Silva Screen Records digitally release The Long Shadow, composer Sarah Warne’s powerful soundtrack to New Pictures Productions’ true crime drama. Depicting the desperate five-year hunt for serial killer Peter Sutcliffe, the series  focuses on the lives of the victims who crossed Peter Sutcliffe’s path and those of the officers at the heart of the police investigation. With the victims, their families and the survivors at the heart of this series, The Long Shadow brings a new perspective to a well-documented story...

Sarah Warne's score for The Long Shadow starts on a very promising opening theme. 'Turmoil In Britain'. Sadly, this is where it peaks. Over the course of this album's 35 tracks (1 hr, 02 min, 53 sec) the production opted to go down the route of delivering atmospheric music cues. While these do work incredibly well to unsettle the viewer as the onscreen events unfold, it's not really the sort of music that works well when heard on its own merits.

Composer Sarah Warne explains her process: "There’s an isolation and vulnerability that threads through the score - mournful brass, fragile strings and textured vocals, but also a strangeness too; not just the elusive shadowiness of Sutcliffe himself but also of the scrambling officers that missed crucial developments in the case through arrogance, misogyny and institutional red tape. Driving percussive elements spur on the case, but poignant and haunting melodies always refocus us on the importance of the lives of the people in this story, and not on plot. One such melody can be found in ‘Tormenting George’ and ‘Under Scrutiny’, which feature a minor key adaptation of the hymn ‘Faith of Our Fathers’ (St Catherine Tune). This theme came to represent the sense of broken community and the failures of our institutions to protect the lives of women in this harrowing impossible-to-be-forgotten period of British history."

I appreciate what the production of The Long Shadow was going for with the score. And I equally understand what composer Sarah Warne was aiming to achieve. On all counts they did exactly what they set out to... The problem is that while this works incredibly well in the series, it falls a little flat when listened to in isolation. Actually, that's not technically accurate. What I mean is that the music just feels a little directionless and uninteresting when listened to without the onscreen action.

While, personally, I didn't get much out of this release, musically it's interesting from a technical point of view for those who enjoy score's which are atmospheric while only delivering a handful of strong themes. Having said that, I really loved the main theme and the choral elements of ‘Tormenting George’ and ‘Under Scrutiny’, and I just wish there had been a little more of that style of suspense and intrigue injected into the score as a whole.

4

Darren Rea