Cobbin & Whalley
Such Sweet Thunder
SUCH SWEET THUNDER Recording engineers, Peter Cobbin and Kirsty Whalley have enjoyed phenomenal success in their respective engineering careers, and together as Such Sweet Thunder - where from their epic studio in London, they specialise in producing and mixing music for the biggest blockbuster films. It all started when they both decided to break away from the safety of Abbey Road and go on an adventure of their own...
“I’m a dinosaur,” jokes Grammy award winning, Cobbin. “I do one thing well, and Kirsty does everything well – she’s a great multitasker, has got a really great technical mind and a more refined sense of musicality. I’m a little bit broad; I’m really experienced from a mixing perspective, because that’s what I was trained to do. It’s fair to say that we have different skill sets within the job.” He’s being modest. In 1995 Cobbin was invited to become senior engineer at Abbey Road Studios, where he pioneered mixing music for surround – and was the first engineer ever to undertake remixing works for The Beatles. This in turn led to other successful collaborations, such as remixing John Lennon’s catalogue and creating dynamic works for artists such as Amy Winehouse, Freddie Mercury, Bjork, Kanye West and The Eurythmics. Before arriving in London, Cobbin was a mix specialist. His training in his native Sydney (EMI/Studios 301) saw him assisting on sessions with Duran Duran, Elton John and Bob Dylan. As a classically taught musician and a lover of pop, some of his early years
46 HEADLINER
meant editing repertoire by day and recording rock and roll by night. Cobbin soon developed an appreciation for fine analogue equipment, helping him to develop a natural ease when working with artists of different genres, such as Ed Sheeran, Sting, Annie Lennox, Luciano Pavarotti, Kate Bush, Gotye, Janet Jackson, Paul McCartney, Florence and the Machine, Mick Jagger, Emeli Sandé, and Mark Knopfler – to name a handful. But it was destiny that Cobbin’s love for music, image and cinema collided creatively. As one half of Such Sweet Thunder, Cobbin has helped create some of the most memorable soundtracks in recent times, such as for The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia, Star Wars and Shrek franchises, and The King’s Speech. Whalley, meanwhile, is one of the few (if not the only) women to mix an Oscar winning score, which was awarded to the 2017 multi-award winning film, The Shape of Water. Developing a love of all things technical from an early age, Whalley made her own metronome when she was just 10, studied cello and
piano at the Junior Royal Academy of Music London, and was touring around Europe in orchestras as a teenager. Her obsession with music coupled with “matters of geek-ness” led her to becoming a Tonmeister at the University of Surrey, although after graduating, finding a job as a woman proved to be difficult: “I walked around all the studios in London with my CV and tried to get a job,” she recalls. “No one would take me! It was just that time when they thought, ‘we don’t want girls in our studio’. But I did find a job with a film composer – although I’d never given film music a second thought really. It opened my eyes to this film stuff, and it suited me quite well!” Whalley went freelance, which she insists is not as brave as it sounds: “It was hard to get employed; no studios would hire me! Even with the experience I had.” Meeting Cobbin when they were both at Abbey Road, things started to change for Whalley. “We’re both into music and we love film – we had the same synch,”