So… how does a well-known film composer end up writing detective novels?

Nick was a fan of JK Rowling’s wizarding world before he was ever asked to write for the films. Whilst sat one day in the composing room at Abbey Road writing the final pieces for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (his favourite Potter score), Nick suddenly realized he had been writing music for other people’s stories for thirty years - and that it was time to write his own.

In 2012, Nick began writing short stories, poems and novels alongside his film-composing work. After five years of development, drafts, re-writes and editing, his debut novel was released by Wordandnote Publishing. Above the Void is an exploration into what it might feel like to be someone suffering from a damaged cerebellum. The subject is particularly close to Nick's heart, as his daughter, Rose, was born with an underdeveloped cerebellum and has had to work incredibly hard to learn to speak, walk, and do so many of the things that we all take for granted in our everyday lives. Above the Void follows Mellisa, the book's protagonist, in the aftermath of a serious road accident as she comes to terms with the full extent of her injuries and the challenges she will have to face during her recovery. Sensing that this could lead to a worthy, but difficult read, Nick also explores the story of her inner life and love in Above the Void, and even wrote and recorded a guitar piece inspired by the book.

A fan of Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie - and of detective fiction in general - Nick began to toy with the idea of creating his own detective. In 2017, Detective Inspector Arnold Rackham – nearing retirement in a predictable suburban setting – emerged onto the page. A year later, The Occasional Gardener was published – the first in an ongoing series featuring Rackham. As he grapples with a worsening memory problem, he finds that the metaphorical weeds in his safe patch have in fact grown into triffids on his watch. Aided by his ability to recall memories using his artistic skills - and by his faithful dog – Rackham embarks on a one-man mission to tidy up the garden… but at what cost?

The Occasional Gardener has received 5-star reviews on Amazon and inspired The Bookshop Band to compose a lovely song about Arnold, which you can watch here.

On 23rd June 2019, Wordandnote Publishing released the second book in the Inspector Arnold Investigates series, The Mirror in the Ice Cream Parlour, which is also available on Kindle. The sequel follows Detective Inspector Arnold Rackham as he nears retirement, with only a few weeks to go before he takes up his new job as an art-fraud investigator for a firm of art insurers. When he finds a wallet on the beach, he is pulled back into the world of policing and terrorism, and life gets increasingly dangerous for him and those close to him.

Nick started working as a musician at the age of sixteen when he left school, performing both classical and folk music on the guitar. During this time, he also wrote numerous pieces for a variety of instruments, a selection of which have been digitised from their original manuscripts and are now available to download for free. He went on to study composition and guitar at the Royal College of Music in 1971, winning both the Guitar Prize and the Cobbett Prize whilst studying under the great guitarist John Williams. After graduating, Nick wrote music for both the Contemporary Dance Theatre students and for Ballet Rambert young performers. His composition 54321 for Ballet Rambert, choreographed by Lenny Westerdijk, earned him rave reviews in the national press. During this period, Nick was also working as a duo with tenor Neil Mackie, touring England and Scotland and premiering works on BBC3.

He then worked as a guitarist on the Live Music Now scheme for four years, playing in prisons, hospitals and schools all over the country, before concentrating on writing music for orchestra, forming his own amateur orchestra to try out his ideas. In 1984 his commission for The Oxford Concerto Orchestra, Lark Rise Concerto, became a favourite with the orchestra and is available to purchase on this site. Concurrently, Nick also wrote a lot of guitar music and arrangements, which are available to download.

During the eighties, Nick played in a number of folk duos and ensembles, including duos with Chris Leslie and Dave Townsend – the duo album with Dave Portrait of a Concertina is available on Amazon. Also, around that time Nick released an album of Bach Cello Suites Nos. 2 & 6, transcribed for guitar. You can hear some of this on Muziekweb.

During this period of immensely fruitful Yates/Hooper collaboration, Nick also worked with other directors scoring My Family and Other Animals (2005) and Prime Suspect: The Final Act (2006), the latter of which awarded him another BAFTA. After working on the Potter films, he went on to score two films for Disney Nature (African Cats, 2011 and Chimpanzee, 2012) and a number of TV dramas and films, including Enid (2009, starring Helena Bonham-Carter as author Enid Blyton), Mo (2010, starring Julie Walters as the labour MP Mo Mowlem), Birdsong (2012, starring Eddie Redmayne), The Escape Artist (2013, starring David Tennant) and Winter Thaw (2016, starring John Rhys-Davies).

In 2015, Nick's connection to the Harry Potter world was rekindled when he was invited to compose the music for a special production of W. B. Yeats' beautiful poem, The Song of Wandering Aengus, read by none other than Michael Gambon (who had, of course, played the role of Dumbledore in the Potter films). The production, a film by well-known Irish director Thaddeus O’Sullivan, was commissioned by Tourism Ireland as part of the Yeats2015 celebrations, marking the 150th anniversary of his birth. Nick called on the skills of his wife, Judith, for the recording of the score, on which she plays the solo fiddle line.

The following year, Nick's music could be heard in an entirely new context. Specially composed for Sophie Christiansen's freestyle performance at the Rio Paralympic Games in 2016, Spirit of Athene accompanied Sophie and her incredible horse as they wowed the judges in a carefully choreographed performance which won her yet another Gold Medal to add to her impressive collection.

Following a successful career in film composing, Nick has now returned to his roots in traditional music and guitar-playing, working on a number of projects with several talented musicians.

In 2001, he teamed up with fiddler Judith Henderson (now his wife), and together they perform regularly at folk festivals and in concert venues. In 2018, Henderson:Hooper released an album of largely self-written tunes in various traditional folk idioms, entitled Pete’s Trees. The album marks the history of their collaboration both as musicians and as a married couple.

More recently, they joined forces with singer and bassist Susanna Starling to form The Boot Band and, in 2017, Nick started to play in concert with the legendary guitarist Gordon Giltrap.

Nick’s solo guitar album of traditional Irish tunes, 6 Strings, was re-released by Angel Air Records in June 2018 and is also available to purchase on Amazon. His solo guitar-playing and his collaboration with Irish singer Mick Henry, and Irish poet Bernard O’Donoghue can be seen on YouTube.