Jonathan Whitehead, who wrote the music for a number of acclaimed films and television comedies including Brass Eye and Green Wing, has died. He was 59 and died of a heart attack in late May. Comedian Chris Morris has written an obituary in The Guardian this week.
Whitehead collaborated regularly with Morris, also working on C4 comedy Nathan Barley and most recently on the soundtrack to his film The Day Shall Come (2019, pictured), with the musician and bandleader Seb Rochford.
The widely experienced musican, often known as Trellis, also wrote soundtracks, theme music and songs for shows including Black Books, The Day Today, Smack the Pony, The Graham Norton Show and Rev.
Morris recalled Whitehead's work on the famously controversial "Cake" episode of Brass Eye in which celebrities were told that the new drug sweeping the nation was called cake and were asked to condemn it on camera. "He loved nonsense and preposterous body language and you can hear it in his work, at its most extreme perhaps in the music he wrote to evoke the experience of taking the fictional drug Cake in Brass Eye. It is a brilliantly ridiculous piece of music for which he naturally invented an idiotic dance."
Buy The Day Shall Come here.
