I've never looked at composing as a job... it's a hobby I get paid for

TOP COMPOSER LORNE BALFE TALKS TO MARION McMULLEN ABOUT WRITING MUSIC FOR EVERYONE FROM TOM CRUISE AND EDDIE MURPHY TO WALLACE AND GROMIT

- MARION McMULLEN

Was music a big part of your life growing up in Scotland?

My father was a songwriter and he had a residential recording studio, and we had bands from everywhere coming over.

Ozzy Osbourne would record there and I thought it was normal to wake-up at lunchtime and get to bed at midnight.

Musicians were around continuously and it was a great inspiration.

What was the first instrument you played?

(Laughs) Played successfully is a different answer, but drums were always there and piano - but piano was more complicated, so I stuck to drums.

I think there was more experimentation going on than there was me playing Mozart. I was playing drums when I was three.

There is a photograph of me with the band Inner Circle and, in a weird coincidence, they wrote the song Bad Boys, which is in the film of the same name.

I was getting drum lessons from the band when I was three or four and that was the beginning of it.

Forty-odd years later, the song has become part of my life after working on the last two Bad Boy movies.

How did you end up serving breakfast to the cast and crew of 90s TV drama Hamish Macbeth?

(Laughs) That was my first proper job, working for the BBC. I was on production and doing everything from making breakfast to cleaning the toilets.

I had always known that if I wanted to work in the arts and film I needed to get a broad spectrum of everything, so I worked in post-production houses and at the Edinburgh Fringe.

Hamish MacBeth was a great learning curve because I got to see first hand how a film crew worked and how teams work. It's like a mini-army.