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Wallace and Gromit composer: ‘I wrote the theme music at 3am’

30 June 2026, 19:41

How the 'Wallace and Gromit' soundtrack was composed | Classic FM

By Hazel Davis

Composer Julian Nott tells Classic FM how he wrote one of British film and television’s most iconic theme tunes.

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The music to Wallace and Gromit is as distinctive as Gromit’s own eyebrows. But how exactly was it written?

We spoke to composer Julian Nott, whose composing credits also include Peppa Pig, about his biggest inspirations for the score, and how he came to write it in the first place.

He also admits that the theme was written extremely last-minute, as part of a 3am piano-playing session, the very morning of the recording session.

How did Julian Nott become involved in Wallace and Gromit?

Julian Nott and animator Nick Park were film students together at the National Film and Television School.

“[Park] bravely decided to make this animation film,“ Nott explains. “The first instalment of A Grand Day Out. He was a one-man band, so it took him something like eight or nine years to complete.”

It was a serendipitous moment that led to Nott joining the project: “One day, we were all eating lunch when the animation tutor came in and shouted, ‘Are there any composers in here? Because I need one.’

“That was it. I put my hand up, as it were, and got matched up with Nick, before I’d even seen the film.”

Composer Julian Nott wrote the score and theme music for the ’Wallace and Gromit‘ franchise. Picture: Aardman

Writing the Wallace and Gromit theme tune

Nott is typically modest about his role in the award-winning franchise. “I’d like to say that the theme tune for Wallace and Gromit was carefully thought through and took months or weeks to create,” he says.

“In fact, what happened was that we had the music session starting at 10 o’clock the next morning and I hadn’t actually got around to writing the title or credits music until about three in the morning.”

“I’m a great improviser,” Nott expands. “That’s what I’ve spent my life doing and it’s how I came into music when I was a kid.

“I still do a lot of improvisation now - it’s my greatest pleasure. I just sit at the piano and play something, making it up on the spot. That’s how a lot of my composition arises. I just bash away at the piano and something comes.”

How do you compose for an animation?

Back when The Wrong Trousers was made in 1993, it was conventional for animation or cartoon music to use a technique called ‘Mickey Mousing’, in reference to the style favoured by Disney and its plucky cartoon mouse. If you had action on screen, you’d have comedic music mimicking it.

The Wrong Trousers didn’t do that. “On the whole, there isn’t comedy music in it,” says Nott. “It’s mainly the kind of music you’d get in a live-action film. In other words, it supports the idea of real jeopardy. You’re trying to make the characters seem like real people in genuinely difficult situations, as you would in a live-action film.

“Wallace, though I hate to say it, is a bit of a moron,“ he says. “But he’s also our hero, and we do love him. So you don’t really want anything too comic against him. He doesn’t really have a tune, I don’t think, because things happen to him rather than him driving them.”

Watch the teaser for Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

Eagle-eared fans will note that the baddies tend to get the main themes in Wallace and Gromit.

Take Feathers McGraw, who first appears in The Wrong Trousers. He’s the evil genius behind a plot to rob the biggest diamond in the world.

Nott explains: “We needed a very simple theme for him that suggests that, although he looks innocent and rather charming, he really isn’t underneath. His theme uses the bassoon and is just four notes, very simple, but it tells you there’s something amiss with that little penguin.”

However, all heroes need music and Gromit, the dog, is the hero of all the films. “What we did was use fairly traditional British heroic music, something in the vein of Elgar or Walton,” says Nott.

“That’s what you hear when Gromit rises to the occasion, for example [in A Close Shave] when he fires porridge from his little aeroplane at the villain. The music builds him up as a great hero.”

Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No.2 - II. Adagio sostenuto LIVE

What references are there in Wallace and Gromit?

Nick Park is notable for making references to films and other media throughout the Wallace and Gromit franchise.

In A Close Shave, for example, there’s a reference at the start to Thunderbirds. When Wallace and Gromit first go on their window-cleaning mission, they pass through a completely futile, Thunderbirds-style set of machinery to get to their vehicle.

“The music reflects that too,” says Nott. “It’s not identical but it’s clearly connected.”

A Close Shave is also a love story between Wallace and Wendolene, who owns the wool shop. The romance is obviously unrequited. Nott explains: “Nick wanted some romantic music and for him the seminal love moment in any film was Brief Encounter, where the train pulls away from the station. That film uses the second movement of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No.2.

“So what I did was write a piano-led theme, with strings accompanying, lightly reminiscent of Rachmaninov, though nothing like as sophisticated.”

Sophisticated or not, Nott’s music for Wallace and Gromit is some of the most beloved of all British TV. So what would he advise budding future composers?

“Just sit down at the piano, bash something out, and you never know where it could go. I was in the right place at the right time, and frankly it’s made my career, meeting Nick [Park] and doing that film.”