Daniel Blumberg hands me his Oscar, as surprised as he is chuffed. Bloody hell, it’s heavy. Is it real gold? “I wish it was,” says the latest winner of best original score, for The Brutalist. (Apparently, it’s gold-plated bronze.) He puts it back on a shabby wooden shelf alongside his Bafta, also for The Brutalist, and his Ivor Novello award, which he won in 2022 for The World to Come, directed by Mona Fastvold (the partner of Brutalist director Brady Corbet). “Before the Ivor Novello, the only thing I’d ever won was ‘most improved footballer’ when I was six,” he says. “Honestly, I’d never thought about Oscars in my entire life. I’d never even watched the ceremony.”
Blumberg, 35, is the least likely Oscar winner you could imagine. Not because he lacks the talent, but because he has spent his career walking away from mainstream success. The former schoolboy indie pop star has reinvented himself as an atonal improviser of scratchy, screechy weirdness. If that sounds like a tough listen, it’s all combined with sublime minimalist melodies to create music as beautiful as it is challenging.
He and I go back a long way. I promise Blumberg I won’t go on about knowing him since he was a toddler. Or playing football for decades with his father, who was also, all too briefly, my GP. Or playing football with him when he got older. Or lending him my Led Zeppelin albums when he was about 10, basically paving the way for his Oscar. Or him being an unusually intense, sweet boy who grew into an unusually intense, sweet man. I tell him his secrets are safe with me.
His tiny flat in Hackney, east London, is an Aladdin’s cave of keyboards, guitar pedals, harmonicas, microphones, drawings, art books and DVDs. It manages to be scruffy and immaculate at the same time. There is dust galore, but everything is meticulously catalogued in 1950s-style filing cabinets. He has lived here for 15 years, but it looks as if he could have moved in yesterday.
The golden locks of yesteryear have gone. His head is shaved, his face pale; there are purple bags under his eyes. (To be fair, he has been to Los Angeles this week to collect his Oscar, then back to London, on to Rome and back home again.) There is an intensity to his gaze that can be forbidding – he would make a great Caliban. But it’s offset by a puppyish affability. You could see it in his Oscars acceptance speech – shy and shaky-legged, he just about got through his thank-yous, before leaving the stage half-singing a tribute to his friends at Cafe Oto, the avant-garde London venue that has been a second home to him for years.
Blumberg is a visual artist as well as a musician. His work ranges from primitivist cuboid figures to abstracts drawn in silver. “My favourite thing in the world is drawing,” he says. He tells me about some of his artistic heroes (Joan Miró, Paul Klee and Francis Bacon, for starters) and how you have to prime the paper before working in silverpoint. He could talk for ever about art.
As he could about his friendships with elderly people. He worked in an antiquarian bookshop for eight years with Celia Mitchell, the former actor (and wife of the poet Adrian Mitchell), who died last year at 91: “She was my best friend.” There are so many things he loves to talk about: the mates he plays music with at Cafe Oto; his football team, Tottenham Hotspur; and why Italian cafetieres make better coffee when they are smaller. Also, how the Polish film director Krzysztof Kieślowski made him understand the possibilities of cinema; the genius of Scott Walker and the French musician Ghédalia Tazartès; becoming soul brothers with Brady Corbet; why he and his ex-partner (the actor Stacy Martin, who stars in The Brutalist) get on better than ever …
And then there are things that he definitely doesn’t like talking about, notably his past in the music industry. When he was 15, he formed the band Cajun Dance Party with his friend Max Bloom. Back then, the industry was flush with cash. The band got a great record deal when they were still at school. Their first and only album got rave reviews and their song Colourful Life featured in an episode of Gavin and Stacey. He is grateful for what the band provided him, but he struggles even to say the name out loud.
“I have this flat because of the first band and it only costs me £200 a month! I’ve never made money since then, like even now. I can barely afford the flat!” This is because Blumberg has not prioritised making money. You are one of the most defiantly uncommercial people I have ever met, I say. “But look how commercial I am now: I won an Oscar!” I wouldn’t put it past Blumberg to denounce his Academy Award as a sellout. Thankfully, he doesn’t today. In fact, he is loving it. He shows me photos of his neighbours happily holding his Oscar.
At 19, he and Bloom formed another band, Yuck. Again, their first album was rapturously received. They toured with Tame Impala, earned comparisons to Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth, performed in front of huge crowds at festivals and were on their way to super success. Again, he walked away after one album.
“I remember playing at Coachella and feeling the worst I’ve ever felt in my entire life.” Why did you feel so bad? “Because I didn’t like what I was doing.” As far as Blumberg is concerned, there is nothing more uncreative than gigging mechanically. “It was like Groundhog Day. I was touring, doing these songs that I’d written a couple of years ago. You’re literally just doing the same thing over and over again.” He felt relieved that his fellow band members continued when he left. “I was only involved in the first album, so I feel embarrassed to be associated with the other stuff.”
The more he turned his back on success, the more amazing musicians wanted to work with him. After Yuck, he recorded a wonderful album of lovelorn lo-fi under the name Hebronix. There were hints there of what he would do later, in the mix of gorgeous tunes and frazzled dissonance. I tell him I adore the album. He looks at me as if I have lost the plot. Maybe you should listen to it again, I suggest. It’s the worst thing you could say to Blumberg. “No, no, maybe I shouldn’t!” he protests.
He explains his aversion to the old stuff. Whenever he signed with a label, they would want him to make a series of albums. To Blumberg, that was the definition of hell. He remembers talking to the director Lars von Trier when Martin was working with him on the film Nymphomaniac. “It was a really important conversation with Lars. He said: ‘I don’t understand bands. They sign a contract for three albums to work with the same people,’ and he was like: ‘I would never do that with films.’ You build a team for each thing you do.”
When he returned from his nightmare tour with Yuck, he popped into Cafe Oto for the first time. It was life-changing. He saw Keiji Haino playing improvised guitar. Blumberg loved it. He returned the next night, and Haino’s set was totally different. He decided that this was what he wanted to do musically – be in a state of permanent evolution or revolution. He created a simple manifesto – no two gigs should be the same. He started to play with other regulars at Cafe Oto. A few people would turn out to watch them and he couldn’t have been happier. This, he decided, was real music.
In 2015, he was awarded a scholarship to study for a postgraduate diploma at the Royal Drawing School in London and focused on his art. Then, in 2018, he returned to music with an album unlike anything he had made before. Minus, recorded with his regular collaborators from Cafe Oto, is a collection of songs, but it’s also something more. It’s about his first breakup with Martin and is astonishingly raw. In parts, it’s so gentle that it barely exists. At other times, it drills straight into your soul. Billboard described it as “one of the more unique and exquisite records you’re likely to hear this year”, while Rough Trade ranked it the sixth best album of 2018.
Minus is extraordinarily tortured, I say. He smiles: “I was in a very emotional place.” Perhaps it’s something we have in common, I say – we have both struggled with our mental health. “Yeah. You get …” He has another go. “You learn how to deal with that stuff. You get more experience with dealing with wonky times.” When was the first time he became aware of the wonkiness? “Well, I definitely … I don’t know. Yeah. D’you want some more coffee?”
Does he find this too personal to talk about? “No, but I’m not sure it’s that productive.” Is he in a good space now? “Yeah! Very!” He makes more coffee and we change the subject.
Even the self-flagellating Blumberg admits he is proud of Minus and all that has followed. This is where his career really begins, he says – he was too young to understand himself when he started out. The quietly ecstatic score for The World to Come features an unutterably beautiful title song, co-written and sung by Josephine Foster. If Richard Strauss were around today, you could imagine him writing it.
A couple of years ago, Blumberg was diagnosed with an intestinal disease that leaves him with chronic pain and fatigue. Gut, another deeply personal album, from 2023, chronicles his experience with the condition. Again, exquisite harmonies are juxtaposed with the unlovely – retching, burping, gurgling.
The score for The Brutalist is as epic as it is intimate. It mirrors perfectly the arc of the narrative – about a Hungarian concentration camp survivor and groundbreaking architect (played by Adrien Brody, who won the Oscar for best actor) trying to establish a new life in the US after the war – from the shrieking sax and industrial percussion reflecting the epic landscape and debauched nights out to tender piano pieces telling the love story. While film scores are normally written after movies have been shot, Blumberg was on set throughout, composing in real time.
The score was as much curated as written. Blumberg travelled the world recording hand-picked musicians – the trumpeter Axel Dörner in Berlin, the pianist Sophie Agnel in Paris, the multi-instrumentalist Simon Sieger in Budapest, Erasure’s Vince Clarke in New York, the saxophonist Evan Parker and the pianist John Tilbury in Kent. Tilbury, 89, plays accompanied by falling rain. That would have been a distraction for many composers, but Blumberg saw it as an asset. He even miked up Tilbury, so you could hear him breathing and writing notes on his stave. As the film is about the act of creation, so is the music.
I ask Blumberg if he enjoyed all the Oscar razzmatazz. Daft question, really. He laughs and tells me of the five times The Brutalist team had to visit LA in the awards season. “The film company had booked all these Q&As for me and after the first one they said I was so shit at them I shouldn’t do any more. They said it in a passive way: ‘Is Daniel too tired to do the Q&A tomorrow?’ And I was like: ‘I think I’m going to sleep tonight, so I’ll be fine.’” At that point, they just came straight out with it. “They said my body language was really bad and it looked like I didn’t want to be there.”
He tells me how big names in the industry came up to him and punched him on the shoulder by way of congratulation after his win. He had to be told they were big names. By the end of the evening, he felt thoroughly battered. Then there was the advice. People told him that now he had won an Oscar he should do a big-budget Hollywood movie and rake it in. He was horrified.
It was a great experience, but he was relieved to return to Hackney, stick the Oscar on the shelf and get back to work. He is now composing a score for Fastvold’s next film. On his first night back, he turned up at Cafe Oto. It was packed with friends, fellow musicians, people with a sense of common purpose. After the “madness of Hollywood”, he says, it was heaven.
