Origins: How I wrote a comedy rap battle about WW1

Written by: Lee Henman
Published: Friday 20th June 2014

Hi. So I somehow found myself involved in this WW1 rap battle commissioned by the BBC. This is how it happened and the process behind how it all came together, should anyone be interested.

A few years ago a nice guy called Simon Balch asked me to do the music for a Wimbledon comedy video (it's here, if you fancy a look) so when he put a call out on Facebook for somebody who could knock out some Hip Hop music for a new comedy project I messaged him and said "Hey, I can do that!", despite being a white male in his 40s. But hey, if it works for Eminem...

Anyway, at the time, I'd assumed it was one of Simon's own pet projects but it turned out that he was now a freelance director, working for Dan Snow's Ballista Media who had just got a pretty big commission from the BBC to go away and make a ton of short films about World War 1, as part of The Great War's 100th anniversary programming. One of the ideas they'd had was a Horrible Histories / Epic Rap Battles-style thing that told the story of the origins of WW1 through the mouths of the key historical players. And so Origins was born.

So I quickly threw together a rough demo track and sent it off to Simon, and to my surprise I got the gig. The first order of business was lyrics. I knew exactly bugger all about World War 1, except what I'd gleaned from Blackadder Goes Forth. In fact when it comes to history, George summed me up perfectly when he said to Blackadder, "I'm thick, you see. I'm as thick as the big-print version of The Complete Works of Charles Dickens." So I was given a great deal of WW1 literature to go through and told to swot up, which of course I did with great diligence. Well actually that's not true, I was already wrapped up in making the actual music, so I read up on the main points but largely relied on Simon to tell me what actually happened.

Very quickly it became apparent that it might be a tall order - we had a brief from the boss with a list of characters and events that absolutely had to be covered in the song. Even though this was going to be a comedy thing we also had to make the content historically-accurate to satisfy the brief. It was a big story to tell in the few minutes we had. So Simon and I set about writing the lyrics, which happened like this: Simon sends me ideas, I rewrite them to fit into the music, I send Simon ideas, he rewrites them to fit the brief, we Skype, we laugh, we don't laugh, we ponder, we make sweet Skype-love. Well maybe not. But somehow after going back and forth for aeons we came up with something that seemed to be hit all the historical facts as well as be - hopefully - entertaining.

So now I have to write the music properly. The easy way would have been to just have a basic hip hop track that never changed all the way through, but the project deserved more than that so I set out to write a piece with distinct musical differences for each character. For example, for the Kaiser, I'd been reliably-informed that in real life he was a tad effeminate, so I thought it'd be funny to put together a track for him in an electro-funk style that he could shake his booty to. That idea was quickly dismissed though and I was told to make it more menacing. I'd been struggling for inspiration until the Terminator theme popped into my head and I decided to use the same type of big drum phrase - and thankfully it worked much better. The music itself took me about two months to get right and is a mixture of software instruments, loops, vocals, orchestral stuff and God knows what else. It had to sound huge, given the nature of the subject matter. By the time I'd finished there were about 120 separate tracks on the piece and my computer was groaning like an overladen cargo ship every time I tried to work with the track. Eventually though, it was done and I was bloody relieved to hit the "Export To Disk" button for the last time.

So - armed with the lyrics and music, I then recorded a guide vocal track and off I went to Fonic Studios in London to meet Spencer Jones (of Big Babies fame) and Jamie Demetriou, who would be lending their vocal talents to record the thing. They did a sterling job but I was pleasantly surprised when it was decided that one of the voices I'd done for the guide vocal would be used in the finished track, so it turned out that George V is me! (As an aside, after yelling into microphones for hours on end, my larynx swelled up to twice its normal size and I had to go for an exploratory operation to get a camera shoved down my throat to make sure it wasn't cancer. Which was nice. Glad to report I'm Big C-free.)

Next was casting. Ballista purposely cast actors who resembled the real historical characters they'd be playing, and on filming day I was blown-away how fantastic they looked in their costumes. Only thing was - I don't think the costumes were built to be worn for wildly-gesticulating rap artists, so there were buttons pinging off and flying epaulettes all over the shop. Luckily the production assistant was on hand with a sewing kit and glue. The location itself looked fantastic - a disused warehouse in deepest London that reeked of pigeon shit but apparently is used quite often for music videos, photography sessions, etc. The day before we filmed, Kate Moss was there doing a photo shoot!

And there we have it. Origins was bloody hard work but a joy to work on. The talented chaps at Ballista were great people and basically gave me (almost) free-reign to do what I wanted, so it's been a bit of a dream gig really. I usually make my bread and butter writing funny stuff but the chance to work on something that allowed me to combine writing with my other love - music - has been just awesome. Next on the list a musical sitcom? Nah, that'd be shit.