For a musician as venerated as Hans Zimmer, you might not suspect him of being susceptible to fear of live performance. But until some friends helped him snap out of it, he was exactly that.
Those friends were none other than Pharrell Williams and The Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr, and they were insistent that he needed to get out of his head.
“[They] are really my best friends,” Zimmer tells Tom Power in a new interview with Q [via CBC]. “[They said] it came to the point now where I have to look the audience in the eye, where I can’t hide behind a screen anymore, and I need to get out there and confront humanity.”
Hans Zimmer’s decades-spanning career is about as decorated as can be. A two-time Oscar winner, the German composer extraordinaire has created scores for movies like Interstellar, The Lion King and Pirates of the Caribbean, to name just a few.
But it wasn’t until 2015 that Zimmer finally overcame a deep fear of performing live, thanks to an invitation from Pharrell Williams, where he was asked to play guitar for him during his 2015 Grammys performance.
“At that moment, I thought only an idiot would say no,” Zimmer says. “That sort of started the whole thing up.”
He later went on to perform two years later at Coachella, delivering his iconic Lion King, Gladiator and Inception scores accompanied by a full orchestra.
“I said, ‘Well, this is a festival. We’re not going to do The Lion King,’” Zimmer recalls. “And Nile Marr, Johnny Marr’s son, said, ‘Hans, get over yourself. That’s the music of my childhood!’… We played The Lion King and suddenly I’m looking out and there are 80,000 people crying – I mean, crying in a good way.”
Elsewhere, Hans Zimmer recently revealed that “90 percent” of what he does is “done on one software synth”.
“I was one of the first people to really get into computers and music and there came a point where there’s a new operating system every few months,” Zimmer recounts. “I just gave up and I just went ‘I need to concentrate on my music.’”
He continues, “So I started to subtract things out of my life and I started getting very good at the things that I kept. For instance software synthesizers, 90 percent of what I do is done on one software synth.”
