“I said ‘Robin, I’m going to have to resign after my first day – I just can’t do that’.
I was like, ‘what’s this’?”ĭespite Wise showing him what to do, Kirkhope immediately felt it was “way too hard” and called Beanland with resignation already in his mind. I was used to playing keyboards, not to typing it in. “I remember the first day, it was done in Hex – Hex is just like four numbers on a screen, it’s just a hexadecimal code. I just had no idea… It was ridiculously hard! My first job was working on the original grey GameBoy, so that was converting Dave Wise’s music from Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest to work on the original GameBoy. “I went in with no idea what it entailed, right? I had no idea: I just thought it would be like MIDI files and what I was used to doing at home. While Kirkhope clearly did well enough to start working at Rare in 1995, his first day hit him like a truck. After spending a year sending Rare cassettes of “tunes I thought were appropriate for video games” without a reply, the studio finally invited him in for an interview with Dave Wise. Luckily, fellow composer Robin Beanland – who still works at Rare – pointed out that perhaps 33 was a good age to move out from his mum’s house, and nudged him into applying for a position at the studio. After 11 years of gigging around and living with his mum, the thought of a real job struck Kirkhope as bizarre – laughing, he describes how, at the time, “no one I knew got a ‘job'”. In a nightmarish scenario for the industry, Kirkhope shares that there were multiple points where he almost never became a video game composer. That being said, it was always going to strike more of a (literal) note for Banjo-Kazooie fans, who regard Kirkhope as genuine royalty. With some special guests and Kirkhope’s own playful spin on things, Banjo Kazooie: Re-Jiggyed turned out to be a wonderfully creative endeavour, and perhaps more of a departure from the source material than fans may have imagined. Similarly, the guitar-shredding Rusty Bucket Bay cover features Jules Conroy (also known as YouTuber FamilyJules) who Kirkhope credits as a “good friend and a great player”. Kellett said he’d “have a go” at the song and the result is the Bubblegloop Swamp version that ended up on the album, which Kirkhope says is “mostly track”. Kirkhope thought it would be “fun for him” to cover Bubblegloop Swamp, and asked Kellett if he’d take a shot at it. But he ended up being in Simply Red, who were a huge pop band back in the 80s, and he played trumpet for them.” “Tim Kellett is a friend I’ve known from school, we both were trumpet players. As Kirkhope mastered the instrument in his youth he befriended Simply Red‘s Tim Kellet, and the two have been friends for “donkey’s years”. Kirkhope’s trumpet-wielding days also came in handy at another point during the production of Re-Jiggyed. He went in looking for a tune to ska-ify, and eventually landed on Freezeezy Peak. With some creatively vocalised ska noises, Kirkhope explains that he likes the “oompah-type thing” of the genre and says ska is “very like Banjo-Kazooie“. I ask if that’s why I can detect a little bit of ska in Freezeezy Peak, and he happily admits that his younger days in a soul band – which he says used to support Bad Manners – may have crept in. He points to turning Gobi’s Valley into an orchestral piece with metal guitars “like Metallica or Nightwish“, and transforming the iconic Click-Clock Woods theme into a GameBoy-esque 8-bit piece. So I wanted to try and make it different and add different styles – as much as I could possibly chuck in everything and the kitchen sink – so that’s what I did.” I thought there’s no point in me doing that, because there’s a gazillion versions out there that are really good. “But they just kind of stick to the standard, you know, whatever the game version did.
“I really wanted to do something that was different, because a lot of people have remixed my stuff over the years,” he explains. Instead of remixing each track like-for-like, Kirkhope wanted to take his legacy in a completely new direction. With the help of a site that specialises in video game song covers, Kirkhope managed to release Banjo Kazooie: Re-Jiggyed in October this year, and the end result is a fantastic love letter to the game – though not everything sounds exactly like you’d remember it.