Writing songs for the gently bent comedy “The Ballad of Wallis Island” was a tricky job for British actor, writer, musician and comedian Tom Basden. In the film, which he co-wrote with his comic partner Tim Key, Basden plays Herb McGwyer, one half of McGwyer Mortimer, a semi-legendary folk duo lured to a small island off the coast of Wales to play a private gig for what turns out to be an audience of one: Charles Heath (Key), an eccentric widower and sad-sack two-time lottery winner who used his windfall to isolate himself and obsess over getting the duo back together for his solitary enjoyment.
In the story, which spins off from a short that Basden and Key made 18 years ago, McGwyer is supposed to have written songs that made him a cult figure but not a star; he may not have had any big hits, but he had at least one very big fan. That presumably meant threading a needle by writing songs that are good enough for somebody to get passionate about yet not good enough to ensure fame.
“I think a lot of the musicians that I like the most are cult musicians who aren’t big stars,” Basden said. “I know that territory quite well, and I know this type of music quite well.”
He laughed. “I don’t think I ever worried that I would accidentally end up writing a really commercial song.”
Some of the songs in “The Ballad of Wallis Island” were in the original short; others had been written over the years and then retooled to fit the feature. Still others were newly written as Basden and Key came up with the script, in which Herb McGwyer and ex-partner Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan) have an awkward reunion on the island.
One of those, and the one that has been entered in the Oscar race for Best Original Song, was “Only You,” a wistful love song sung as a duet by Basden and Mulligan as part of a scene in which long-suppressed emotions resurface.
“The idea was that it should be the song that Charles and his wife listened to when they were getting together,” Basden said. “It had to have a sense of lost innocence about it, because it taps back into a particular time in Herb and Nell’s relationship and their musical partnership.
“In a way, it’s quite romantic and hopeful, but when you look back on it, it can feel sad and full of longing.”
The fingerpicking song also turned out to be unexpectedly hard to play. “I had to practice it a lot before filming,” he said. “The scene goes to a very dark place, and I wanted to make sure that I could trust myself to play the song as well as possible. It’s one thing to be acting in a scene with Carey Mulligan; it’s another to do that while you’re worrying about messing up a guitar part halfway through the take.”
And is it also nerve-wracking to send off your songs to Mulligan, recognizing that she’s married to Marcus Mumford, who’s been awfully successful doing the kind of thing your character does?
“It’s terrible,” he admitted. “That was the most fear-inducing part of the whole process, really. The writing of the songs had been a very private thing that I’d done by myself in my bedroom. But then it came to a point where I had to send them to Carey knowing that Marcus Mumford would listen to them and might have an opinion. That felt very exposing.”
A shrug. “But they were both really lovely about it. As soon as she signed on, she felt that Tim and I knew exactly what we were doing, which obviously we didn’t think at all. We felt like she was the only real adult in the room.”
This story first appeared in the Race Begins issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
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