Barn River Cam Smile
Barn River Cam Smile
Barn River Cam Smile

Andrew Barnabas

Andrew Barnabas (known as ‘Barn’) is a British Guyanese composer. A performing musician with a passion for funk and disco and roots in both classical and electronica, he broke new ground in the world of games with his symphonic scores for the MediEvil series and BAFTA nominated Primal.

2020 – Present

2020 – Present

Recent

Recent

Recent projects include F1 Manager 2022-2024 (for Xbox, Playstation and PC), Dead Pixels (comedy featuring Will Merrick (Silo), Rose Matafeo (Moana 2) written by Jon Brown (Succession)), Friday Night Live (BAFTA winning comedy for Channel 4 with Ben Elton and Harry Enfield) and The Hatton Garden Job (heist caper with Matthew Goode, Larry Lamb, Phil Daniels and Joely Richardson). His score for Netflix's Hating Peter Tatchell (co-written with sometime collaborator Paul Arnold) won the coveted Crystal Pine at the International Sound and Music Festival for Best Documentary Score, whilst his music for the feature film Green Street 3: Never Back Down won Best Action Score.

Barn’s most recent large-scale work for Harvey Greenfield is Running Late was nominated for a Royal Television Society award in 2024. Barn's inventive score saw him record percussion, marimba, acoustic bass, string quartet and a choir at Queens’ College Chapel, Cambridge.

Recent projects include F1 Manager 2022-2024 (for Xbox, Playstation and PC), Dead Pixels (comedy featuring Will Merrick (Silo), Rose Matafeo (Moana 2) written by Jon Brown (Succession)), Friday Night Live (BAFTA winning comedy for Channel 4 with Ben Elton and Harry Enfield) and The Hatton Garden Job (heist caper with Matthew Goode, Larry Lamb, Phil Daniels and Joely Richardson). His score for Netflix's Hating Peter Tatchell (co-written with sometime collaborator Paul Arnold) won the coveted Crystal Pine at the International Sound and Music Festival for Best Documentary Score, whilst his music for the feature film Green Street 3: Never Back Down won Best Action Score.

Barn’s most recent large-scale work for Harvey Greenfield is Running Late was nominated for a Royal Television Society award in 2024. Barn's inventive score saw him record percussion, marimba, acoustic bass, string quartet and a choir at Queens’ College Chapel, Cambridge.

Barn Choir recording Vid
Barn Choir recording Vid
Barn Choir recording Vid

1990 – 2000

1990 – 2000

Beginnings

Classically trained from an early age on piano, guitar and oboe, Barn studied at Trinity School of Music, and earned a degree in Popular Music Studies from Bretton Hall – the first course of its kind in the country. Also a passionate gamer with a fascination for the possibilities within the new medium, he had, in fact, already found a way to put his skills to work in the industry by the time he started his undergraduate studies.

Barn Studying Cubase
Barn Studying Cubase
Barn Studying Cubase

He was just seventeen when he landed his first commission for the shoot ‘em up, SWIV. Released on the Amiga, Atari ST and the Commodore 64 by Sales Curve in 1991 to great acclaim, it placed Barn centre stage of a new creative boom in the rapidly changing games industry. It also demonstrated Barn’s unique talent for combining old and new, allowing him to bring a solid foundation of traditional musical skills to bear on new media and technologies. This would become a running theme in his career, establishing him as one of the great innovators in his field.

Barn Ted Talk
Barn Ted Talk
Barn Ted Talk

Other early games highlights included Aladdin in 1994 (which involved converting the orchestral score Alan Menken faxed over from Disney!), Creatures in 1996, Frogger in 1997 and MediEvil in 1998 – during which time he also became the head of Sony’s music department. MediEvil was to become a regular gig, with Barn composing for all four titles, evolving the score from fully electronic to fully orchestral as the technology grew.

Barn conducts HTW
Barn conducts HTW
Barn conducts HTW

2001 – Present

2001 – 2023

Breaking new ground

One of the breakthrough scores of this period was his BAFTA nominated score for the 2003 game Primal, written with Paul Arnold (under the name Bob & Barn, a company the pair formed in 2001). This was to be the first games score to be recorded with City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra and chorus, and also the first ever game soundtrack to be released on CD by the renowned film music label Silva Screen. Other major game credits included Neverwinter Nights, Bionicle, Sega Rally, Brink, Forza, and PlayStation VR launch title RIGS – but the grand, cinematic scope of the scores for both Primal and the MediEvil series was immediately evident to all who heard them (Screen Rant magazine described the latter as ‘like something out of a Tim Burton movie’) and the expansion into film and TV was inevitable.

Barn Conducts Orchestra
Barn Conducts Orchestra
Barn Conducts Orchestra

Since taking that step, Barn has also been commissioned to compose scores for the 2021 rom-com Me, Myself and Di and for Sacha Bennett’s 2024 adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (starring Robert Lindsay, Juliet Aubrey, Florence Kasumba, Tamzin Merchant, Tyger Drew-Honey and Lee Boardman). Traditional as Shakespeare is, it provided yet another opportunity for Barn to push his personal envelope, writing for a range of ethnic instruments he had never written for before, in addition to traditional string and orchestral arrangements. He’s written a case study about the film score here:

Barn lives in the heart of Cambridge with his wife and daughter.

© 2025 Andrewbas Music Ltd.

© 2025 Andrewbas Music Ltd.

© 2025 Andrewbas Music Ltd.