Tom McLeod

After graduating from the New Zealand School of Music in Wellington, where he majored in jazz piano, Tom spent several years performing at festivals around NZ with many acts – including his own comic persona Tommy Love, before going to work with composer/arranger Terry Gray – producing and arranging music for television.

Through this, Tom discovered a passion for narrative composing, and has since established a career creating music for numerous films and television shows, as well as stage musicals such as the large scale 2018 stage production City Of 100 Lovers, and his collaboration with composer Tim Finn for the opera project Ihitai ‘Avei’a – Star Navigator.

In 2021 Tom won Best Original Score for Fight For The Wild at the NZ TV Awards. He has been a multiple finalist at the APRA Awards, and has twice won the APRA Best Original Music in a Series award for TV comedy Girl Vs Boy.

Other screen highlights include the Netflix docu-drama series Blood, Sex and Royalty, comedy feature Dead, family film Kiwi Christmas, fantasy-adventure Into The Rainbow, true-life drama 3 Mile Limit, and the WWI 6-part epic When We Go To War.

Tom has also scored many feature documentaries which have garnered success at international festivals such as When The Cows Come Home, Camino Skies, Pecking Order, The Art of Recovery and Candyman. He composed the score and songs for several NZ/Germany tele-features with ZDF based on the Emilie Richards romance novels, and has scored many local children's television series including super-hero show The Amazing Extraordinary Friends and musical drama series Karaoke High.

Tom has collaborated with leading New Zealand recording artists The Phoenix Foundation, Louis Baker and Tim Finn. He has produced and arranged albums such as Tim Beveridge’s Come Rain Come Shine recorded with the Buddy Childers Big Band in Los Angeles (Sony Music), and The Spirit Symphony with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.

As Music Director, Tom has worked on stage musicals, television dramas and light entertainment shows. For many years he was conductor for Wellington's Carols By Candleight alongside entertainer Nick Tansley, with whom he also performed a Duelling Pianos act around the city.

Tom was also co-writer of a musical comedy-drama series for Prime called Tommy Love in 2006 and starred in the pilot episode, later performing the role again for a talk-show style TV3 pilot The Tommy Love Show in 2010, and reprising the role in 2022, for Tom Sainsbury's The Love Hour on TV3.

Samples of Tom's work can also be found on www.tommcleod.com.

Information about Tom McLeod and his music for film and television can also be found on the NZ On Screen website.