22nd January 2009

I’m a longstanding fan of film scores, and have been buying soundtrack albums in various formats for decades to the exclusion of pretty much all other areas of music (you won’t catch me in the reggae section of HMV any time soon). Right now I’m listening to (of all things) Gino Marinuzzi Jr’s music for Mario Bava’s Planet Of The Vampires. It’s very strange stuff.

As an aficionado of such things, I am often (well, occasionally) asked what my favourite soundtracks are. Inevitably the selection changes from day to day and sometimes more frequently than that. But right this minute, they look something like this.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN (Basil Poledouris, 1982). This one is always near the top of my list because it’s a thunderous score somewhere between opera and oratorio. And it’s loud, as naturally befits a Schwarzenegger epic. The orchestra boasts no less than twenty four French horns, and there’s a chorus in there as well, belting it out in Latin. But it’s the delicate moments, the gorgeous love themes, as much as the massive battle music, that make this one a personal favourite. Sadly, the album is hard to find these days, though there’s always talk about a reissue of the complete score. Poledouris also scored the 1984 sequel, Conan The Destroyer, and that’s fun but not a patch on what is probably his best work.

THE MEDUSA TOUCH (Michael J Lewis, 1978). I don’t know whether this is a minor cult movie or just another quirky British oddity with a terrific cast of reliable character actors (Derek Jacobi, Michael Hordern, Jeremy Brett, Harry Andrews) up against a ranting Richard Burton. But it’s special to me because it was one of the first movies I saw on the exciting new medium of Video Tape, and more importantly it was one of the first movies to get me interested in the music. I must have played back the end credits sequence a hundred times just for the over-the-top score by the now criminally underused Welsh composer Michael J Lewis. Like the best film composers, Lewis scored everything from caper comedies to horror movies, action thrillers to historical epics, and they all sounded different while still sounding like Michael J Lewis. Other seventies films that boasted his work include Sunday afternoon favourite North Sea Hijack and the mighty Vincent Price classic, Theatre Of Blood. Sadly, almost none of Lewis’ work has achieved a commercial CD release beyond a superb 2-disc set of re-recordings (and that’s very hard to find at a reasonable price these days). I found a copy in the CD exchange shop in Camden High Street and I was so thrilled that when I got it home I went straight for the Medusa Touch tracks over and over again.

FRIDAY THE 13TH (Harry Manfredini, 1980). Manfredini’s shrieky strings and ki-ki-ki accompanied eight out of eleven entries in the Friday saga, and for me it’s as instantly identifiable a musical signature as John Carpenter’s Halloween theme. It’s also going to be felt by its absence in the upcoming rehash. The later episodes (Jason Goes To Hell onwards) were performed on synths and keyboards rather than live players, and they didn’t reach the level of the early scores. The CD album, nominally Friday The 13th Part III but apparently containing 30 minutes of music from the first two and an instrumental rock piece, is very hard to find at anything other than silly prices these days. It’s one of my most treasured CDs, and one of my most frequently played.

MAD MAX (Brian May, 1980). Not that Brian May. The first time I encountered the late Australian composer’s work was an ITV screening of the bonkers Harlequin and I was thrilled, more than a decade later, to get that film’s score on CD. Mad Max, however, is the one I usually reach for when I’m in the mood for some May. It’s a thrilling, aggressive action score with a lot of brass and percussion, and there’s even a love theme in there, amidst the carnage and burning rubber. I don’t actually know what it was he did with the orchestra but it sounds like no other movie composer I can think of. He also scored Mad Max 2 (Road Warrior), but that score is badly represented on disc with a short running time and sound effects over the music.

ALIEN (Jerry Goldsmith, 1979). I can’t believe I’ve got this far down the list without mentioning Jerry Goldsmith, my favourite film composer. Though he got his (only) Oscar for The Omen, my favourite Goldsmith score is probably Star Trek: The Motion Picture, but I don’t think the Frightfest definition of genre movies extends quite that far. As far as horror is concerned, I prefer Alien, even though it was hacked about mercilessly by the director and editor. In the end the film even included tracks from his score to Freud and the eventual End Title music was needle-dropped from a classical symphony! The Goldsmith score, whether as heard in the film or as the composer intended (and the original DVD issue has both as isolated audio tracks) is a bleak, cold, forbidding work of utter horror with, thankfully, little in the way of comfortable tunes. When I got the chance to have a CD booklet autographed by Jerry Goldsmith at one of his London concerts, Alien was the title I went for.

OBSESSION (Bernard Herrmann, 1976). If you want a touch of Hitchcock on your movie, one of the easiest ways is to slap some vintage Bernard Herrmann on the soundtrack. Martin Scorsese’s remake of Cape Fear has that touch thanks to the re-orchestration of Herrmann’s score to the original (which wasn’t even a Hitchcock film, but came to us from the auteur behind Death Wish 4 and Happy Birthday To Me). Brian De Palma has often evoked Hitch through his association with composer Pino Donaggio, who similarly evoked Herrmann with Dressed To Kill, Blow Out, Body Double and Raising Cain. But back in 1976 he had the original and Herrmann’s penultimate score is one of my favourites. Big, bold, romantic, yet terrifying, in a similar vein to his Hitchcock work such as Vertigo and Marnie. Again, like so many great scores from the past, it’s getting tough to track down the CD issue.

HELLRAISER (Christopher Young, 1987). Though I’m not a big fan of his drama, comedy and romance scores, I’ve always liked Christopher Young in horror and thriller mode. Hellraiser is a gloriously dark score that alternates between underlining the blood and nastiness, and capturing the wonderfully tragic darkness. Originally it was going to be scored by Coil, which Wikipedia informs me is a cross-genre, industrial experimental music group. Whatever that is. Frankly I can’t imagine it scored with anything other than the beautiful Young soundtrack it has now. Young also returned for the first sequel (to my mind a better film, but I do prefer the original’s music) but none of the others, though his music was dropped into Hellraiser III at the expense of that film’s specially commissioned music by another composer!

I don’t think it’s surprising that most of my favourite scores are late seventies to early eighties. Certainly in the last ten years the increased use of synthesisers and samples to replace real musicians has lessened the appeal, and the music just isn’t as interestingly written. Scores have rather degenerated into identikit, interchangeable mulch; I’ve practically stopped buying them as a result and announcements of albums for things like The Day The Earth Stood Still or Valkyrie no longer thrill me. I’m much more excited when a long-lost score like Twisted Nerve or Body Double is finally released on CD.

But looking at the list just makes me aware that I haven’t included so many other scores, genre and non-genre. The Empire Strikes Back, the best of the Star Wars soundtracks, if only for the Asteroid Field chase music and the stunning crash-bang-wallop mayhem of the Battle In The Snow? Re-Animator, with its pastiche of the Psycho theme? Indeed, Psycho and Vertigo? John Harrison’s fabulous Day Of The Dead score deserves a mention. And what about James Horner’s thundering Aliens score? And that’s before I get to Goblin’s work for Dario Argento. Or Keith Emerson’s pounding music for Inferno? And while we’re in Italy, what about the various spectacularly doom-laden scores for Lucio Fulci? Maybe they’ll be on tomorrow’s list.

Until the next time.

Richard.