Soundtrack Saturday

Iggy Pop plays at Manchester's Victoria Warehouse tonight and I'm going to be there. Iggy feels like the last man standing in a way. He hasn't played in Manchester for years and at 78 years old I can't imagine there'll be too many opportunities to see him on home turf again. Although it wouldn't surprise me if Iggy lived to be 100 and carried on performing with his shirt off for another two decades. 

Two weeks ago the Soundtrack Saturday featured Iggy's title song to the 1984 Alex Cox film Repo Man. Iggy got a massive boost in the 90s when his songs were included on the soundtrack to Danny Boyle's Trainspotting. Included seems a bit reductionist- it's fair to say that the film, its publicity and its opening scene would be nowhere near as memorable as they were without this song bursting out of the cinema speakers as a shoplifting Ewan McGregor attempt to outrun security guards and ends up almost splayed across the bonnet of a car, laughing at the poor driver...

Lust For Life

Lust For Life was the title song from Iggy's 1977 second solo album, recorded at Hansa in West Berlin with David Bowie in the producer's seat. The band were Iggy's touring line up- Ricky Gardiner on guitar and Tony and Hunt Sales on bass and drums. Ricky Gardiner came up the famous guitar riff, based on the Morse code  opening to the US Armed Forces Network news programme and written on a ukulele. The guitars are great but its the drums which are first out of the traps, the loudest, most perfectly recorded drums. But there's no escaping the riff, everything just has to fall into line and follow. 

On top of this, essentially punk crossed with a sped up Motown backbeat, Iggy songs and sneers, at the top of his game, lines about Johnny Yen, liqour and rugs, hypnotising chickens, flesh machines and GTOs fired off, always coming back to the hilariously brilliant, 'well I'm just a modern guy... I got a lust for life'. Jon Savage (I think) once wrote that in just four years, from Raw Power to Lust For Life, Iggy went from Death Trip to Lust For Life and what a strange trip it was. 

Trainspotting also featured Iggy's song Nightclubbing, a genuine solo Iggy Pop classic, from Iggy's solo debut The Idiot (also recorded with Bowie but at Chateau d'Herouville, France). Bowie and Iggy had both left the USA to kick addictions and ended up in Europe making records that soaked up the new sounds of West German rock and electronics. Nightclubbing has Bowie on keys and a very mechanistic drum machine, a weird, dislocated electronic pulse, cocaine numbness and Iggy intoning his lyric about what it was like hanging out with Bowie every night, seeing people, 'brand new people', and doing 'brand new dances like the nuclear bomb'. Bowie wanted to replace the drum machine with 'proper' drums but Iggy stuck his ground, correctly, seeing that the drum machine gives the song its blank, lurching edge.

Nightclubbing

Iggy wrote the words in ten minutes in the studio and later said Nightclubbing was about "about the incredible coldness and deathly feeling you have after you've done something like that and how much you enjoy it. It could be Los Angeles or Paris or New York or anywhere, really." In Trainspotting the song soundtracks a scene involving shooting up in a desolate Edinburgh apartment and ends with the death of a baby. 

The Trainspotting soundtrack is a superb 90s soundtrack. It turned Born Slippy into a massive hit and rebirthed Lou Reed's Perfect Day. It included Brian Eno's Deep Blue Day and Pulp's Mile End and a ten minute Weatherall produced Primal Scream title track, a slow, snakey instrumental with the street sounds from an all day session outside a pub in Soho, the assembled Scream party people shouting to friends and associates from the street to a first or second floor room. 

Trainspotting

Soundtrack Saturday

Eliza's recent three week trip to Bali coincided with the 2000 film The Beach being shown on TV last weekend (she said they screened it at the beach cinema in Bali, to an audience of western twenty somethings in paradise- someone in charge of the film programming has got a sense of humour given how the film turns out for the main characters). 

The Beach is a 90s classic, a novel by Alex Garland turned into a film with something of an all star cast- directed by Danny Boyle and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Tilda Swinton and Robert Carlyle along with a slew of recognisable faces. The story is about the search for an earthly paradise where western travelers can live idyllically, everyone seeking some kind of turn of the millennium spirituality, that ends in violence, betrayal, shark attacks, cannabis farmers and the breakup of the island community. On release the film received mixed reviews, some of the book's commentary and subtleties lost on the big screen but that's often the way. No one in the film, despite being beautiful, tanned and photogenic, is particularly nice and in the end they all seem to largely get what they deserve. 

But the film isn't really what we're here for on Saturdays, it's the soundtrack and the soundtrack has got plenty going for it. As well as a complete score by Angelo Badalamenti, there is this song, the gorgeous number one single and comeback for All Saints, the William Orbit produced Pure Shores...

Pure Shores

Orbit's liquid production style is all over the song, a relation to Madonna's Ray Of Light from two years previously, a dreamy, ambient sheen with tons of delay and FX. 

The soundtrack is crammed with late 90s names, mainly from the dance world- Leftfield, Moby, Asian Dub Foundation, Faithless and Orbital all appear along with the Hardfloor's blinding remix of Mory Kante's Ye Ke Ye Ke. Blur and Barry Adamson both crop up and Brutal by the recently reformed New Order (their comeback album Get Ready didn't come out until 2001). Brutal is perfectly serviceable New Order I guess but also a bit  of a smoothed out, edges sanded down version of the group.

The hidden gem of The Beach soundtrack is by Underworld, their eight minute masterpiece 8 Ball one of their best songs. Crunchy/ radio static percussion, a guitar riff and Karl's multi- tracked vocals, a medication on a homeless man using an empty whisky bottle as a walkie talkie and with a flaming 8 ball tattooed on his arm. The song builds gently, the 4- 4 rhythms rattling onward and bursts of feedback juddering out against the shimmering, ambient backdrop. Eventually, after a wonderful breakdown and finger picking guitar part, Karl meets a man who 'threw his arms around me' and they laughed and laughed. It's beautifully done and very affecting. 

8 Ball

James Lavelle and DJ Shadow's Unkle are also on the soundtrack, at the end as everything goes to pot. Lonely Soul was one of the standouts on the 1998 Psyence Fiction album, a record with some serious special guests- Thom Yorke, Badly Drawn Boy, Kool G Rap, Mike D, Mark Hollis and Richard Ashcroft. It was listening to The Verve's A Northern Soul that sparked the idea for the album in Lavelle and Ashcroft and Unkle recorded Lonely Soul in 1996. 

Lonely Soul

Shadow's foreboding samples, drums, and production, the sense of space, the edge of darkness feel, all make Lonely Soul a bit of a late 90s classic. Wil Malone's cinematic strings fill the second half. Then there's Ashcroft's lyrics and vocal, streets ahead of much of the songs he recorded for Urban Hymns, the sound of a long dark night filled with drama. 

I Heard Wonders

I can't decide what was most impressive and jawdropping about last night's opening ceremony- the wit, scale and verve of the historical section, including dancing Victorian industrialists, marching Suffragists, a pause for the First World War and the destruction of the English countryside by the erection of some giant chimneys.

The whistle stop tour through British music, including some of the actual good bits, played out through text messages between a boy, a girl and a lost mobile phone.

The tribute to the National Health Service (no political points being made there then) with hundreds of dancing doctors and nurses and patients in hospital beds.

Or the sudden and totally unexpected appearance of Arctic Monkeys playing I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor, then covering Come Together as giant cycling doves flew from the ground beneath them.

Or the sound of Underworld's tripped out acid house belter Rez blasting round the stadium as the teams of athletes began their entrance. I mean, Rez!

Or for that matter, the honour guard for the flame by the people who built the stadium, Danny Boyle pointing out that this should be, maybe, the peoples' Olympics. Followed by the six kids who took the flame for the last part of the journey. Not Becks, six unknown kids. Well done Danny Boyle- hats off to you sir. 


I Heard Wonders