Soundtrack Saturday

Alex Cox's 1984 film Repo Man is one of those classic counter- culture 80s films, a combination of road movie, music, Los Angeles, science fiction, UFOs, crime, cars and black comedy and a satire on Reagan's America, 80s consumerism, the nuclear bomb and anything else Alex Cox, in his directorial debut, could throw at the camera. It stars Harry Dean Stanton and Emelio Estevez as repo men- 'the life of a repo man is always intense', says Bud (Harry Dean Stanton). 

The musical backdrop to the film, the scene around which Estevez's character Otto comes from, is 80s L.A. punk. The soundtrack is in part a snapshot of early/ mid 80s L.A. punk rock with the title track coming from Iggy Pop who wrote it specifically for the film after his manager saw a screening of it. 1984 isn't necessarily the best period in Iggy's musical back catalogue. In 1982 he'd released Zombie Birdhouse and the year before Party. Party is poor. Zombie Birdhouse isn't much better. For Repo Man he enlisted ex- Sex Pistol Steve Jones and Blondie's Clem Burke and Nigel Harrison and they make a decent fist of it, the song a heavy piledriver with Iggy in good voice. 

Repo Man

The rest of the songs, ten of them, take in The Plugz (last seen at Bagging Area backing Bob Dylan on David Letterman), Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies, Fear, Burning Sensations (cvering Jonathan Richman's Pablo Picasso) and Juicy Bananas. As a document of Californian punk rock in Reagan's USA its pretty good. The soundtrack is completed by possibly the most archetypal L.A. punk band of them all, Black Flag, and their 1982 song TV Party. 'We've got nothing better to do/ Than watch TV and have a couple of brews', bawls Henry Rollins. 

TV Party

Repo Man

I've had three different Iggy Pop encounters in the last week- the recent Teatime Dub Encounters ep with Underworld was the first, followed by watching a documentary I'd taped before going on holiday, the film American Valhalla, which records the making of the Post Pop Depression album with Josh Homme and subsequent tour. Then somebody, somewhere, posted a clip from the 1984 film Repo Man.

I'd already been writing an Iggy Pop solo Imaginary Compilation Album for JC at The Vinyl Villain (it's only being written in my head at the moment but may make it to type at some point along with the almost finished Primal Scream ICA, a 2nd Factory Records one to go with the one JC wrote and a Spacemen 3 one which is still very sketchy). An Iggy Pop solo ICA is confusing. In many ways you'd just decide to cherry pick five songs from The Idiot and five from Lust For Life and be done with it but it seems remiss to not include songs from his wider back catalogue, not least one from Post Pop Depression. I'm working on it.

Repo Man is great little film, an Alex Cox punk rock/science fiction adventure starring Harry Dean Stanton and Emilio Estevez. The soundtrack is wall to wall US 80s punk- The Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies, Black Flag et al and the title track from Iggy. Iggy was in a bad way in 1984 (and looking back he had a pretty poor 80s musically). Alex Cox asked Iggy to do the title track and Iggy put together a punk band at short notice, comprising ex-Sex Pistol Steve Jones and Blondie's rhythm section. The engineer claims that Iggy and the band threw the song together in the studio 20 minutes before recording it, did two takes and then Iggy said 'Well, I think that's good enough unless someone has a problem with it'. Repo Man is two minutes of hard riffing with a decent Iggy vocal and some stream-of-consciousness stuff about living in Los Angeles, better by far than much of what he put out in the 80s. Functional 1980s L.A. punk rock maybe but good enough unless anyone has a problem with it.

Repo Man