Fifty Minutes Of Soundtrack Saturday

2025's year long Saturday series Soundtrack Saturday has reached the final reel but before the credits roll it seemed that a Sunday mix of various songs and scores from the various film soundtracks I've written about would make a good Sunday mix. This is the result, seventeen tracks from sixteen films, sequenced with something approaching a narrative arc- it starts out in the desert with Harry Dean Stanton tramping round the dust, stays out west for while and then shifts to Tokyo, sleeplessness and jet lag. We jump around some other locations- Long Island, France, Memphis- and have visions of a post- apocalyptic USA before the climax, a death, some levity and then Rutger Hauer in the rain. 

The photo at the top is of Stretford Essoldo, a former cinema just up the road from me, a beautiful 1930s building that has been sadly empty and unused for decades. 

Fifty Minutes Of Soundtrack Saturday

• Ry Cooder: Cancion Mixteca
• Ennio Morricone: Watch Chimes
• Bob Dylan: Billy 7
• Joe Strummer: Tennessee Rain
• Tom Waits: Jockey Full Of Bourbon
• Kevin Shields: Intro- Tokyo
• Kevin Shields: City Girl
• Mick Jones: Long Island
• David Holmes: I Think You Flooded It
• John Lurie: Tuesday Night In Memphis
• Gabriel Yared: 37 Degrees 2 Le Matin
• Nick Cave and Warren Ellis: The Road
• John Barry: Theme From Midnight Cowboy
• Brian Eno: Deep Blue Day
• Son House: Death Letter Blues
• B.J. Thomas: Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head
• Vangelis: Tears In Rain

Cancion Mixteca is from Paris, Texas, Wim Wenders' 1984 film, a Ry Cooder soundtrack with some dialogue from the film that stands up as an album in its own right.  

Watch Chimes is from Sergio Leone's For A Few Dollars More, the second installment of the Dollars trilogy, released in 1967. 

Billy is from Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid, Sam Peckinpah's 1973 Western, Bob Dylan contributing the soundtrack and appearing in the film. 

Joe Strummer did the soundtrack for Walker, Alex Cox's 1987 Western- one of Joe's best 'wilderness years' songs. 

A Jockey Full Of Bourbon appears in Down By Law, Jim Jarmusch's 1986 film- Tom Waits is one of the three stars of the film as well as being a key part of the soundtrack. 

Intro- Tokyo and City Girl are from Lost In Translation, Sofia Coppola's 2003 film, Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson lost in Tokyo. 

Mick Jones provided three tracks for the 1993 film Amongst Friends- Long Island is the most complete, a Jones solo song. 

I Think You Flooded It is from Out Of Sight, the first of many David Holmes- Steven Soderbergh soundtrack collaborations, released in 1998. 

John Lurie's score for Mystery Train had to compete with some big hitters- Elvis' Mystery Train for one, Roy Orbison's Domino for another. A second Jim Jarmusch film in this mix- the use of music is central to Jarmusch's films. 

Gabriel Yared's guitar playing is from the soundtrack to Betty Blue, another late 80s film that made a deep impression on me- Beatrice Dalle made quite an impression too. 

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' soundtrack work spans all sorts of movies and documentaries. They began with the soundtrack to 2009 film The Road, a harrowing version of Cormac McCarthy's equally harrowing novel. 

Theme From Midnight Cowboy is gorgeous, a John Barry highpoint from a composer who recorded dozens of soundtracks. That harmonica. Stunning. 

Brian Eno's soundtrack work is wide and varied and an Eno only soundtrack mix would definitely work- Deep Blue Day is from the 1996 film Trainspotting but originally on Another Green World, Eno's 1975 album. 

Son House's Death Letter Blues is from 1965, just Son and a metal bodied resonator guitar. It's a stunning song and performance, Son's lyrics and performance can chill to the bone. It appeared on the soundtrack to On The Road, the  2012 version of Jack Kerouac's novel. 

B.J. Thomas' Raindrops Keep falling On My Head was a worldwide smash following its appearance in the 1969 film Butch Cassady And The Sundance Kid. The song is probably what the film is best known for, along with the two stars- Robert Redford and Paul Newman- and the famous shoot out ending. 

At the end of Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's 1982 sci fi/ film noir version of Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, Rutger Hauer sits on top of a crumbling building in the rain, holding a dove and improvises a farewell speech as Harrison Ford slumps in front of him, his life saved. 'All these moments will be lost in time', Hauer says as Vangelis' synth score plays. But they're not are they- they replay endlessly, equally moving each time. 

Soundtrack Saturday

John Barry's status as one of the key composers of cinema and film tunes is set in stone- or celluloid maybe. His work on the James Bond films alone guarantees him that. Better still is his music for Midnight Cowboy which featured in this series back in March.  The Ipcress File from 1965 broke ground as a flipside to the Bond films, a downbeat, unglamorous, grittier spy film that contrasted 007 with a working class, almost film noir spy, caught up in red tape and workplace difficulties.

The Ipcress File

John Barry's theme tune is deliberately non- Bond too. The catchy electric guitar riff is replaced by a off kilter melody line picked out on a cimbalon while piano plonks away discordantly. It's London gloom, fog and a 1960s still in black and white. 

The Ipcress File was directed by  Sidney J. Furie and starred Michael Caine as Harry Palmer, a role that came between his one in Zulu the previous year thta made him a star and his leading part in Alfie in 1966 that launched him the USA. 

In 1969 John Barry and Hal David wrote We Have All the Time In The World, a Bond theme sung by Louis Armstrong for On her Majesty's Secret Service. In 1993 My Bloody Valentine covered it for the Peace Together compilation, an album to promote the peace process in Northern Ireland. An unlikely cover version pair up, John Barry and Louis Armstrong with MBV- but they play it fairly straight and it works. 

We Have All The Time In The World

Soundtrack Saturday

Midnight Cowboy, John Schlesinger's 1969 film, was one of those films that when I was a teen in the 80s  you had to watch, one of those 60s and 70s films that were required viewing and would turn up at some point late night on BBC2- along with Bonnie And Clyde, Apocalypse Now!, The Deer Hunter, Taxi Driver, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and 2001. 

Midnight Cowboy is an odd couple film set in the late 60s New York seedy underbelly. Jon Voight plays Joe Buck, newly arrived in the city from Texas dressed in cowboy clothes to find work as a male prostitute. He bumps into Dustin Hoffman's Ratso, a conman and hustler, and they team up, Ratso as pimp. There are unpleasant encounters, unpaid bills, sex acts in cinemas, flashbacks to childhood trauma and Ratso's increasingly poor health. Eventually the pair end up on a Greyhound bus bound for the warmer climes of Florida. Joe abandons his cowboy clothes and hustling dreams and says that when they reach Miami he will get a regular job but by this point, as the bus heads south, it's already too late for Ratso. 

The film won three Oscars and the Library Of Congress designated it as being 'culturally, historically or aesthetically significant'. Hoffman and Voigt both became stars. It's got an edge- it's gritty, and unflinching and bleak if ultimately a film about friendship. It strikes me though as a film its unlikely that today's teenagers are watching in the way we were in the mid- to- late 80s. 

The soundtrack is as legendary as the film, two songs in particular songs for the ages. Harry Nilsson sang Everybody's Talkin', a 1966 Fred Neil song about escape and leaving the city for a simpler, better life. Nilsson's version, released with the film in May 1969, was the film's theme song, playing over the opening scenes and again at the close. 

Everybody's Talkin'

It wasn't until writing this piece that I remembered that Bob Dylan had been supposed to supply the film's theme song and wrote Lay Lady Lay for it but didn't complete it in time. It's impossible to imagine Midnight Cowboy without Everybody's Talkin', and with Lay Lady Lay in its place. 

John Barry wrote and recorded an equally brilliant and beautiful song, the title track, a gorgeous instrumental with the best harmonica part ever recorded snaking its way through Barry's laid back track, the harmonica courtesy of Belgian jazz musician Toots Thielemans.

Midnight Cowboy (Theme)

Saturday Theme Fourteen

Saturday's theme today comes from the former bassist of Magazine and one time Bad Seed, Barry Adamson, a man whose solo back catalogue is littered with delights and treasures. In 1992, on his Soul Murder album, Adamson recorded his take on the James Bond Theme, a version that has been sent to Jamaica and infused with ska and a big band orchestra, a sample from the original 1962 John Barry and Monty Norman Bond theme and a spoken word vocal that imagine a world where Bond is from Kingston and Bond is black. 

007 A Fantasy Bond Theme

I know it's close to pop culture heresy but I've never been that fussed about the Bond films. Some of the 60s ones have a period charm- the suits are well cut, the women are beautiful and the villains villainous, but it quickly became a joke that wore increasingly thin. I like the voodoo nonsense of Live And Let Die, I must have watched that at an impressionable age on a wet Sunday afternoon at some point. The modern Bonds don't do much for me at all. Is it just me? Have I got Bond all wrong?

Love Is All That's Left In the End

Last week Lauren Laverne did a theme for her 6 Mix show called Desert Island Disco All Dayer, inviting various people to submit a mix of songs they'd like played endlessly on their fantasy desert island. David Holmes contributed a half hour of uplifting and emotional songs perfectly sequenced to lift the spirits. He starts out with Suicide's Dream Baby Dream, 9 by Sault, a seemingly unreleased Skylab track sampling that Joe Strummer interview where he says 'people can change anything they want to... and that means everything in the world', Chris Carter's remix of Daniel Avery's Lone Swordsman, Francesco Lupica's Heal Thyself, a scorching David Holmes and Keith Tenniswood song called I Am Somebody (also unreleased) with Andrew Weatherall's sampled voice, a French cover version of Stayin' Alive by Freedom Fry, an as yet unreleased song from David's Unloved band called Turn Of The Screw ('screw you' the chorus spits) and finishes with a short section of Poly High School Choir doing John Barry's Midnight Cowboy. It's wall- to- wall brilliance, drawing from the past to produce a dancing, life affirming, vibrant, day glo, slightly tripped out present. I just hope all the unreleased ones are going to appear soon. 

If you're in the UK you can find it at the BBC website, split over two parts. The first is here and the second here (the first five minutes run into Alison Goldfrapp's own Desert Island Disco All Dayer mix, also worth staying on for). You'll have to click through the news at the start to get to the music. If you're outside the UK (or inside and want to have the shows to keep) you can get part one here and part two here. 

Or you could download the one below- I edited the two files above into one thirty minute piece, chopping off the news at the start and the Alison Goldfrapp mix at the other end. Trying to get the two files to overlap exactly took some doing and I haven't quite managed it- the section of the David Holmes and Keith Tenniswood track with Andrew Weatherall's voice in it is a millisecond out but the very slight delay effect it creates on the vocal sample is quite pleasant so I've left it as it is. You could think of it as an exclusive Bagging Area remix of the track. 

David Holmes Desert Island Disco

And here is Poly High School's choral version of Midnight Cowboy in full- rather beautiful, probably wasted on a Wednesday morning in late January, but as the choir fade out singing 'love is all that's left in the end' you might just feel like the winter and January can't last forever.

When We Get To Miami

Midnight Cowboy is one of those films that I first saw late at night on BBC2, the cult movie slot. Channel 4 took up the baton too and there was Alex Cox's Moviedrome series. Logan's Run, The Wicker Man, Get Carter, Barbarella, Repo Man, Performance, Eraserhead, Apocalypse Now!, The Last Picture Show, various Spaghetti Westerns, The Man Who Fell To Earth- all those sorts of films. Recently I overheard John Barry's theme from Midnight Cowboy and that twisting harmonica line, the off kilter rhythm and then those melancholy strings sent me straight back to my late 80s bedroom, tuning in late at night, a big box TV with clunky push button channel knobs and a portable aerial that would need rotating from time to time.

Theme From Midnight Cowboy