You Need To Hear This… Part 2 (1980s)

5 underrated 80s movies you should re-watch for their scores alone.

Last year, on what would have been my late father’s birthday (November 24th), I published a special post about underrated 70s movies with superb and interesting soundtracks. I thought I would continue the thread this year but looking at movies from the 1980s instead. If anything, this was even harder than last year’s. There were so many great scores made during the 1980s, and having grown up during this decade my memories of the film’s and the music of this decade are especially nostalgic… I had to be even more strict with myself than last year — the movies and their scores had to be genuinely underrated rather than cult (which rules out the likes of John Carpenter’s scores or Vangelis’ work on Blade Runner for instance). Hopefully, I’ve come up with 5 that perhaps might not immediately spring to mind…

Incidentally, you’ll soon spot a theme going through the majority of these scores. The 80s saw a huge rise in music technology, most notably advent of the Fairlight CMI (and later series 2 & 3) and the Synclavier. These were huge expensive machines, that were essentially “studios in a box”; offering digital synthesis, sequencing, multitrack recording and the then new technology of sampling — finally allowing composers to create complete demos or even the entire score to a movie, at home.

Stewart Copeland — Rumble Fish (1983, Dir. Francis Ford Coppola)

Until recently, I assumed that this score, like Copeland’s later ones for Wall Street or the Equalizer tv series — which were done using the Fairlight, had also been created electronically. I wasn’t until I saw the fascinating (very amusing) video clip below of Copeland being interviewed about the score, that I realized it all been done live with multitrack recording.

Regardless of the method behind its making, this score, when I first saw the film as a teenager, blew my mind. As a drummer myself, the idea that you could make a score using primarily just percussion instruments changed my view of music scoring forever. It also made me a composer, as a few months later I created my first ever score — for a school drama piece — using nothing but percussion Instruments and a drum machine.

The score is absolutely essential to the film, it’s skittering rhythms perfectly underscoring its dreamlike quality, with it’s high contrast black and white cinematography (aside from the fish themselves, which are almost the only thing you in color) and use of time-lapse. It also adds to the film’s sense of timelessness — the clothes and the look of much of the film suggests the 50s or 60s, the cars are from the 80s — an electronic score would date it and an orchestral score would root it in the past too much. Instead, Copeland’s score keeps it in an alternate universe where all these elements can co-exist.

Howard Shore — Videodrome (1983, Dir. David Cronenberg)

Creating to the score to a movie about a video signal that fools the viewer into thinking their hallucinations are reality, using a machine that was the industry standard for synthetically recreating acoustic instruments sounds incredibly “high concept”, but in fact that’s exactly what Howard Shore did with this score.

The instrument in question, the Synclavier II, was still in a fairly primitive iteration, when this movie was made and it’s sampling capabilities were fairly limited. However, there’s no denying the power of Cronenberg’s disturbing imagery of videocassettes being slotted into gaping, vaginal stomach wounds underscored by Shore’s Dies Irae — like motif, played on what sounds like a combination of a cello and an organ.

This was the first time the Synclavier was used on a film score (Shore even got Sydney Alonso, one of the Synclavier’s inventors to come along and help him program the sounds he used in the movie.), but it would not be the last. As the Synclavier graduated from being a complex FM synthesizer, with resampling and resynthesis capablities, to a fully-fledged multi-track, sampling and sequencing recording solution; composers such as Alan Silvestri, Alan Howarth and Mark Snow began to use it for scoring films and Tv shows, not to mention the countless sound post-production houses, like Skywalker Sound, who used the machine as a Digital Audio Workstation for sound design on their films.

Until Macs and PCs became fast enough, to be used for real-time audio recording, the Synclavier was what was used and Videodrome was the first score to take advantage of its abilities; That alone makes it a ground-breaking score. Add to that the brilliant concept of creating a score that blurs the line between whether you’re hearing a real instrument or a synthetic one and you have music that completely compliments the concept of the movie.

It’s even more of a shame then, that in preparing the soundtrack for it’s album release, Shore chose to layer additional sounds and FX onto the music, which distracts from the score itself. Perhaps one day, there might be an expanded release, but until then the best way to appreciate this score is by watching the movie itself.

Here’s an interesting little fragment of an interview with Shore talking about the score for the film, which conducted by Michael Schelle and included in his book of interviews with film composers: “The Score”.

“ Videodrome was the first score where I actually used a computer. I did it very academically, note by note. It was an early version of what we’re doing now, and it’s still the same computer, the Synclavier. I think I had one of the first ones ever made. The inventor, (Sydney) Alonso, created it as a student project at Dartmouth. It didn’t occur to him that any musician would ever really use it. But once I managed to get hold of one, I started composing with it. Alonso would come down from New Hampshire to work with me. He couldn’t believe that somebody was actually using the thing”

Thomas Newman — Desperately Seeking Susan (1985, Dir. Susan Seidelman)

The 80s, encouraged by the launch of MTV, saw the growing inclusion of pop songs in movie soundtracks, slowly edging out underscore as studios realized they could essentially sell movies almost on their soundtracks alone. A good pop song, cut to clips from a film and shown continuously on MTV would generate more public interest than any amount of trailers or newsprint ads. This meant that composers often had to find away to fit their score around pre-existing songs, without sounding too jarring.

This early score from the now renowned composer of American Beauty, Finding Nemo and Skyfall is a great example of someone doing this brilliantly. After this, Newman would find himself at the forefront of a group of new composers managing not only to create there scores around the ever present pop songs, but using similar technology to that of the songs that they had to sit alongside of.

Newman has mentioned in numerous interviews that, for him, the son of a famous Hollywood composer and conductor and part of a family of composers and conductors, using electronics in his early scores was a way of both distancing himself from the family legacy and finding his own “voice” as a composer. Something that, coming from a musical family myself, I can relate to absolutely and I’ve made no secret about the massive influence Newman’s music had on my own work, when I began composing professionally.

What’s fascinating in this early work, is how many of the elements that are now so recognizable are already in place, and Newman himself still rates it as the best of his early scores. Part of that is clearly down to the inclusion of two very important members of his team: Rick Cox — who is responsible for a lot of the great textural guitar work here and Chas Smith, whose found percussion and ambient textures are another constant in a lot of Newman’s work. (If you’re not familiar with these two men, check out this video of Cox showing a bunch of extended playing techniques on electric guitar and this one of Smith in his workshop showing some of his self-made instruments.)

There’s a more obviously electronic feel to much of the score than that of Newman’s later work — which often has a more acoustic ambience, eschewing synths for samplers or processed real instruments played in strange ways — but the core of what makes Newman’s music so evocative: the pulsing rhythms, the sparse minimalistic keyboard melodies, the ear-catching textures are already cemented here.

The score, which due to being only about 35 mins in length was paired on the album with that of another Seidelman film, Making Mr Right (scored by Chad Jaekel). It’s long out of print, but thanks to YouTube you can now listen to it in its entirety. It’s a fascinating insight into the early work of a now much better known film composer and a great 80s score in its own right.

Wang Chung — To Live And Die in L.A. (1985, Dir. William Friedkin)

Continuing the theme of using pop songs in scores, this score to Friedkin’s movie about a U.S. Treasury agent, Richard Chance, who’s willing to break the law in order to catch counterfeiter, Rick Masters, does the opposite of most 80s scores using pop music — It gets one band to create both the songs and the underscore. The result is a seamless fusion of songs and score, that leaves you wishing that more directors would take this approach.

The group had come to the attention of Friedkin when he’d heard their album, Points On A Curve and used the track “Wait” from that album in the film, the rest of the music, bar the title track, was recorded in just two weeks. Even more amazingly, the title song was the only thing actually created “to picture”, after the group saw a rough cut of the film’s opening sequence.

Despite this, the score is integral to the film, from the songs like, “Lullaby” which is used to underscore Chance meeting his lover and informant; to the pulsing minimalist instrumental “Black-Blue-White” which used again and again throughout the film whenever Chance is closing in on Masters.

Cleverly, the album, which is still readily available on cd via Amazon, sequences all the songs in the first half, leaving the instrumentals, which are often longer and more minimal, for the second part.

It’s very much an 80s score, for the most part, With relentless drum machine rhythms and hard, jagged synth sequences driving the action and perfectly matching the main character’s singe-minded pursuit of his quarry. There are also several slower and more haunting cues, such as “The Red Stare”, scored with Emulator strings and a flanged piano sound, that are used to underscore scenes of Masters alone.

Hans Zimmer — Black Rain (1989, Dir. Ridley Scott)

In his second major Hollywood score, Zimmer creates the template for not only all his future action/adventure scores (you can hear echoes in later scores such as Broken Arrow, Crimson Tide and even The Dark Knight) but most major action scores from then on, with his mixture of synths, percussion, ethnic instrumentation and orchestra.

The film, with its lead character (played by Michael Douglas)’s unrepentant racism, is a guilty pleasure nowadays, but the score which was recently given a superb re-issue on cd by La-La Land records is not.

Deep, throbbing synths mixed with sequenced percussion, orchestra and occasional electric guitar, create a sound world which sounds both alien and familiar, ancient and modern.

It’s difficult to say exactly what synths Hans used for the score, but a rough equipment list from an old interview gives you an idea: A Fairlight CMI, a Moog Modular, a Roland System 700 Modular, a Prophet 5 and a Yamaha TX816 (7 DX7s in box). However, it’s the way the electronics and orchestra are blended together, rather than the synths themselves, that’s different from the way that say, Jerry Goldsmith combined them, that’s revolutionary here and which, like it or not, set the standard for modern hybrid scores (a standard that continues to this day) and made Hans the most sought-after composer in Hollywood.