Best known as one half of electronic duo Orbital, Paul Hartnoll has
composed the score for new Welsh thriller
Concrete Plans, available on UK
Digital
from November 23rd.
You can read our interview with Paul
here, while below Paul selects his five favourite movie scores.
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly (1966) Ennio Morricone
It’s a tricky one, picking five, but I’ve got them, they’re quite big
ones. First one I’ve got down is
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. I had to have some Ennio Morricone. I love lots of Morricone but
this has The Good, The Bad and The Ugly theme tune and 'The
Ecstasy of Gold' in it. I think that has to be one of the pinnacles of
Ennio Morricone’s scoring. I like all his scores - even the mad '70s jazz
sort of horror ones are brilliant as well - but
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly has to be in here.
It’s fantastic, because he made us believe that cowboys listen to surf
music, you know what I mean? We now associate anything that sounds like
Ennio Morricone with Westerns. It’s got nothing to do with Westerns! That
style of music has got nothing to do with Westerns at all, but it has
become the narrative for Westerns. It’s brilliant! We all believe that’s
the sound of Westerns now, twangy guitars. They didn’t have guitars -
well, electric guitars - back then. It’s not the sound of Westerns. It’s
great.
Edward Scissorhands (1990) Danny Elfman
Danny Elfman - Edward Scissorhands because he brought
back romance and fantasy in such a massive way. Every bar of that score is
so sure footed. There’s no waste, everything is really gregarious and
beautiful. And again, it’s been imitated so much in advertising and things
like that ever since. He kind of set this twinkly Christmassy sort of
gothic fantasy dialogue going, along with Tim Burton’s films. But for me,
it’s what Danny Elfman brings to the table - it adds so much beauty. It’s
an amazing score and I’ve loved Danny Elfman ever since.
American Beauty (1999) Thomas Newman
So for the next one, we have a similar era and Thomas Newman’s
American Beauty. I was gonna pick Meet Joe Black. It’s a tough one for me, between those two.
American Beauty’s been so rinsed it’s almost boring to listen to now. But when I go back
to what it meant, and what it was, and the influence it had, and the
diversity of instrumentation that it had… for what it was, which was an
American suburban story. The ethnicity and strangeness of the instruments
brought along a sense of alienation to the score, which was just immense.
The beautiful piano piece, with the plastic bag. Again, how many times
have we heard that since? It’s just echoed through popular culture since
that point. I loved all his scores from around that time. Like I said,
Meet Joe Black was a massive one.
Road to Perdition was a great one. But with
American Beauty, it’s like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, you gotta go back to the source, and that was the big one for me.
Brazil (1985) Michael Kamen
My next one is the score to my favourite film of all time, which is
Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. The score gets quite forgotten. But if you listen to it - and you’ve
seen the film as many times as I have - you realise that
Michael Kamen extrapolated the entire score from one piece of Latin
American music. Everything is a version or variation on the one piece of
music that is the “Braaaziiiilll - duh-duh-duh-duh”, everything. When it’s
moody, when it’s scary it’s like “duh-DUHHHH”, it’s immense, it’s so
beautifully crafted. There’s no reason why that film is called ‘Brazil’ as
far as I can see and I’ve watched it so many times, apart from that song
was the earworm of the era when the action was being played out. Kamen
keeps that theme throughout the whole thing. Even with all the diversity
of all of his score, it’s always a variation on that song. I love it as a
technical piece of work, but it’s agreat score as well. It’s so amusing
and works beautifully with the film.
There’s a song called 'Brazil', which is an old Latin standard, of which
I’ve spent the last 30 years collecting versions of it. I’ve got a massive
collection of variations on that theme from second-hand shops all over the
world. I still can’t work out the reason they picked the song for the
film. It might be really obvious, and someone might go “Oh it’s because of
that, you idiot!”. But I’ve never really spotted it. Every piece of music
in the film is based on that one song.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) John Barry
So that’s that! And this is where I get stuck. I’m on five and I can’t
decide between John Barry or Lalo Schifrin. I think I’m
going to go with Barry, because he makes me cry. Schifrin is groovy as
hell, and I love him, but he doesn’t make me cry. Barry makes me cry. And
I cannot decide between a Bond theme and
The Knack …and How to Get It. I think I’m gonna go for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. It’s got a couple of changes of chord which just blow me away every
time. It’s beautifully laid back and jazzy. It’s got vibraphones, which I
love. It’s John Barry lounging it up in his best way. It’s a really
sumptuous score. So many of his scores are brilliant, all the Bond ones.
But I particularly like the romance of
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. And it is a romantic film, it’s the one where James Bond gets married
and then loses his wife, it’s terrible! We get a one-off James Bond as
well, George Lazenby, God bless him. That was a hard one to pick, because
there are so many brilliant John Barry scores, but that’s the one I’m
gonna go with…