So, this week, I'm doing something a little different. This week, I'm listing the funkiest movie soundtracks I've ever come across. Now, since appreciation music is subjective, I'm doing these in no particular order, and you might agree with some more than others. Never-the-less, I suspect you'll want to check out some of these tracks before you die. Today...
1. If You've Never Heard Of Roy Budd, You've Certainly Felt His Influence.
When most people think of Roy Budd, they think of the Get Carter (1971) theme. Mike Hodges gritty gangster movie was probably one of the darkest thrillers ever made up until that point.
SPOILER ALERT!!!
No one had pulled off a Diabolus Ex Machina so effectively before. Even today, the sudden demise of Michael Caine (shot by an assassin, who had been in plain view the whole time without us even realising it) five seconds before the end is so shocking, it leaves the view pretty stunned for days after seeing it.
END OF SPOILER ALERT!!!
Anyway, more than anything, the movie is known for it's Jazzy-yet-bleak main theme, one that you'll have stuck in your head for weeks. It goes something like this...
No surprises there, then. I don't even know why I bothered with the spoiler alert. You've all seen the film. Some of you probably own a copy of the soundtrack. But believe me, it's not the funkiest thing he wrote.
You ever see Who Dares Wins (1982)? OK, I see about half of you with your hands up. For those of you who don't know, it's basically an action movie starring Lewis Collins as an SAS operative infiltrating a group of EVIL! uh... anti-nuclear protesters. Yeah. I never said the film wasn't appallingly right-wing and politically naive. But the final 10 minutes, in which the EVIL! Ban-the-bomb group take over the American embassy in London, prompting the SAS to come flying in, abseil out of helicopters and blow everyone away in an incredibly violent and superbly staged running gunfight is, I'm afraid to say, pretty awesome. Plus, we get to see lots of Lewis-Collins-running-down-corridors-with-a-machine-gun shots, which are always welcome. Besides, everybody knows that if you object to the presence of nuclear weapons of British soil, you must be a dirty communist liable to commit acts of terrorism and if you get a full clip of machine gun fire in the chest, you had it coming, right? Well, this was the 80s.
But never mind all that. We're hear to talk about the fucking awesome soundtrack. And rather fucking awesome it is, too. Here's the Main Theme...
So yeah. Funky. If you were in the SAS, you'd probably walk around with this track in your head all the time.
Now, at the begining of this post, I said that even if you haven't heard of Roy Budd, you'd have heard his influence. Well, by influence, I mean *ahem* "influence". You will no doubt recall that in the late 90s and early Naughties, you couldn't go anywhere without hearing "Clubbed to Death" by Rob Dougan. It was in The Matrix (1998), it was in TV commercials. It's probably been featured in every episode of Top Gear ever made. You still can't escape the bloody thing. It's not even the best track on the album. In fact, I suspect it might have been meant as an album-filler. Why? Because of this...
It's "Jazz it Up" from The Marseille Contract (aka The Destructors, 1974). I will leave you to draw your own conclusions...
