SURREAL, perplexing, weird, disturbing, offensive. The list goes on by which to describe David Lynch, the 65-year-old Montana-born film-maker, visual artist and – cue intro music of decidedly off-centre value – musician.
It comes as little surprise that Lynch would release a solo album ( Crazy Clown Time); one of his signature motifs is the melding of dreamlike/nightmarish imagery with a fastidious approach to sound design. From his 1977 debut feature, Eraserhead, onwards, Lynch has utilised sound and music in his films to match his feverish imagination: the hissing radiators and creepy organ music in that film; the truly unsettling mime to Roy Orbison's In Dreams in 1986's Blue Velvet; the foreboding otherness of the soundtrack to his successful early 1990s television series, Twin Peaks.
Added to these are this year's collaborations between Lynch and groups Duran Duran (he directed a concert that was streamed live on YouTube in March) and Interpol (he created the animated short I Touch a Red Button Man,which played in the background to the band song Lights, as they performed at April's Coachella Valley Festival).
It seems that, in a similar fashion to Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, Lynch has the knowledge and intuition to position music in a visual context. He agrees music may well be the spiritual axis of his film work.
“Good point,” he remarks in a polite, if quite hesitant manner, almost as if there is a full stop after every word. “For me, the rule is this: you can love lots and lots of different songs, but when you put them into a film it has to marry into the scene. Some songs don’t work, but some are a perfect fit. All the elements are like that in cinema. You want it to be a magic thing, if you can do it, so that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, and so that every part is critical.”
For someone so into music, how come it took so long for a solo album? He has created and produced music before, but always within the realm of his film work. It was, says Lynch, yet another of those happy accidents his modus operandi (which amounts to creative jigsaw puzzles wrestling with his renowned “dreamlike logic”) seems to thrive on.
"Like they say, it just happened. I sorta snuck into music, to be honest, and I have always said that Angelo Badalamenti brought me properly into that world. We started working together around the time of Blue Velvet, but I guess I've just kinda got closer and closer to working on my own music, but always with other people.
"Over a year ago, I was in a recording studio working on some songs with a good colleague, and getting some halfway decent results, but we knew we had a really good one with Good Day Today. Somehow – I can't rightly recall – it was heard by a DJ on KCRW, which broadcasts out of Santa Monica, and he played it thinking it was Underworld! Then he took the song to Ibiza, where he played it to the British DJ Rob Da Bank and a guy from an English indie label. They loved it, asked to put it out as a single, and then when that went down well, asked us for more songs to make an album. So. Here. We. Are."
Crazy Clown Timeis, perhaps, what you'd expect from Lynch, which means his fans and followers will be pleasantly mystified by the music's occasional non-linear tropes. Non-fans will be steering well clear of tracks Football Game, Strange and Unproductive Thinking, The Night Bell With Lightningand These Are My Friends,which don't necessarily adhere to the blueprints of pop's Golden Age. It's all about tangents, isn't it, David?
“Oh, yes. If you start something and go along and work on it, and then go off in different directions, what’s great is that you might forget the original intention and go off in the direction of the tangent. This makes it something that could blow you away, and often does.”
Is this his primary approach, creatively? “In cinema, I still think it’s very important to have a script before you start shooting, but in the building of the script that’s where those kinds of tangents can happen. In painting, a lot of the time what I start out with is nothing like what I end up with. It’s a process of action and reaction, and you’ve got to be able to destroy something to get to the place you really want to.
“It’s similar to music, I guess, in that sometimes I have lyrics up front, and I can get them into the music easily, for sure. And sometimes the music conjures the lyrics. Ultimately, it’s all a great big experiment until it starts to feel like something that you can really work with. And then you’re home free.”
Lynch says it's strange to have a bona fide record out, but you can sense that, enjoyably odd though Crazy Clown Timeis, his heart and mind are best served in visual formats.
“I think cinema holds so many different art forms, and one of them is music – the area, the format, has got me into a lot of different worlds and each one, frankly, is astounding.”
One of Lynch’s latter-day enthusiasms lay in the internet; his personal website (davidlynch.com – for your visual pleasure but with a pay wall solidly built) features short videos, wonderfully absurd animated inserts, and other odds and ends. And yet this staunch online fan is thrilled that his album is released on physical formats such as CD and vinyl.
“It’s all going towards downloading” he says glumly, “but there are still people who want to hold albums in their hands. For me, the main loss is in album cover art, which can be staggeringly beautiful squares of design. Going down in size from vinyl to CD was a loss in visual terms, but we’re kinda used to that now. With downloads, what is there? The music also seems less important, in a way. That’s sad for me, quite honestly.
"But, you know, I love – repeat: love – the fact that Crazy Clown Timeis on vinyl. What disappoints me personally is that so much of music is listened to in either the car or on computer. What you really need is a killer pair of headphones, a quiet room, low lights, and the volume turned up on a good sound system."
Does he have a measure of the album’s qualities? “No, it’s the same as film – if you’re happy with what you’ve just created then that’s okay. Everybody knows that when anyone puts something creative out into the world, it’s gonna go one way or the other – people are gonna love it or they’re gonna hate it, and you’ll have people in the middle ground, too.”
You can never guess how it’s going to pan out, implies the genial Lynch.
"If you have done the best you can, and are happy with what you did, then it's a winning situation. Crazy Clown Time? I. Feel. Good. About. It."
Crazy Clown Timeis released through Sunday Best/PIAS
LYNCH'S MOVIES IN MUSIC
ERASERHEAD (1977)
Almost as unsettling to listen to as the movie is to watch, you’d imagine that for a generation of alt.rock artists (including Autechre, Napalm Death and Radiohead) and record labels (including Warp and Ninja Tune) the soundtrack has been on careful if continuous rotation. The inclusion of snippets of Fats Waller’s organ playing adds a disquieting, carnivalesque air, while the freaky ambient music (devised by Lynch and sound editor Alan R Splet) with its hissing radiators, wheezing electronica, factory whistles and the piercing wails of a quadriplegic baby perfectly matches a film once described by Lynch as “a dream of dark and troubling things”.
BLUE VELVET (1986)
It was during the making of this controversial film that Lynch met up with composer Angelo Badalamenti. While the soundtrack (for which Lynch requested something reminiscent of Shostakovich) was completed after shooting, it is the use of retro pop ballads – notably Bobby Vinton's hit Blue Velvetand Roy Orbison's In Dreams(mimed by actor Dean Stockwell in a particularly sinister fashion) that stick in the mind as some of the weirdest aural-visual juxtapositions in contemporary cinema. This film also introduced singer Julee Cruise into Lynch's musical domain.
TWIN PEAKS (1990-92)
The unmistakable sounds of composer Angelo Badalamenti and singer Julee Cruise wafted out over the credits of Lynch's groundbreaking television series. According to Badalamenti, Lynch requested that the famed Laura Palmer Theme "should be "dark, brooding, haunting . . . ending with a climax that's slow and tears your heart out". In tandem with the oddness of the show (which concerned the murder of small town schoolgirl Palmer and the secrets she kept that lead to her death), was the eeriness of the music. The soundtrack to the series went on to become one of the most successful in television history, while Cruise's hit single, Falling, quickly became the epitome of the word "ethereal".
WILD AT HEART (1990)
The soundtrack to Lynch's ironic interpretation of the classic cinematic staple of the road movie features more diffuse strands of music: pure rock'n'roll (Gene Vincent's B-Bop-A-Lula), speed metal (Powermad's Slaughterhouse), swirling puffs of parallel-universe jazz (by Badalamenti), slicked-back pop (Chris Isaac's Wicked Game), garage-rock (Them's Baby Please Don't Go) and – perhaps oddest and most startling of all – Nicolas Cage rendering a lovely version of Elvis Presley's Love Me Tender. A divisive but impressive soundtrack to a movie described by Lynch as "insane, sick and twisted".
