Over the last few years, the CD-ofthe-soundtrack has become a de rigueur part of the marketing of most self-respecting movies, along with the T-shirt, the baseball cap and the other bits of disposable plastic paraphernalia produced by the marketing machines and given out as prizes on cheap television shows. In most cases, the resulting product is strictly for the enthusiast - most movie scores are not designed for listening to without a visual accompaniment. With the exception of a few greats like Ennio Morricone (Cinema Paradiso, Once Upon A Time In America) and Bernard Herrmann (Cape Fear, Citizen Kane, Taxi Driver), and some of the lusher efforts of Philip Glass (Mishima) and Michael Nyman (The Piano), movie scores tend to stay where they belong - attached to movies (except when politicians, such as Dana, use them for their party political broadcasts).
But in the 1990s, a strange phenomenon has occurred - more and more films come with studiedly "eclectic" soundtracks, combining up-to-the-minute bands with easy listening standards or half-forgotten underground classics. The benefits are obvious - in a media-saturated environment music is a great shorthand for telling an audience what kind of film they're going to see, and the movie can benefit from a little marketing synergy with the simultaneous CD release. You never know - you might get a hit record out of it as well.
When director Danny Boyle, producer Andrew MacDonald and writer John Hodge were adapting Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, they were faced with the problem of bringing Welsh's 1980s twentysomething heroin addicts up to date for a 1996 audience. The astute combination of Britpoppers like Blur and Elastica with dance acts like Leftfield and Underworld, leavened with 1970s junkie superstars Iggy Pop and Lou Reed, was faithful to the spirit of the book, but made the Trainspotting soundtrack one of the best-selling CDs of the year, shifting two and a half million copies. It also led to the best hit single of 1996, Underworld's Born Slippy.
"Born Slippy had been released before and hadn't done anything, even in the clubs," says Boyle. "What's exciting about film is that it's a young person's medium, and very often that's not reflected in the music."
I Went Down, the Irish comedy currently riding high at the box office here, is one of the first films made in the Republic to go for a soundtrack tie-in. The CD, featuring tracks by Irish performers Lir, Revelino, Christie Hennessy and the High Llamas, along with rhythm 'n' blues from King Curtis and Junior Wells, is a relatively low-key affair. The fact that the bands are Irish is largely accidental, says producer Robert Walpole, who insists that the film's requirements have to come before any thoughts of CD tie-ins. "We're far too selfish to be interested in promoting the Irish music industry. I don't think that it works the other way around - the songs have to serve the film. Some people have made that mistake, and I think their films have suffered as a result."
There's nothing much new about using songs to sell films, and vice versa. Music and movies have gone together like coffee and cigarettes ever since the moment when Al Jolson opened his mouth for the first bars of The Jazz Singer. For 30 years US movies and popular music were virtually interchangeable, with the Hollywood musical bringing the two together in a gorgeous synthesis of colour, movement, rhythm and melody.
When rock 'n' roll came along in the mid-1950s, Hollywood reacted by producing a slew of vehicles for the new stars, but the old musical format slowly died a death over the following two decades, despite the best efforts of Julie Andrews and Barbra Streisand.
It was in the 1970s that film-makers discovered they could use rock 'n' roll to tap into the cheapest and most potent emotion of all - nostalgia. George Lucas's American Graffiti helped kickstart the trend for 1950s revivalism, while Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now proved that the Vietnam war looked a lot better with a guitar solo tacked on. But the most successful soundtrack tie-in of the decade was Satur- day Night Fever, which took disco out of the clubs and into the global marketplace. There were other commercially successful music movies in the 1980s (Fame, Flashdance etc) but none managed to crest the wave of a pop phenomenon quite so successfully.
The cycles of pop are much faster than those of movies - an entire musical movement can be born, peak and die in the length of time it takes to develop and produce a feature film. So film-makers' relationship to popular music is of necessity parasitic - either feeding off the canon of golden oldies or casting about in the final stages of post-production for some tunes that might help the story and boost the film's credibility rating (not necessarily in that order). It seems to have become a requirement for every big sludgey action picture to take on a few trendy tunes, usually as background noise or to cover the closing credits, but, as films like The Saint prove, a couple of Sneaker Pimps or Daft Punk tunes aren't enough to conceal a turkey.
The really smart compilations tend to be a combination of low cunning and excellent taste, often in restricted budgetary circumstances. Quentin Tarantino didn't have millions of dollars to spend on the soundtrack for his debut film, but he did have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the lay-bys and hard shoulders of pop history. The soundtrack for Reservoir Dogs, a collection of forgotten 1970s "bubblegum favourites" held together by snippets of dialogue and Stephen Wright's laconic intros for "KBilly's Super Sounds of the Seventies", sold millions. Tarantino had picked up on a brilliant trick demonstrated by David Lynch in Blue Velvet (and by underground film-makers like Kenneth Anger and John Waters years before). A seemingly sweet and simple pop song could take on an entirely different meaning when juxtaposed with contrasting images of violence and danger.
Trainspotting was perceived as a very slick marketing operation, but the soundtrack was not originally part of that process. "Nobody was rushing up to us when we were putting the soundtrack together - we had to pay for the rights ourselves," says Andrew McDonald, who is slightly apologetic about Trainspotting 2, the "sequel" which includes some songs that nearly made it into the film, plus a few which apparently "inspired the film-makers" (one of which, Goldie's Inner City Life, must hold the record for highest number of compilation appearances). "It's one of those things you have to do. I could make excuses about it, and point out that some of the profits are going to charity, but ultimately we just have to put our hands up."
The soundtrack for the Trainspotting trio's new film, A Life Less Ordinary, features a similar mix of old and new, from Orbital to Elvis. "Because of the setting of A Life Less Ordinary we felt we had to use at least some American music," says Danny Boyle. "But British music is so far ahead of the American stuff at the moment. We did get songs by Beck and Luscious Jackson that we were happy with." As soundtracks become more popular, the range of products on offer is expanding, with multi-volume editions devoted to such esoterica as blaxploitation tunes, Italian soft porn classics, and (of course) spaghetti westerns. In a related move, the use of movie score motifs and styles by many contemporary musicians is being exploited in some excellent cover version compilations, most recently and notably Shaken And Stirred, David Arnold's fine collection of classic Bond themes performed by the likes of Pulp, Iggy Pop and the Propellorheads.
The lounge revival of a couple of years ago prompted a renewal of interest in wonderfully cheesy tunes such as The Windmills Of Your Mind from The Thomas Crown Affair, and helped the career revival of Burt Bacharach, whose credits on movies such as Casino Royale and Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid are now joined by a raft of 1997 releases, from the unspeakable Father's Day through the forgettable My Best Friend's Wedding to the indigestible Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. But Burt's chips are well cashed at this stage - this year's real trend is 1980s revivalism, from the sublime (Grosse Pointe Blank) through the ridiculous (Romy And Michelle's High School Reunion) to the irredeemably dull (Fever Pitch). It may be that nostalgia has had its day, though. There's only little over a month to go to the ultimate tie-in, and after Spice - The Movie hits our screens this Christmas, you may never want to hear another soundtrack again.
Five essential recent soundtracks
Trainspotting
Grosse Pointe Blank
When We Were Kings
Reservoir Dogs
William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet
Five to avoid
Trainspotting 2
Fever Pitch
Twin Town
Lost Highway
Pocahontas
Soundtrack regulars
Burt Bacharach
Nine Inch Nails
Abba (especially in Australia)
The La's (but only There She Goes)