CDs of the week
Whether it’s because the film functions like a giant commercial or because people want to relive its ambience, movie soundtracks often sell very well. Not the scores (unless it’s Titanic, boosted by Celine Dion going on and on) but the CDs subtitled “music from the motion picture”, the compilations of various songs that appear in a movie.
The success of the soundtracks of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet and Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting led the way. Both were lucrative enough to spawn sequel compilations, stretching the notional raison d’tre of the genre to its limit. How many songs or snatches of songs can you get into one movie?
What you get from such anthologies, apart from a bit of the movie’s flavour, is often a very strange set of juxtapositions – sometimes the selection seems all but random. You also get oddities: for the X- Files soundtrack a few years ago, for instance, REM got William Burroughs to do his best Marlene Dietrich impression over the karaoke version of Star Me Kitten.
The least you can expect is a bizarre cover version. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. The Notting Hill soundtrack (Island), which is otherwise a tad dull, rejoices in Elvis Costello doing Charles Aznavour’s She in lushly orchestrated style and Al Green quavering creditably through the Bee Gees’ How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?
The Forces of Nature soundtrack (Universal) kicks off with U2’s rousing version of Everlasting Love, and includes Propellerheads, Faithless and Tricky, but it’s not quite the collection of “thunderous dance grooves” promised on the front.
That distinction probably belongs to the excellent Human Traffic soundtrack (Gallo). We’ve yet to see this movie about debauched young ravers here, but that doesn’t prevent one enjoying this collection of potent dance grooves and comedown-ambient from the likes of Fatboy Slim, Public Enemy and Orbital. There’s a second CD, too, with a seamless, rather minimal dance mix of another 17 tracks.
The music from Go (Sony), which contrasts dance and rock, also makes a good package; EDtv (Gallo) veers from Cornershop to Bon Jovi. Cruel Intentions (Virgin) provides an interesting cross-section of contemporary Anglo-American pop (no oldies) – and, once more, Fatboy Slim.
South Africa weighs in with Heel Against the Head (Gallo), most of it fathered by Terry Dempsey, who co-produced the movie. We have The Rock Rebels (who?) singing Viva Bokke and She Wants Your Money, and a Welsh choir chorusing Land of Our Fathers and Shosholoza. PJ Powers does, and I mean does, Somebody Loves You, and on Obscene Love a Mango Groove-free Claire Johnston, er, rocks out.
But the most exotic choice is Something for Everybody, “presented” by Australian director Baz Luhrmann. It collects songs, many remixed, from his movies (R+J, Strictly Ballroom …), theatre, and an opera he directed. So this is an anthology of anthologies, with a number of strange things made stranger by juxtapostion: a bit of La Bohme alongside a remixed cover of Prince’s When Doves Cry; Doris Day’s Perhaps Perhaps Perhaps next to the album’s surprise hit Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen), which doesn’t even have any singing on it. It’s just some rather wry non-advice about life.