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Desperately Seeking Soundtracks – Getting into Sue’s 80s groove with Betty Blue, Ry Coo and the Ghostbuster crew!

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What a delight that 1980s films thread turned out to be! My thanks to everyone who contributed.

That decade was a cinematic doozy! Almost 200 movies have been mentioned so far. And it’s not closed so please keep your comments coming!

And not only did we get reminded about some stupendous movies. We were also treated to added extras like @Locust’s account of skiving off school to binge watch all the new releases and being mistaken for a teenage film critic. And @Bingo-little’s wonderful musings on the many ways in which the Big Apple was portrayed in 80s movies. Let’s not forget @Gary’s utterly convincing elegy of Terence Davies’s Distant Voices, Still Lives. How could anyone not want to see the film after reading that?

So we’re done with the 80s now? Not a chance! It ain’t over until the Fat Lady dances..

I now want to know about your favourite songs from 80s movies. (Don’t forget there are some very naff movies with some great tunes.)

And also your favourite soundtracks….
I’d like to kick off by mentioning Gabriel Yared‘s magnificent theme tune for Jean-Jacques Beineix’s Betty Blue: 37°2 le matin from 1986. It’s a quite magnificent, very dramatic piece of music.

Combine it with those idiosyncratic Riviera beach houses on stilts. And the exquisitely beautiful Beatrice Dalle. And you have one hell of an opening scene!
We’ve mentioned a shitload of films. But this being the dancefloor-denying Afterword, we’ve managed to overlook the fact that this was a decade full of movies about. dancing. And soundtracks packed with magnificent floorfillers.

Not a single mention of Dirty Dancing, Fame or Flashdance!! Have we no dirty dancers? And no flashers?
Simple Minds, Jennifer Warnes, Madonna, Duran Duran, Survivor, Prince and Irene Cara were filling dance floors all over the planet.

So please tell us about your favourite songs from 1980s movies!

If there’s something strange
In your neighborhood
Who you gonna call?
(Afterworders!)

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Comments

  1. Gabriel Yared’s theme from Betty Blue

    And that opening scene. Scorchio!!

    Ry Cooder produced some magnificent film music in the 80s.

    And I definitely remember enjoying The Breakfast Club.

  2. This song from Rocky 3 was a ginormous floorfiller.

    And back in 1984, I really enjoyed the movie, The Neverending Story, and this theme song by Limahl. What a hair cut!

  3. Re: the dire…
    The fat lady’s dancing.

    That said, I’ll go to my grave defending the right for dodgers to listen to and view shite.

    I got a bit emotional saying that.

  5. I just stumbled across this top notch. in-depth look at 80s soundtracks.

    https://www.indiewire.com/features/best-of/best-80s-film-scores-1234895411/

    It features Philip Glass, Herbie Hancock, Vangelis, David Byrne, Ennio Morricone, Tangerine Dream, Peter Gabriel, Randy Newman and many more.

    It also covers several Japanese films, notably Akira and My Neighbour Totoro.

    Bernard Tavernier’s Round Midnight, which Herbie did the soundtrack for, is the best jazz film I’ve ever seen.

  6. During the 80s a lot of soundtracks became less compendia of incidental music composed for the film, and more collections of old pop hits.

    They probably sold more that way, but sort of lost something in the process.

    • Would I be right in thinking that American Graffitti (1973) was the first example of that?

      The soundtrack double album was a magnificent introduction to the music of 1962. And the film is still enjoyable.

      The exception that proves the rule @Sniffity?

      • For some movies, like American Graffiti, it’s essential to use selected old hits to give context.
        For some other movies it’s just laziness or currying favour with the audience, IMO.
        Possibly cheaper too (or at least costing about the same) to license some popular songs than to employ a composer to score your movie properly.

        • I’m sure there are directors who take the approach you describe @Mike_H.

          But at the same time, there are several modern directors who put a lot of time and care, (and sometimes quite a lot of money) into getting the songs they want.

          I name one film for each of them, but all of them have done this throughout their career.s

          Edgar Wright – Baby Driver
          James Gunn Guardians of thr Galaxy
          Ari Kaurismäki – Dead leaves
          Quentin Tarantino – Jackie Brow
          Sofia Coppola – Marie Antoinette
          Jim Jarmusch – Paterson

  8. One of the most memorable pieces of music in any 80s film is Wilhelmina Wiggins Fernandez performing the aria from Catalini’s La Wally
    in the film Diva.
    It should be as popular as Nessun Dorma.

  9. Right up at the top of this thread Ry Cooder’s superb theme from Paris. Texas is cited.
    I’d like to add the great, lost Ry Cooder soundtrack: Southern Comfort.
    While there are at least half a dozen official soundtrack albums that Ry released, for some reason Southern Comfort never was. The theme and another piece “Swamp Walk” are on the compilation album Music by Ry Cooder, no complete soundtrack was ever released.

      • I had a look at Southern Comfort on wiki and discovered this extraordinary tale @Bamber..

        “In the late 1980s Iranian state TV IRIB broadcast the film, under the name “Operation Lagoon” (Amaliyate Mordab). The film was shortened to 95 minutes, and the story was changed. In the Iranian version, a group of US Army soldiers who opposed the Vietnam War are sent on a mission among man-hunters, equipped only with blanks. The soldiers are killed by man-hunters one after another as planned by US authorities. At the end, when the remaining two soldiers believe the US Army truck is coming to save them, the picture fades and the sound of constant shooting is heard, indicating the US authorities killed all the soldiers. The film was a huge hit among the Iranian audience. Iranian film critics believed that the IRIB censored version made more sense considering the American government’s atrocities overseas.[16]”

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Comfort_(1981_film)

    • Can’t really look past soundtracks from the 80s without mentioning Streets of Fire. It even, preposterously, billed itself as a Rock’n’Roll fable.

      The actual soundtrack album has two of the best Jim Steinman songs as performed by the made-up Fire Inc and has a couple of songs by The Blasters, who are also in the film but Ry Cooder also did the incidental music, which, unfortunately, didn’t make it onto the album.

      Still….Youtube, where someone has done the needful.

      • Great point @A45RWD.

        An uneven film but there are some very fine songs in Streets of Fire.

        Such as this.

        And this show-stopper

        Robert Townsend and his group star as The Sorels, performing I Can Dream About You in the final concert of the film.

  10. The Blues Brothers takes some looking past, for me at least. The music in that movie changed my life.

    This is a favourite use of music in an 80s movie though (and I don’t believe the film has been mentioned on the other thread): from the opening of The Big Chill.

        • It is indeed a great cast and does have some good moments. Maybe I was a bit harsh. However I just find it a bit smug and pleased with itself. I was in love with Jobeth Williams though

        • I think the slightly earlier The Return of the Secaucus Seven was also a big influence on that genre, which was probably summed up in the title of thirty something. It was a certain generation realising that they had now joined the grown ups, and that meant compromising.

          • The Big Chill was a rewrite of The Return Of The Secaucus Seven for a more mainstream audience.
            I forgot about John Sayles’s movies in the 80s film thread. I’ll have to check some of the dates, so see which ones qualify.
            Matewan and Eight Men Out were both brilliant low-budget films, which succeeded through good scripts and great actors – many of whom recurred in Sayles’s movies – most notably David Strathairn.

            • Matewan was 1987 and Eight Men Out 1988, so they both qualify for our list of 80s films.

              I don’t think I’ve seen any of Sayles’s films other than Lone Star from 1996 which is brilliant. So I’m very glad you put him on the map for us.@david-kendal and @Carl

  11. For Randy Newman completists the Three Amigos soundtrack is essential. Who can forget his performance as the Singing Bush? Here’s a personal favourite. The song I sang for my children at bedtime for years.

    • Great suggestion, @Locust. That Nyman was a prodigious chap.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Nyman

      “One of his earliest film scores was the 1976 British sex comedy Keep It Up Downstairs, followed by numerous films, many of them European art films, including eleven directed by Peter Greenaway. Nyman drew frequently on early music sources in his scores for Greenaway’s films: Henry Purcell in The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) and The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) (which included Memorial and Miserere Paraphrase), Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber in A Zed & Two Noughts (1985), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Drowning by Numbers (1988), and John Dowland in Prospero’s Books (1991), largely at the request of the director.[9] He wrote settings to various texts by Mozart for Letters, Riddles and Writs, part of Not Mozart.”

      Some of you may recognise this from The Draughtman’s Contract.

      Do you have any special favourites, Lo?

  13. Spina Tap – not so much a soundtrack, more a history of the band (including a track from Shit Shark Sandwich).
    What? Spinal Tap are real, and it was a documentary all along …

  14. My favourite song from an ’80s movie is this one. It is one of my favourite songs of all time. What a pity that this version of it is so terrible! But then again, it made Nick Lowe a lot of money so…

        • Absolutely no need to apologise @Steve-Walsh.

          I had a fika with an friend this morning and we were talking about movies and he mentioned how difficult it is to remember which year (or even which decade!) a film or album was released.

          Which is why this, and the 80s album thread, are rather useful. One has to think back and put the pieces together. And then use Wiki and IMDB to get the facts straight.

  15. But if we’re looking for exactly the right piece of music to a highly evocative film sequence in a great movie, then I’d go for this:

    Incidentally, I went out for a lovely meal to celebrate my birthday with my family on Saturday and Richard E. Grant was on the next table. How nice to see that not a single person bothered him all evening.

    • Rubbing shoulders with the stars, @steve-walsh!

      Thanks for an excellent addition to the thread.

      Someone on Spotify has done a playlist with music from Withnail

      From which I learnt that it was King Curtis playing on that fine version.

      • There was a soundtrack album of the film at the time it was released but since I already owned the Hendrix and Beatles tracks I bought King Curtis Live at Fillmore West instead. It’s a decent album but I must have played this track 100 times for every once I’ve played the album as a whole.

    • It’s an incredibly evocative piece of music to match the moment.

      A Sunday morning, a comedown, a hangover, the sound off rain on the window and the detritus of the previous night still scattered around the house. A Whiter Shade of Pale and Withnail & I is one of the most perfect combinations of film and music.

  16. A couple of very productive partnerships have been mentioned

    Ry Cooder and Walter Hill.
    Michael Nyman! and Peter Greenaway

    Here’s another:
    Popol Vuh and Werner Herzog

    A quote from that IndieWire article I mentioned above. (Take a look!)

    “Popol Vuh and Werner Herzog go together the way Herzog and Klaus Kinski go together, only much less violently. The German band scored “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser,” “Nosferatu, the Vampyre,” and several others, but they saved the best for “Fitzcarraldo.”

    Take “Wehe Khorazin”: a dies irae-like chorus gives way to unhinged chanting, and a thudding bass drum dissolves into a wailing fuzzed-out guitar with a tambourine. It’s a sonic journey from the sacred to the profane, and therefore a perfect accompaniment to Herzog’s heavily fictionalized historical epic about an Irish rubber baron (Kinski) and his obsessive desire to build an opera deep within the Amazon rainforest. It’s the sound of reason being swallowed by chaos.

    The krautrockers get more reflective too on “Engel der luft,” with its shimmering hi-hats, plaintive woodwinds, and calming piano chords. And a wide range of influences appears on the score — “Musik aus Burundi” is percussive mood music extraordinaire — indicative of the unexpected diversity the film shows was typical of the Amazon basin in the late 19th century. Of course, there are also many excerpts from classic opera works, some of them recorded by Caruso himself. After all, art makes the madness of life go down that much sweeter. —CB ”

    Let’s have another track by Popol Vuh.

    Which other Krautrock bands contributed to film soundtracks?

    Tangerine Dream did the music for Friedkin’s Sorcerer but that was back in 1977.

  18. Absolute Beginners Soundtrack

    Yes, the film was a mess but this is a period piece and virtually the “sophisti-pop” manifesto. One of Bowie’s better 80’s songs, a Ray Davies deep cut in “A Quiet Life,” and a decent Sade song. Over to you, people.

    • I’m just baffled by it all, @Pessoa.

      A movie featuring performances by Bowie, Ray Davies and Sade (who is in very fine form)

      Which is directed by Julien Temple who’ is a very interesting and competent director)

      And nobody likes it!

      @DuCool, who is a great fan of the Colin MacInnes novel,´felt that far too many liberties had been taken naming real people who are mentioned in the novel.

  19. Another dynamic duo who started working together in 1984 on Nausicaa Valley of the winds: Hayao Mizazaki and Joe Hisaishi.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Hisaishi

    Studio Ghibli did not yet even exist.

    You can sing along with this one, if you like! Joe’s greatest hit. From 1988’s My Neighbour Totoro.

    One of my happiest surprises at Bio Reflexen was screening Totoro for an audience of six-year olds who all came out of the cinema singing the theme song. In fluent Japanese!

    • Keeping the best to last, @exilepj??

      The whole movie looks like a hoot.

      Maurice Jarre must have had a lot of fun composing the music.

      What a remarkable chap! To be honest I knew more about his son, Oxygene Hitmaker, Jean-Michel Jarre. I now realise what a soundtrack superstar his dad was.

          • There was a doc about the films of Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker. The premise was “have we got enough gags? Surely we can squeeze some more in”. Top Secret may be the lesser lauded film of their films, but it is jam packed with qoutes, asides, and all round silliness.

                • One point that the clip about ZAZ makes is that one reason for their success was their choice of actors.

                  “David Zucker explained that “the trick was to cast actors like Robert Stack, Leslie Nielsen, Peter Graves, and Lloyd Bridges. These were people who, up to that time, had never done comedy. We thought they were much funnier than the comedians of that time were”.[18]”
                  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airplane!

                  The same goes for their choice of composer.

                  The film’s score was composed by Elmer Bernstein, who had provided soundtracks for classic films like The Ten Commandments, The Magnificent Seven, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Great Escape. ZAZ told Bernstein they did not want an epic score like his past works but “a B-Movie level score, overdone and corny”.[19] According to ZAZ, Bernstein completely understood what they were trying to do, had laughed throughout a previous cut of the film, and wrote a “fantastic score”.[17]

                  In 1980, an LP soundtrack for the film was released by Regency Records which includes dialog and songs from the film. Narrated by Shadoe Stevens, it features only one score track, the “Love Theme from Airplane!” composed by Bernstein. The soundtrack was altered for the European Flying High release, with several featured tracks swapped for pieces original to the LP.”

  23. This one from the film “The Legend of Billie Jean”. I never saw the film but I had a thing for Pat Benatar, fabulous singer but not always best served by the material. She couldn’t be bettered here though.

  25. Talking of no-expense-spared videos, I just tumbled across this piece of weirdness for a Cyndi Lauper song from the Goonies soundtrack.

    Lauper was musical director for the movie which must have really helped to put it on the map.

    The video was directed by Richard Donner and there’s quite a back story:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goonies_%27R%27_Good_Enough#:~:text=Cyndi%20Lauper's%20character%2C%20referred%20to,wrestling%20ring)%20outside%20the%20station.

    Here’s the second part of the video where you can catch a glimpse of the Bangles who also had a song on the soundtrack.

    Quite a break for a new band who were really starting to go somewhere.

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