Soundtrack Saturday

Midnight Cowboy, John Schlesinger's 1969 film, was one of those films that when I was a teen in the 80s  you had to watch, one of those 60s and 70s films that were required viewing and would turn up at some point late night on BBC2- along with Bonnie And Clyde, Apocalypse Now!, The Deer Hunter, Taxi Driver, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and 2001. 

Midnight Cowboy is an odd couple film set in the late 60s New York seedy underbelly. Jon Voight plays Joe Buck, newly arrived in the city from Texas dressed in cowboy clothes to find work as a male prostitute. He bumps into Dustin Hoffman's Ratso, a conman and hustler, and they team up, Ratso as pimp. There are unpleasant encounters, unpaid bills, sex acts in cinemas, flashbacks to childhood trauma and Ratso's increasingly poor health. Eventually the pair end up on a Greyhound bus bound for the warmer climes of Florida. Joe abandons his cowboy clothes and hustling dreams and says that when they reach Miami he will get a regular job but by this point, as the bus heads south, it's already too late for Ratso. 

The film won three Oscars and the Library Of Congress designated it as being 'culturally, historically or aesthetically significant'. Hoffman and Voigt both became stars. It's got an edge- it's gritty, and unflinching and bleak if ultimately a film about friendship. It strikes me though as a film its unlikely that today's teenagers are watching in the way we were in the mid- to- late 80s. 

The soundtrack is as legendary as the film, two songs in particular songs for the ages. Harry Nilsson sang Everybody's Talkin', a 1966 Fred Neil song about escape and leaving the city for a simpler, better life. Nilsson's version, released with the film in May 1969, was the film's theme song, playing over the opening scenes and again at the close. 

Everybody's Talkin'

It wasn't until writing this piece that I remembered that Bob Dylan had been supposed to supply the film's theme song and wrote Lay Lady Lay for it but didn't complete it in time. It's impossible to imagine Midnight Cowboy without Everybody's Talkin', and with Lay Lady Lay in its place. 

John Barry wrote and recorded an equally brilliant and beautiful song, the title track, a gorgeous instrumental with the best harmonica part ever recorded snaking its way through Barry's laid back track, the harmonica courtesy of Belgian jazz musician Toots Thielemans.

Midnight Cowboy (Theme)

Love Is All That's Left In the End

Last week Lauren Laverne did a theme for her 6 Mix show called Desert Island Disco All Dayer, inviting various people to submit a mix of songs they'd like played endlessly on their fantasy desert island. David Holmes contributed a half hour of uplifting and emotional songs perfectly sequenced to lift the spirits. He starts out with Suicide's Dream Baby Dream, 9 by Sault, a seemingly unreleased Skylab track sampling that Joe Strummer interview where he says 'people can change anything they want to... and that means everything in the world', Chris Carter's remix of Daniel Avery's Lone Swordsman, Francesco Lupica's Heal Thyself, a scorching David Holmes and Keith Tenniswood song called I Am Somebody (also unreleased) with Andrew Weatherall's sampled voice, a French cover version of Stayin' Alive by Freedom Fry, an as yet unreleased song from David's Unloved band called Turn Of The Screw ('screw you' the chorus spits) and finishes with a short section of Poly High School Choir doing John Barry's Midnight Cowboy. It's wall- to- wall brilliance, drawing from the past to produce a dancing, life affirming, vibrant, day glo, slightly tripped out present. I just hope all the unreleased ones are going to appear soon. 

If you're in the UK you can find it at the BBC website, split over two parts. The first is here and the second here (the first five minutes run into Alison Goldfrapp's own Desert Island Disco All Dayer mix, also worth staying on for). You'll have to click through the news at the start to get to the music. If you're outside the UK (or inside and want to have the shows to keep) you can get part one here and part two here. 

Or you could download the one below- I edited the two files above into one thirty minute piece, chopping off the news at the start and the Alison Goldfrapp mix at the other end. Trying to get the two files to overlap exactly took some doing and I haven't quite managed it- the section of the David Holmes and Keith Tenniswood track with Andrew Weatherall's voice in it is a millisecond out but the very slight delay effect it creates on the vocal sample is quite pleasant so I've left it as it is. You could think of it as an exclusive Bagging Area remix of the track. 

David Holmes Desert Island Disco

And here is Poly High School's choral version of Midnight Cowboy in full- rather beautiful, probably wasted on a Wednesday morning in late January, but as the choir fade out singing 'love is all that's left in the end' you might just feel like the winter and January can't last forever.

When We Get To Miami

Midnight Cowboy is one of those films that I first saw late at night on BBC2, the cult movie slot. Channel 4 took up the baton too and there was Alex Cox's Moviedrome series. Logan's Run, The Wicker Man, Get Carter, Barbarella, Repo Man, Performance, Eraserhead, Apocalypse Now!, The Last Picture Show, various Spaghetti Westerns, The Man Who Fell To Earth- all those sorts of films. Recently I overheard John Barry's theme from Midnight Cowboy and that twisting harmonica line, the off kilter rhythm and then those melancholy strings sent me straight back to my late 80s bedroom, tuning in late at night, a big box TV with clunky push button channel knobs and a portable aerial that would need rotating from time to time.

Theme From Midnight Cowboy