'A new life awaits you in the Off- world colonies! A chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!'
Two weeks ago I published a post about Blade Runner and the long lasting impact of Vangelis' music from the 1982 film. The soundtrack, held up for years in legal disputes, eventually came out in the mid 1990s and included pieces of dialogue from the film among the synths and timpani to great effect. For some time there have been a series of bootleg editions of an album called Blade Runner Esper Edition, originating (I think) in 2001 on CDr. The Esper Edition is the full, proper soundtrack to Ridley Scott's film, an ambient/ musical edition across two discs, the score as well as music from the film itself, the dialogue (but not Harrison Ford's controversial film noir voiceover) and all the noises from the film- the rain, street sounds, voices, gunshots, the Voight- Kampf machine, hovercars, footsteps, all the ambient background sounds of Los Angeles in 2019 (or the Blade Runner version of it). You can fall down some internet wormholes looking at all the different bootleg editions that have been produced, various claims to be definitive and better or best quality. This one seems to be highly rated and to my ears is as good as you're going to need.
And if you want to go deeper and further Youtube is full of parts of the soundtrack slowed down for a long, soft, ambient drone, white noise and Vangelis six hundred times slower than intended- this one, Blade Runner Blues slowed right down is a beautiful way to spend an hour.
More and more I think that the soundtrack to Blade Runner has been a formative influence on my listening. Which is weird because if someone asked me to list my favourite artists I'd never reply 'Vangelis'. Then film came out in 1982 and I saw it at the cinema (the Scala in Withington, a very run down flea pit with three screens, two small ones downstairs and a larger one upstairs with double seats on the back row. Entry was £1 and they weren't too fussy about age restrictions. It later became Cine City and then was demolished). The look of the film, the non stop rain and night, neon lights, 1940s/ 1980s fashions, Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Darryl Hannah and Sean Young all captured my attention- the famous roof top scene and Roy Batty's death (and Hauer's famous improvised lines) lingered long after the credits had rolled. Vangelis' instrumental score must have stuck with me too- the synths and keyboards, the rolling drums and pulsing synthesisers, the bleeps and sounds of the machinery worked into the music and the snippets of dialogue, the strange bursts of Japanese singing in Tales Of The Future, the ambient washes of sound and sudden rumbles of distant timpani... I hear these all over the place in things I listen to at the moment. Vangelis has a long shadow.
Strange to think that when Blade Runner came out the year it was set in, 2019, was nearly four decades away in the future and is now two years gone. These Polaroids were taken by Sean Young during filming are an incredible time capsule and snapshot of the past/ future.
There's a film channel on Freeview called TCM which shows a random selection of movies. Recently I noticed that they were scheduled to show The Bog Sleep and The Maltese Falcon so set the box to record both. I was a big fan of film noir back in the 80s and early 90s, watched both these films and others, especially those with Humphrey Bogart in them. I read some of Raymond Chandler's novels. This week there was a night when everyone was out and I settled down to watch The Big Sleep.
Bogart plays a private detective Phillip Marlowe hired by General Sternwood to settle a problem with some gambling debts one of his daughters (Lauren Bacall) has accrued. Carmen (Bacall) wants to stop him. She suspects that what her father really wants is to find Sean Regan, who vanished in mysterious circumstances a month earlier. From there on in the plot thickens to involve a bookseller, some blackmail regarding indecent photos of the younger Sternwood daughter, a very flirtatious scene in the bookshop and implied sex, a casino belonging to Eddie Mars, several visits to a house where the body of the bookseller Joe Geiger is found, a beating for Bogart, some resolution of plot issues, Bogart and Bacall suddenly falling in love and the death of Eddie Mars, shot by his own men when Bogie tricks him into going outside. All good film noir stuff.
The film was made during the war- there are a few wartime moments such as a female taxi driver and poster of FDR- but its release was delayed until 1946 so the studios could rush release all the war films they'd made. It was criticised on release for being difficult to follow and confusing. Marlowe sometimes makes deductions that aren't shared with the audience. The death of chauffeur Owen Taylor is unexplained. It's not especially confusing but there is a lot of back and forth, people going to and from places rapidly. There's little character development, it is all plot. And it does look old- really old. But Bogart and Bacall are superb, the lighting is dramatic, there's a grittiness about it that appeals and script is witty and fresh. Everyone, Bogart especially, smokes constantly.
A couple of pop culture things leapt out. Firstly the line 'now wait a minute, you better talk to my mother', taken by Coldcut, who have been posted here several times this week now, and used in their 1987 remix of Eric B and Rakim's Paid In Full. Paid In Full (Seven Minutes of Madness Mix) was a pioneering example of the art of the remix, a record that gave Eric and Rakim a hit, spliced in vocals from a recent hit from Ofra Haza and introduced the world to the much used 'This is a journey into sound...' sample.
When Marlowe (Bogart) visits Eddie Mars' casino Vivian (Bacall) is singing (backed by The Williams Brothers including Andy). The song is And Her Tears Flowed Like Wine, a jazz song written by Stan Kenton. One of the lines she sings refers to a girl being 'a sad tomato'- the lines go 'she's a sad tomato/she's a busted valentine'.
In 1994 Michael Stipe would use the same line in R.E.M.'s Crush With Eyeliner, a line that has always jumped out at me as being such an odd expression. I've no idea if Stipe got it from The Big Sleep or from a different version of the song but it seems reasonable to assume he watched the film late night on tour in a hotel room. Stipe follows it with 'she's three miles of bad road'.
Finally, as this picture shows, the younger of the two Sternwood girls must have been one of the inspirations for the look Ridley Scott gave Sean Young in Blade Runner (Martha Vickers, second right).
That's your lot from The Big Sleep. Next stop for me is to watch The Maltese Falcon, a film and book that from memory are far more confusing and difficult to follow than The Big Sleep.
We're now in the year Blade Runner was set. We have until November for all the aspects of the film to be realised- replicants, flying cars, off world colonies, Voight- Kampff empathy response machines (although it wouldn't surprise me if these do exist). Maybe Blade Runner isn't very far from our 2019 at all- in the film corporations are all powerful, product and advertising is everywhere, the climate is seemingly broken (perpetual rain and night), the wealthy isolate themselves living high up above the streets where everyone else exists. Deckard's Esper machine is voice controlled and has the functions of Google Earth, the ability to manipulate photographs.
In Blade Runner's 2019 people dress in a cross between 1940s film noir and early 80s synth pop.
In the meantime, Vangelis' soundtrack remains a repeated joy.
Sean Young's Polaroids she took during the filming of Bladerunner are really something else.
And here's even more Bladerunner. You may have heard there's a new film imminent, Bladerunner 2049. Spain's disco/house producer Vicmoren has a free download of his theme to the new film on Soundcloud. Vangelis evidently referred to, this is ten minutes of minimal soundtrack electronica well spent.
Sean Young and Rutger Hauer on the set of Bladerunner taking a replicant Polaroid selfie, circa 1982.
I'm A Cliche is the brainchild of French dj and producer Cosmo Vitelli. It's Edit Service offers up fortnightly remixes, edits and reworkings of all sorts of stuff by various remix types, often under pseudonyms, putting unofficial goodies into the public domain. Well worth a trawl if you've got a few hours on your hands this weekend. This one, Edit 61 from Front De Cadeaux, seems to be a slow mo version of Max Berlin's Elle Et Moi. The thunking piano chords and snaking horn make nine minutes fifty seconds go by in a very pleasant haze. Free download too.
