Reverb-TV Matt Lidis Column

All the great films have great soundtracks. Not the most inspiring thing I’ve ever thought on a Thursday afternoon, but it’s true. When the film and the score are the one and the same in our minds, you know somebody has done their job right.

Think of some film themes. Go on. If you’re reading this at your computer, google it – they’re all there. As depressingly familiar as Stuart Maconie’s sagging jowls on a Channel 4 rundown of the top 100 greatest ever >you make this bit up<.

The theme from The Godfather is more mafioso than a heavily Brylcreamed Robert De Niro eating Al Pacino shaped meatballs on a bed of Scorsese’s mum’s pasta. In Italy. The theme from Jaws sounds EXACTLY like a dangerous shark. Star Wars? Spaceships. Indiana Jones? Treasure and dust. James Bond? Spies. Blah blah blah. That’s all well and good, but all those are all mere blockbuster Pavlovian associations. We’ve seen them a million times and they’ve been bleached on to our minds via our ears at a rate of roughly 874 times per film. That’s just brainwashing.

What matters to people like us, the lovers of music made by people without Steven Spielberg’s remit dangling over the composer’s head, isn’t the theme tune– it’s the soundtrack. The subtle and fine art of attaching records to films.

People who like music are people who like films are people who like books are people who like drink are people who like drugs. Well, maybe. It seems people who are interested in other people’s imagination and what they can do to their own tend to be intelligent folk who can see what a mess we’ve made of the planet who either A) want to escape the reality of it for a while or B) want it rubbed all over them like a cold, grey shower gel. Either way, the eyes and the ears are the two quickest routes to our creative minds (until Radiohead finally release their 100% scent project) and this provides a rare opportunity to marry sight and sound in film and soundtrack. The song and the scene are what matter to us.

I’m not going to preach to you about why the Pulp Fiction soundtrack is perfect, or how On Days Like These by Matt Munroe’s inclusion on The Italian Job allows for some of the most sublime opening credits in film history, or even why the presence of Hundred Mile High City by Ocean Colour Scene on Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels very nearly ruins it. But I would like to talk about why these, and all the other soundtrack successes, are so important to us.

As a music lover, I rarely do anything in life without musical accompaniment. Sitting on a bus, having a shower, doing the washing up, shopping, dancing the bedroom mazurka, eating my tea…you get the idea. Most psychologists would probably argue that I was trying to block out the thoughts I would normally be having if I wasn’t actively trying to suppress them with sound. And, while they would probably be right, I believe listening to Hank Williams whilst tying to scrape dried egg off a frying pan or the Beach Boys whilst waiting for a bus in December drizzle provide a powerful and easy relief from the mundane realities of modern life. In much the same way, we have become experts at accentuating out mood and experience with our personal soundtrack. It may be trite, but listening to I Wanna Be Adored as my train skirts round Ancoats on the way into Manchester Piccadilly station makes it feel so much more exciting for me to be heading home. As does London Calling on the way back.

But, like it or not, our lives are pretty boring. That’s why we turn to music when our taboos tell us we can’t turn to anything else to lift us up (never take pills at a funeral), We rarely have the opportunity to experience anything emotional with an appropriate song in the background – much to our loss. This is where films come in.

With even a very modest budget, it is possible for the filmmaker to create a visual reality so much more appealing than our own. A good director can create a scene that lures our brain into theirs, in just the same way a good songwriter can. We think we are there and we want to believe it. When these two artists’ worlds are given the opportunity to collide, there are few things in the creative world that make such a good pairing. Like Jagger and Richards, Beardsley and Rush, together they just click.

In this double-drop of sensory emotion we become briefly consumed in a reality we are constantly trying to achieve by lugging our entire record collections around with us on our iPods.

Whilst always being at risk of a certain degree of cliché, the moment when the perfect song melts into the scene before us is a beautiful, rare and addictive reminder of how perfect life could actually be. But, deep down, we know that in reality, those moments of emotional perfection will always be just out of reach. And that’s why we keep buying them.