Everything is Connected 19 September 2013
Welcome back to another trivia filled installment of Everything is Connected. This week we go from Film scores and trip hop to pscyadelic rock in six steps.
Being a nerd, one of my favourite films last year was Dredd, a film version of the law dispensing Judge Dredd from various 2000AD magazines and comics. One of my favourite pieces of the film (beyond the fact it wiped the Stallone version out of my memory) was the score by Paul Leonard-Morgan. It’s got kind of an industrial techno vibe to it. In the film, there’s this drug called slo mo and whenever someone takes the drug, the scene slows down in a very stylized way including the music. Leaonard-Morgan musical cues for those scenes were inspired was inspire by a video like this…
Sent to him by Geoff Barrow. Leonard-Morgan really liked the sound of the video so much so that it was used as a place-holder until he had finished recording the score. You can really see the influence in pieces like this:
Geoff Barrow is one of the members of Portishead, a great band out of the 90’s that is in a state of hiatus for the moment. He’s also a pretty good producer and remixer, who has worked on tracks for Depche Mode, Primal Scream and an artist who has also dabbled in sci-fi films, Tricky.
Born Adrian Nicholas Matthews Thaws, Tricky is a musician, producer and occasional actor, his biggest role being the right hand man to Gary Oldman in The Fifth Element. Tricky does a pretty solid job too in a film that’s filled with stars like Oldman and Bruce Willis.
The Fifth Element is director Luc Besson’s love letter to French sci-fi comics and especially the works of artist Jean Giraud better known as Moebius.
To explain how awesome an important Moebius is to comics and sci-fi would be really hard to do here but he work is fantastic. Besson hired him to work on the film as a designer and in a weird turn of events, Moebius along with frequent collaborator Alejandro Jodorowsky, sued Beson for using their graphic novel The Incal as inspiration for the film but due to his employment on the film, the suit was thrown out.
Alejandro Jodorowsky is a film director, actor, comic book writer and mime who has worked on a number of “art” films. John Lennon loved his film “El Topo” so much that he got Beatles Manager Allen Klien to help distribute it across the US. A film project that Jodorowsky tried to get off the ground but ended up becoming a legend in unmade films was an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel, Dune. The fil would have featured a partial score by Darkside of the Moon era Pink Floyd! Can you imagine that? A film score by Floyd at the height of their creative powers? Unfortunately that’s all you can do is imagine it as the film never got past pre-production.
So in this week’s chain we go:
Paul Leonard-Morgan – Geoff Barrow – Tricky – Moebius – Jodorowsky – Pink Floyd
Do you have a chain we should know about? If so, please leave it in the comments below!
