Ian Brown1 and Johnny Marr2 are teaming up to create a soundtrack creating supergroup
The Guardian UK reports:
Ian Brown and Johnny Marr are to team up, recording music for three television dramas. The former Stone Roses frontman and the Smiths guitarist hope to assemble a soundtrack supergroup, possibly including Happy Mondays bassist Paul Ryder or even Brown’s former bandmate, Mani.
“The idea is that Johnny writes the music and I write the words and the melodies,” Brown told BBC News. Though the Mancunian legends live conveniently close together in Lymm, Cheshire, Brown admitted they will “have to bring a drummer or a bass player in”.
[Click to continue reading Ian Brown and Johnny Marr to record music for TV series |Music |guardian.co.uk]
Daniel Pemberton notes:
pop stars often produce excellent one-off soundtracks.
There’s a number of reasons for this. The first is power. As a composer, unless you have an enlightened director or producer, people rarely care what you think (when I was working on a film about drunks I suggested that I should write the score while totally legless. They didn’t go for it. But I reckon they would if, say, Shane McGowan suggested it). You’re usually hired after they’ve already cut most of the film with a “temp track”, which is basically a score cobbled together from old soundtracks. If you’re lucky, it’s just there to give a guide to the mood; if you’re not, you’ve got to copy it as closely as possible without getting sued. The reason a lot of scores sound exactly the same these days is because, half the time, they almost are. If you’re a real soundtrack nerd (like, er, me) this can ruin a halfway decent movie like Michael Mann’s Public Enemies because you’ve spotted a rip-off of the theme to The Thin Red Line (which generally gets copied mercilessly) within the first five minutes. It happens far too frequently and drives me, and whoever has the misfortune to put up with my accompanying huffing noises, nuts.
However, this isn’t going to happen when you watch something scored by a pop star. Firstly no one is going to ask them to copy the incidental music from American Beauty for the millionth time, as they’ll no doubt tell them where to stick it. Although composers will protest this as much as they can they’re also aware where their next job will come from. Pop stars don’t care – for them it’s an amusing sideline to the day job.
[Click to continue reading Ian Brown and Johnny Marr know the score |Music |guardian.co.uk]
One of these days I need to watch The Thin Red Line in its entirety. I’ve seen some of it, but not all.
Mr. Pemberton’s point is spot-on, if you hire Jimmy Page to write your Satanic film soundtrack, you’ll get what you get, and if you don’t like it, well, piss off.
Footnotes: