ASK MOJO
Let us answer your nagging rock questions and resolve your musical doubts.
Debaser by the Pixies relates to the 1929 Luis Buñuel/Salvador Dalí short film Un Chien Andalou, while the group’s song Gigantic was, said Kim Deal, based on the 1986 movie Crimes Of The Heart. Who else has written songs after watching a film? It must make things easier…
MOJO says: Watching a movie and then penning a song inspired by it is a long-established practice. Scott Walker reframed Bergman’s 1957 deathfantasia The Seventh Seal as a western on Scott 4 in 1969, while Roxy Music’s 1972 track 2HB was based on the 1942 Humphrey Bogart vehicle Casablanca. The Clash were serial offenders, with Charlie Don’t Surf quoting Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now in 1980 and Red Angel Dragnet lifting lines from Scorsese’s film Taxi Driver in 1982; three years later, Mick Jones’s Big Audio Dynamite repurposed Nic Roeg features including Performance, The Man Who Fell To Earth and more for E=MC2. Other notable examples include The White Stripes basing The Union Forever on Orson Welles’s 1941 debut/masterwork Citizen Kane, Merle Haggard, Georgie Fame, Brigitte Bardot and Serge Gainsbourg all singing songs based on 1967 armed robbery romance Bonnie And Clyde, and the multiple pictures Iron Maiden have based songs on (try Where Eagles Dare and Run Silent Run Deep for starters). And how about Ultravox! (Hiroshima Mon Amour), R.E.M. (Imitation Of Life) or Dave Edmunds (The Creature From The Black Lagoon)? The opposite phenomenon of movies lifting song titles is another ripe debate, as 1995 Andy García vehicle Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead did with Warren Zevon, John Hughes’ Pretty In Pink did with The Psychedelic Furs, and 2006 rom com You, Me And Dupree did when it borrowed egregiously from Steely Dan’s Cousin Dupree. The latter situation prompted the Dan to pen an open letter to featured actor Owen Wilson’s brother Luke observing, “they didn’t even bother to think of a new fucking name for the guy.” Got any good suggestions?
WILL JCC SING AGAIN?
It’s good to see Dr John Cooper Clarke’s been out on the road. But will he ever record his poetry to music again? I still think Disguise In Love and Snap, Crackle & Bop are works of genius.
MOJO says: John said he enjoyed making his 2016 album This Time It’s Personal with Hugh Cornwell but says: “I haven’t got any plans to do that. Putting music with [poetry] was never my idea in the first place, but I don’t regret it. In fact, some of the poems, I wrote them because there were some spare tracks, so they wouldn’t have
