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caredogstips · 7 years ago

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Bowie and the missing soundtrack: the amazing fib behind The Man Who Fell to Earth

David Bowie is rumoured to have written a score to the sci-fi classic thats locked up in some grave. But the truth is much stranger committing screaming maids, boozy melee and coke-induced sounding hallucinations

There is a great mystery at the very heart of The Man Who Fell to Earth, Nicolas Roegs cult film: its soundtrack. There is a prolonged report that long-lost music for the film recorded by its sun David Bowie sits somewhere in a vault. Theres merely one trouble: Bowies soundtrack to The Man Who Fell to Earth doesnt actually dwell. The music that appears in the film released for the first time next month as part of a collectors edition by Studio Canal and a vinyl carton to be prepared by Universal was written and produced by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas.

The never-before-told story of its formation is almost as improbable as Roegs film. Signed to both idol in and write an original soundtrack for the cinema, Bowie, then at the top of his early renown, intended to record the music once killing had completed, envisioning it as the follow-up to his album Young Americans. But he began working instead on Station to Station, while deep into his cocaine and milk phase. After three months, he had managed to complete exclusively five or six lines in a ludicrous mishmash of styles from country rock to instrumentals on African thumb pianos and atonal electronic music.

The British arranger Paul Buckmaster worked on the demos with Bowie at his rented house in Bel Air, and at Cherokee Studios in Hollywood. Although they had composed the music playing along to a videotape of the movie , none of it was actually synched to the picture, interpreting it almost unusable. I repute[ Roeg] just got these disparate parts and likely said, What the hell is this? responds Buckmaster.

Finding himself without a soundtrack weeks from the movies projected premiere in March 1976, Roeg turned to the Mamas and Papas songwriter. Phillips third spouse, Genevieve Waite( a South African actor and simulate ), had introduced him to Roeg in 1970, when the director was in LA to work on Performance.

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Four years later, the director come here for Phillips and Waite performing a musical-comedy double act at Reno Sweeney cabaret club in Greenwich Village. Subsequentlies, he offered Waite the role of Mary Lou in The Man Who Fell to Earth opposite Bowie the capacity that eventually went to Candy Clark. He told John he wanted me to do it, she announces. But Phillips had other ideas. He had written his own sci-fi themed rock musical for his wife to star in, called Space, which was about to go into product. John spoke, Genevieves going to be working on the Broadway show. And he and Nic Roeg were so wino they had this terrible fight and knocked over tables and stuff.

The posting for the film Photograph: Everett/ REX/ Shutterstock

Those kind of episodes with Nic is somewhat I wouldnt announce frequent but “theyre not” sporadic, adds Graeme Clifford, who edited The Man Who Fell to Earth. Everybody who knows Nic, at one point or the other, has got into a wheeling around on the flooring fight with him. If John Phillips had not had a fight with him, Id enunciate, Oh really?

The next time the pair converged, Phillips was living in Malibu. We went to Candy Clarks mansion, he said in an interview before his death in 2001. Nic was going with her at the time. Roeg depicted him a cut of the cinema on a small portable TV. I merely adored the movie the moment I find it. He was unsure why Roeg was asking him to work on the soundtrack when Bowie was the obvious option, but took the number of jobs regardless, aiming to create a real American rating with banjos and folk and stone.

Phillips whose busines started in the late 1950 s in a doo-wop/ jazz vocal radical “ve called the” Smoothies, before he founded, first, tribe trio the Journeymen, then the Mamas and the Papas was steeped in American beginnings music. A musical chameleon like Bowie, he had moved effortlessly through a succession of styles, with a marked virtuosity, and has hitherto worked on soundtracks for Myra Breckinridge and Robert Altmans Brewster McCloud.

A musical chameleon John Phillips with his wife Genevieve Waite. Photograph: Allan Tannenbaum/ Getty Images

On arriving in London in 1976, faced with putting together a tally from scratch in an enormously short time, Phillips knew he necessity someone who could really play. That party was Mick Taylor, erstwhile guitarist for the Rolling Stones, who he considered the best guitar actor in the world.

They started work at Glebe Place, Phillips rented house in Chelsea. One daylight, Phillips recollected, Keith Richards stepped in and theres Mick Taylor standing here. Were playing guitar together. On looking Taylor, Richards give away a shriek. They both ice. They hadnt watched one another since Taylor had sauntered out on the Stones only over a year earlier. It was a little crabby, Phillips suggested.

Richards and Taylor reacted like pups circling. Keith broke the ice the only way he knew how: he grabbed a guitar and is participating in. We simply played old country chants, Phillips enunciated. Those is increasingly becoming the basis for the music Phillips recorded for the film, which included originals like Boys from the South, as well as energetic handles of Hank Snows Rhumba Boogie and Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys Bluegrass Breakdown.

Rude awakening Bianca Jagger. Picture: ANL/ REX/ Shutterstock

Some of the music was very improvised, suggests Richard Goldblatt, one of the engineers who worked with Phillips. The transcriptions were quite innovative. Despite being under gigantic pressure to develops the music in a matter of weeks, Phillips continued to lead a busy and complicated life of narcotic and sexual excess. After one hearing, he arrived back home around two in the morning. Knowing nobody there, he trod round to his sidekick Mick Jaggers house on Cheyne Walk, looking for his wife. Instead, he found Bianca Jagger and Liza Minnellis younger sister, Lorna Luft. Genevieve wasnt there and nor was Mick. We all sat around, drank wine-coloured and went pissed, told Phillips. I was playing the guitar, singing some hymns and substance. Eventually, Luft left and John and Bianca who had enjoyed a brief affair in 1970, before she met and married Jagger ended up in bed.

At some extent close to dawning, they both fell asleep. At the session the following morning, Phillips was a no-show. The musicians and operators all sat waiting. Someone echo Glebe Place to find out where he was. Waite took the announce. She went round to Cheyne Walk, figuring he might be there, talked the help into letting her in and was told “hes in” the bedroom with Bianca.

So we were awakened around 10.30 am, Phillips supposed. There was Genevieve, I know youre in there, you two. Oh God, here I am in Micks bed with Micks old lady. My old ladys outside, slamming on the door. There were Nicaraguan maids run down, screaming in Nicaraguan. Genevieve storms in the door and takes a move at Bianca. I sort of hold Genevieve back and take her out. She just passed down wall street. I had to go to work.

The final session for the score has just taken place in February, with the films world premiere at Leicester Square in London now only three weeks away. Phillips began to desegregate the racetracks so they could be laid into the revise. At that spot, answers Goldblatt, abruptly, he started to go a little singular. He could discover clicks and noises on the tape and, despite the engineers insistence that there was nothing there, insisted they do everything over. But their own problems persisted. By the fourth or fifth day, concepts were pretty tense between them. Then something snarled. He lost it for some reason, remarks Goldblatt, who trod out of its present session and rendered the next morning to learn hed been replaced by another engineer.

Goldblatt was later to indicate that the projectionist had gone into the toilets and all he could hear was mortal in the cubicle next to him smelling big smells. The shower break-dance Phillips had go take, almost at the end of every take, unexpectedly acquired appreciation. He was doing astounding amounts of coke. So much, Goldblatt speculates, that he was having auditory hallucinations. Rafe McKenna, deputy engineer, recollects Roeg coming to the studio to have a serious discussion with Phillips about his behaviour. Told him off, mostly, and articulated stop pissing off the engineers and get wise finished tonight.

The eleventh hour entreaty worked. The music just came piloting out of the studio and I remain it in, reads writer Graeme Clifford. Roeg testifies himself joyous with the music Phillips produced for the movie. It had a range of different calibers that I thought was rather interesting, he does. He truly was an individual composer.

The rebuilt The Man Who Fell to Earth is in UK cinemas on 9 September, when the soundtrack will also be available, and then on DVD and Blu-ray on 24 October.