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Blue
Velvet: Original Soundtrack Recording (T.E.R/ 1987)'It's clearly a metaphor for the artificiality of the idealised vision of small town life depicted in the film,' I blurted out to a stunned friend, whose only crime had been to guffaw at the 'really crap robin' at the end of Blue Velvet. At the time, I knew someone who worked at Manchester's Cornerhouse Cinema, and he — a former film student — had told me with undisguised contempt about how people would come out of screenings of Blue Velvet, saying things like,
'wow, great film but crap special effects. I mean, that bird at the end was so obviously fake.'
So, when I was invited to contribute to a film night my friend was having round at hers, I took Blue Velvet. And all the way through its screening, I sat like a coiled spring, primed and waiting for someone to make my day by daring to criticise the robin at the end. I'm sure her and her friends must have though me a real prick but what the hell, there are some things in life you just can't take lying down.
Actually, it was at the very same Cornerhouse, that I saw Blue Velvet for the first time. And it's impact upon me was profound. Even now, I regard that scene where Dean Stockwell mimes along to 'In Dreams' at the behest of the psychotic Frank, as one of the most powerful and unsettling set-piece scenes in cinematic history. In fact, such was the potency of the visual imagery that it wasn't until subsequent viewings of the film that I began to become increasingly aware of the oddness of the dialogue and to pick up on some of Frank's exclamations, such as, 'Heineken! Heineken! Fuck that shit... Pabst Blue Ribbon!' and 'The yellow man walked into that room and it was fuckin' beautiful!' Both of which, became favourite quotes of my then girlfriend TJR and I, when we indulged in our private entertainment of mimicking the Dennis Hopper’s sociopathic Frank Booth character.
As TJR was American, I asked her about Pabst Blue Ribbon, to which her answer was something like,
'Urgh God, you don't want to drink that stuff. That’s for rednecks. I had an uncle who used to drink that stuff and he was crazy.'
As it happened, though, I did get to sample Pabst, as I discovered a stash amongst the idiosyncratic selection of beers always on offer at Jack's off license in Stroud Green, London. And she was right, having sampled Pabst, I certainly wasn't beating a path down to Jack's to drink any more.
It now strikes me as incredible that I didn't realise that the song Frank requests as 'Candy Coloured Clown', was actually 'In Dreams' sung by Roy Orbison. Especially given that I grew up with Roy Orbison songs on the radio practically every day, courtesy of Liverpool's two 1960's fixated radio stations, City and Merseyside. But the truth was, that I just didn't know what the fuck it was, only that it sounded truly incredible and that I had to own it. I'd also come away from that first viewing of the film, intoxicated by Isabella Rossellini's sensual rendition of Bobby Vinton's 'Blue Velvet': a performance as smooth and decadently seductive as a mouthful of vintage Pinot Noir (maybe it was the nightmarish associations of violence lent it by the film, but I once used this track as the intro to a compilation tape where it segued seamlessly and very effectively into the menacing and bruising 'A Screw' by Swans). So it was chiefly for these two songs that I purchased my first ever film soundtrack album (this being a category of recordings I'd previously regarded as being solely the preserve of the dedicated film buff). And happily, having taken the plunge into uncharted waters I discovered that there were more dark delights to be found on this record than I could possibly have hoped for; with the two tracks I'd hankered after augmented on side one with composer Angelo Badalamenti's evocative incidental orchestration, and on side two with Kitty Lester's timeless, 'Love Letters (Straight to Your Heart)' and Julie Cruise's eerie and ethereal 'Mysteries of Love' amongst other choice cuts. In fact, it turned out that Blue Velvet wouldn't be the last soundtrack to a David Lynch film I rushed out and bought (See Wild at Heart).