Ten Songs Inspired by Movies and Books
5 by Gideon, 5 by Pete (that's right, they're back)
Gideon Haigh and Pete Lalor
GH: Like I said, I'm a decimal thinker, never see eight crows on a wire without wishing for two more to join them. And one of the most popular features of Cricket Et Cetera - well, it was popular with us, anyway - was our top ten song lists. As Pete has been convalescing by reading Bernie Taupin's autobiography, he and I were having a chat at the weekend about our favourite songs with literary or cinematic inspirations, and convinced ourselves that what the world needed was five examples from each of us. So, Pete, welcome to Cricket et al, with a collaborative contribution to this substack's adventure in miscellanea. Remarkably, neither of us have chosen 'Space Oddity', which could claim inspiration from both 2001: A Space Odyssey and thus Arthur C. Clarke 'Childhood's End.' But it's great to have Pete join this substacking supergroup.
Gideon
THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT
Paul Weller’s bittersweet surveillance of suburbia wrings every atom of irony from its invocation of Jack Haley Jnr’s 1974 MGM extravaganza - the only ‘entertainment’ on show here is the ‘amateur band rehearsing in a nearby yard’ while you’re ‘watching the tele and thinking about your holidays.’ Excellently used in the underrated Australian indie movie Garage Days (2002).
Listen: The Jam - That’s Entertainment
BAD MOON RISING
A triple banger: Stephen Vincent Benet’s darkly gothic retelling of the Faust legend ‘The Devil and Daniel Webster’ (1936) inspired William Dieterle’s movie of the same name (1941), and thereby Creedence’s jauntily apocalyptic classic (1969): ’Don’t go around tonight/Well it's bound to take your life/There’s a bad moon on the rise.’
Listen: Creedence Clearwater Revival - Bad Moon Rising
FINAL SOLUTION
Pere Ubu’s mighty anthem from Datapanik in Year Zero (1976) was inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story ‘The Final Problem’, the one in which Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty grapple in a fatal embrace over Reichenbach Falls (spoiler alert, Holmes survives and emerges from exile in ‘The Empty House’). Unfortunately for Dave Thomas and co, ‘The Final Solution’ had different connotations to Cleveland’s neo-Nazis, so for a time the band dropped the song from their set. But it’s hard to resist the lines: ‘Mom threw me out til I git some pants that fit/She just don’t approve of my strange kinda wit’? And much of the late Peter Laughner’s legacy is in that ecstatic, towering guitar solo. And how about this awesome, note-perfect homage by Sweden’s Bob Lund?
Listen: Pere Ubu: Final Solution
Listen: Bob Lund
DEER PARK
The Fall’s oeuvre is strewn with literary intertexts and allusions, including, of course, the band’s name. Who else but Mark E Smith could extract a song from Luke Rineheart’s Dice Man, or namecheck MR James and HP Lovecraft in ‘Spector Versus Rector’? But this is a fave, reconceiving the ‘large type minstrel ranch’ of new wave London in the light of Norman Mailer’s LA roman a clef. The louche decadence of the novel is updated with lines such as: ‘Say have you ever have a chance to meet/Fat Captain Beefheart imitators with zits?’ (Which may well be the aforementioned Dave Thomas, Pere Ubu, being with The Fall on Rough Trade). For a classic angels-on-a-pinhead discussion of the identity of ‘the King Shag Corpse’, see Paul Hanley’s Have a Bleedin Guess. No ambiguity about the line: ‘It’s where C. Wilson wrote A Ritual in the Dark’ - a reference to the serial killer novel allegedly written on Hampstead Heath by the protean Colin Wilson, author of that go-text text of angst-ridden bookish male teens (like me) The Outsider. Oh, and the Hex Enduction Hour preamble, ‘Fortress’, apparently inspired by ‘two hours with four left-wing kids’ on a visit to Broadcasting House, is hysterical.
Listen: The Fall - Deer Park
COLONY
Speaking of the King Shag Corpse (allegedly), this combines one of my favourite short stories with one of my favourite songs. We like Kafka so much in this household, of course, that our cat is named Samsa, but nothing outdoes ‘In the Penal Colony’ for macabre scenario and allegorical power, with its lapidary descriptions of a torture machine that carves prisoner’s sentences into their flesh - allegedly inspired by the industrial equipment that insurance company lawyer Kafka was describing and classifying (see Kafka: The Office Writings, edited by Stanley Corngold, Jack Greenberg, and Benno Wagner). ‘Colony’, from Closer (1980), with that jagged percussion and murky guitar, is a transitional song in the Joy Division catalogue, casting off from the band’s punk mooring point in search of denser, darker seas. Makes a great opening pairing with ‘Atrocity Exhibition’, with its invocation of JG Ballard.
Listen: Joy Division - Colony
Pete
CANDLE IN THE WIND
Bernie Taupin’s autobiography, Scattershot: Life, Music, Elton and Me, might not be everybody’s cup of tea, but I was always intrigued by the fact that he wrote the lyrics first and old mate banged the music over the top later. And, as a boy I loved the lyrics (the bits I could understand) to the Jerry Lee Lewis stomp of Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting.
Unfortunately the topic wasn’t explored in depth and Taupin says he has little memory of writing any of his lyrics. He did, however, reveal the story behind the writing of Candle in the Wind and it is a bloody ripper.
Bernie says the title of Candle in the Wind comes from the Solzhenitsyn play of the same name but the lyric was a meditation on the end era and was inspired by watching Montgomery Clift’s cowboy in The Misfits. “Goodbye Montgomery Clift” didn’t quite ring, so he changed it to a reflection on Clift’s co-star Marilyn Monroe.
Something for nothing: When Willie Nelson wrote Crazy it was originally titled Stupid, but as Willie says on his duet album with Johnny Cash, it was not quite euphonious enough, so he changed it.
Listen: Candle in the Wind - Elton John/Bernie Taupin
ODE TO BILLIE JOE
Bobbie Gentry’s classic not only inspired the movie of the same name, but it also inspired a book. I know that’s an inversion of the task at hand, but bad luck. PS, if you have never heard her song Mississippi Delta, do yourself a favour. One of the great spelling songs.
Listen: Ode to Billy Joe - Bobbie Gentry
THE SHOWER SCENE FROM PSYCHO
Yeah, yeah, the task was songs/books inspired by movies, but what better than a band whose name is inspired by a movie. Shower scene were a psych-synth Melbourne trio who did some great covers, including George Girl and One.
Listen: The Shower Scene From Psycho
FROM HER TO ETERNITY
Nick’s first album with the Bad Seeds, his post Birthday Party outfit began life on New Year’s Eve 1983 at St Kilda’s Crystal Ballroom where he played a show with Barry Adamson, Blixa Bargeld, Mick Harvey and Hugo Race. Anita Lane may have been involved, I’m not sure. I was there and I remember it was a great night that ended up with us all spilling out the back to the first floor of an abandoned car park to see Sacred Cowboys. The event was lit by fires in 44 gallon containers and as seedy as you can imagine. Exact details are a little sketchy. It was one of those nights you wake up after wondering if it was real.
Anyway, the song the album took its name from is clearly a play on From Here to Eternity and features some of the more psychotically picaresque piano you’ll hear.
Ya hear her walking barefoot across the floors? In this lonesome night?
Listen: From Her to Eternity - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
ROCKET MAN
Forgive me for coming back to this well, but Bernie stole the title from Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi collection The Illustrated Man. Tony Cohen used it for his famous Sydney tattoo parlour which dates back to the day when inking up really was an act of rebellion.
Listen: Rocket Man: Elton John and Bernie Taupin
KILLING AN ARAB
Early Cure was wonderful stuff and old mate Bob Smith was, in this case, inspired by Albert Camus’ The Stranger (L’Etranger). Given I was about 17 at the time and indulging in a bit of adolescent existential despair and literary pretension, it was great to have a good tune (their first single) to accompany me in my misery.
The lyric was controversial because idiots took it as an invitation to kill an Arab.
Listen: Killing an Arab - The Cure
Paul Kelly - So Much Water So Close to Home . Inspired by Raymond Carver's short story of the same name
A very late suggestion, but what the hell. It's a pair of pairs with a twist. The books are Nelson Algren, A Walk on the Wild Side (1956) and Hubert Selby Jr, Last Exit to Brooklyn (1963). The Gene Pitney song that everyone knows as 'Last Exit to Brooklyn' is 'Last Chance to Turn Around' on the label, but everyone knows it from the wailing first line of the chorus. It has nothing to do with the book: it celebrates getting away from an unfaithful lover, where the book is all about entrapment within relationships (and work). Algren's 'Walk on the Wild Side' concerns low-rent criminality in 1930s New Orleans, nothing like the Lou Reed song. However, Selby's 'Last Exit to Brooklyn' is set among the drugs and drag queens of 1960s New York, as of course is Lou Reed's 1972 classic. Sort of cris-cross pollination.