Music
Great action movie soundtracks from the '80s
For John Carpenter's atmospheric synths to Prince's preening Partyman, the '80s were a great time for action movie soundtracks.
Turbocharged by slick pop, new-wave edginess and emerging electronic sounds, the 1980s were, without doubt, the decade that defined soundtracks. Here are eight that you have to hear (movie screening optional).
1. Highlander
The runaway success of this sword-slinging neo-epic marks the exact moment the katana (and knowing the word katana) became cool. And the studio obviously knew they had a hit on their hands, hiring Queen – arguably the biggest rock band of the era – to create an entire album of new material to accompany it.
With Flash Gordon's baroque rock opera pomp under their studded leather belts, the Mercury mob were already seasoned soundtrack vets by this point. But this was Queen at their commercial peak, effortlessly mixing stadium rock and pop hooks with Highlander canon exposition. The band's prog genesis and Mercury's straight-faced delivery enabled them to imbue songs about the existential struggles of mystic immortals with genuine emotion, and obviously It's A Kind Of Magic shreds like the Kurgen's cheesegrater.
The next year, One Vision also had an instrumental role in Top Gun knock-off Iron Eagle, which surely beats Live Aid as the pinnacle of the band's career.
2. Beverly Hills Cop
Eddie Murphy's breakout lead role also introduced a new concept in soundtracks. The idea was seemingly to conceptualise an imaginary '80s greatest hits album, then commission, write and record the songs to fill it. The OST tracklist is overstuffed with pop anthems, from Kenny Loggins' main theme The Heat Is On to Patti LaBelle's Stir It Up.
The most enduring is undoubtedly Harold Faltermeyer's one-handed keytar-riff masterpiece Axel F, which took the tautly funky new wave sound from the kind of clubs Axel Foley would shake down punks in to the shopping malls of Anytown USA.
Together with kindred spirit Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop helped transform the pop landscape. Movie tie-in singles were the reality show hits of the era, with practically every second single in the charts being the result of focus group testing and 360º marketing. Although obviously Simon Cowell never produced anything near as awesome as the Ghostbusters' Theme (and especially not the Run DMC remix from Ghostbusters 2, which is a stone-cold jam).
3. They Live
Director John Carpenter spent as much time pushing the boundaries of electronic composition as he did banging out quotable blockbusters. An early visionary of the atmospheric potential of synthesizers, Carpenter's boundary-pushing minimal electronica make him without doubt the most influential soundtrack composer of the decade, and beyond. Artists such as LCD Soundsystem cite him as an inspiration, and the Stranger Things soundtrack is an explicit homage to his work.
Like the movie itself, the music for They Live – an everyday tale of hypercapitalist Illuminati aliens enslaving mankind through hypnotic mass media– blends spookiness, paranoia, and machismo in equal measure. The end result sounds like a Morricone spaghetti western score passed through a 16-bit filter. But it's hard to choose a single best work from a man whose work includes the minimal electro of Assault On Precinct 13, the spectral funk of Escape From New York, or the etheral B-movie fusion of Big Trouble In Little China.
4. Batman
For most of the '80s, Batman wasn't cool. Although his comic incarnation was going through his darkest period (from Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore's The Killing Joke, to the Robin-slaughtering A Death In The Family), most people still associated Bats with the camp '60s TV show starring walking self-parody Adam West. It took the combined efforts of Tim Burton, a freshly post-Beetlejuice Michael Keaton, and sexy MFing Prince to dehabiliate the Dark Knight to brooding antihero icon.
Prince's original plan was to record vocals as a duo with Michael Jackson (playing Joker to Prince's Batman), until the success of Jackson's Bad tour made that unviable. Freed from the pressure to write radio-friendly hits with recognisable choruses (and knowing he was getting paid regardless), Prince turned in a weirdly jazzy take on funk, loaded with dialogue samples in lieu of lyrics. The result was alternately as suave as a Wayne Industries fundraiser, and as disorientating as a batarang to the jaw.
Despite its decidedly uncommercial origins, the album was a massive hit, addIng another seven Platinum records to Prince's groaning studio drywall.
5. Tron
Perhaps the most visionary aspect of Tron's aesthetic was hiring electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos to compose its eerily glacial soundtrack. Already famous for her A Clockwork Orange score, Carlos mixed sweeping strings, gated drums and nagging guitar stabs. Tron's music was an inspiration to Daft Punk right from their early days, making them a natural fit to score the belated sequel Tron: Legacy.
It's hard to believe Carlos's concept was initially viewed as controversial weirdness by nervous Disney execs, who commissioned a traditional orchestral standby score in case Carlos's avant garde genius proved too much for the ears of simple '80s folk.
6. Lethal Weapon
Built around barely likeable, borderline psychotic anti-hero Mel Gibson, Lethal Weapon aggressively redefined the buddy cop paradigm and the soundtrack was no exception. Out were chicken-scratch funk instrumentals. In were dramatic strings, pulsing electronic bass, and glossily-produced stadium-ready riffs that suited the chrome-tinged gloss of the era that brought us the compact disc. Smartly, the producers brought in corporate blues god Eric Clapton to provide the slick fretwork, with soundtrack legends Michael Kamen and Craig Sanborn handling everything else.
Clapton enjoyed the process so much he stuck around for Weapons Two and Three, after which he probably got fed up of Joe Pesci's comic-relief schtick and quit the franchise, just like the rest of us.
7. Blade Runner
Vangelis's masterpiece blends classicism and futurism so beautifully, it's as if Johann Strauss had composed The Blue Danube Waltz specifically for 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Greek composer's electro-orchestral suite perfectly captured not just the film's dysfunctionally futuristic worldbuild, but the alienation and dissonance of its characters. It's a defining influence on ambient and electro-pop music, and is pretty much the sole reason for the existence of chillwave.
The London recording sessions were such a fertile period for Vangelis that he finished up an additional two albums' worth of material that didn't make it into the film. So, nearly enough to soundtrack the various re-edits of the movie with all-new tunes.
8. Legend
While audience-testing Ridley Scott's dark fantasy, the studio hit a major problem. They found the orchestral themes for the proto-blockbuster tested poorly with the pop-hungry youngsters it was aimed at. The solution was simple – hire ageing German psychdedelic prog outfit Tangerine Dream to record their 28th album win the kids over. Yeah, the '80s got their reputation for excess for a reason.
Amazingly, this deranged gamble worked perfectly. The end result is a skyscraping combo of ethereal synth symphony and prog rock love-in, with guest appearances from Roxy Music's Bryan Ferry, David Gilmour of Pink Floyd and Jon Anderson of Yes. Although the movie itself bombed at the box office, the soundtrack is an enduring synth classic, with expanded bootlegs – featuring an additional hour of unreleased material – a prized collectors' item.
