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The Scala by Blood and Roses

by Blood and Roses

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Suspiria 04:53
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The Fog 04:40
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Rumble 02:43

about

Blood and Roses often threw mad ideas around the room as we huddled around an ancient box TV rigged to that most wonderful apparatus, the VHS video machine. In a blue haze of cigarette smoke, we fantasised about a near endless run of future releases. An album of movie theme songs? Shit. Yeah, we should do that. That would be cool.
Of course, it was one of those two days before dole cheque Tuesday afternoon ideas that get quickly filed in the forgotten basket.
We often played movie songs just because we couldn't get records of the stuff we were watching. There's something a little dangerously prog rock about that but I'm not that keen on Prog Rock. Often, prog comes off as pretention for pretentiousness' sake. When rock stars tilt at the genius of classical music, they generally fall somewhat short.
But when you tie prog rock to a horror movie, it has a peculiar effect. Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells" gains enormously from its attachment to "The Exorcist". The recent Believer movie stunk up the scree until the sudden tinkling announcement of the old theme song.
"Tubular Bells" picks up a sinister vibe not apparent in the original recording. Meanwhile, “The Exorcist” gained a quiet tension from the tight repetitious riff.
A normal Hollywood carpeting of heavy strings would have turned it into a TV movie.
Few modern listeners could approach the second side of the Tubular Bells LP, lacking (as it does) any Exorcist references, without rolling an embarrassed eye. For fuck’s sake, after a section that features someone pretending to be a cave man, it ends with a knees up sea shanty.
Oddly though, this invasion of prog into film soundtrack introduced a kind of punk minimalism to film soundtracks. Instead of the preferred orchestration of Hollywood, a simpler synthersiser riff conquered an established cliche.
John Carpenter masterfully took the aesthetic of Kraftwerk and took it into film soundtrack essentially following a blueprint laid down by Goblin in their score of “Profundo Rosso”. Suspense was built off repetition and the slow addition of additional parts.
Assault on Precinct 13 was basically a nightly part of Blood and Roses' set. We learnt it because it was unavailable on record. It didn't matter that Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys described it as a toneless racket in his day job with Flexipop magazine. At least we didn't rip off the riff in an act of "you've got the brains, we got the looks..."
The Pet Shop Boys made lots of money. Low life like Blood and Roses never made any money... or at not least for us.
Come Halloween some thirty years later, for fun I stated to record some songs from movies to play in the background whilst trick or treaters pounded upon the door. And then, I realised that this was the realisation of an idea we shot the shit about doing all those years ago. It was time to pull the idea out of the drawer in which it had been buried for nigh on forty years.
As the last man standing from the original line-up, I declare this a Blood and Roses album.
So, here we are...
The Scala.
We often kind of lived in the Scala. Saturday night, it was safer to go to the all night cinema than stay in the squats. Skinheads didn't do art house cinema.
So down to this new album...

credits

released February 14, 2024

arranged and produced by Bob Short

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Full On Noise Sydney, Australia

Dedicated to making your neighbour's life a misery since 1977, Full on Noise brings you the music you've never heard of!

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