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THEME SONGS
"Pardon me while I polish up the proooo-logue..."

As the stereotypical cigar-chomping studio moguls of old Hollywood had it, the ultimate test of any film is its opening. You have to set the scene, introduce the characters, and establish the mood all at once, from scratch. Oh, and be entertaining along the way. Hard enough to accomplish in a ten or fifteen minute scene, but surely even more difficult within a three minute song. Let's take a dip into the undervalued (and nowadays largely abandoned) craft of the film theme songwriter. Our requirements for a genuine theme song - we're going to ignore themes from proper musicals, for obvious reasons of space, the songs must be specially written for the film, and contain lyrics in some way germane to the film's plot or subject matter, which preferably mention the title of the film at least once.

Rule one for getting in our thematic good books - have a theme song that introduces the plot and characters, preferably sung by the lead actors in character. This is most often to be found in comedies of a certain vintage, and a grand example is the rousing title song Frankie Howerd mugs his way through in UP POMPEII! as he wends his way through a Roman marketplace ("There's no decor-um in the for- um...") and the song builds to a genuinely great booming chorus. At the other end of the scale, forgotten sixties fluff DOUBLE BUNK, in which Sid James and Liz Fraser buy a narrow boat with deleterious results, is introduced by a jaunty little cha-cha-cha number sung by Liz and, trying his damndest to sound halfway melodic, The James himself. The result ("They had a double bunk/A double trouble bunk/They really had a hunk/Of trouble with that bunk") is just as charming when it doesn't come together as when it does. Not all stars are so keen to sing the sig, however. Peter Sellers, at the height of his Britt-bashing sixties delerium, contributed just a few in-character lines for Italian crime comedy AFTER THE FOX ("Me is a thief!") leaving The Hollies to fill in with a spooky, jangly ditty laying down the situation. In a prime example of the profligacy Sellers was starting to generate around him, he even had a separate producer - George Martin, no less - to record his little bit of dialogue situation.

After the Fox was written by that doyen of film theme songs, the sainted Burt Bacharach, who, with lyrical help from Hal David more often than not of course, also penned the raucous themes to Sellers comedy WHAT'S NEW, PUSSYCAT? and, better yet, the Sellers-disrupted campathon that was CASINO ROYALE, which, as well as featuring lashings of Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass, must be one of the earliest examples of a film theme that takes the piss out of the plot as it lays it down ("They've got us on the run! With guns! And knives! We're fighting for our lives!") Less baroque, but more iconic perhaps, was Burt's wistful theme to ALFIE, as sung by Cher in the film, improved upon by Dionne Warwick on record, and then, er, appropriated by Our Cilla later still. There were no takers, however, for covering our fave Bacharach theme - this time with words from Hal's brother, Mack - namely Steve McQueen schlock legend THE BLOB, which Burt, ever the joker, decided to introduce with - yep - a jaunty little cha-cha-cha number warning of the dangers of the eponymous creeping ooze ("Be careful of The Blob!") Sadly, Sid James wasn't on hand for vocal duties. Getting down to the more overtly parodic end of the market, Mel Brooks was always good value for a convincing pastiche or two - BLAZING SADDLES and HIGH ANXIETY, the latter sung histrionically by Brooks himself halfway through the film, being our particular favourites.

If Bacharach got Hollywood swinging, he stopped short of full-blown psychedelia, which was a good thing really, as it's one genre Hollywood's composers never really managed to get quite right, although it wasn't for want of trying. Reasonably successful examples were the raucous fuzzboxery at the start of Walter Matthau affaircom GUIDE FOR THE MARRIED MAN, and the Joe 90-esque reverbathon which bookended David Niven's Eurocomedy THE BRAIN, which is also a great example of the theme song trick of mounting a question and answer session in which to describe the central character ("Who's got a computer for a mind?/Who's got an IQ like an Einstein?") Both these were performed by rather obscure "beat combos", to say the least, the big players of pop becoming increasingly less content to hire out their services for a film (unless of course they were in it) although George Harrison wasn't above mucking in for a pleasing piece of cod-Celtic folkish whimsy over the closing credits of Handmade production TIME BANDITS.

Film composers are generally more at home at the supper club than the be-in, and one of the sixties' finest themes is Noel Harrison's Windmills of Your Mind, which heralded the split screen style supplement glossiness of THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR with entirely apt cabaret aplomb. Also undeniably classy was the ersatz left bank ballad which began second proper Pink Panther entry A SHOT IN THE DARK, starring That Man Again, though not featuring him on it (how come Sellers never got behind the drums for a theme tune, then?) Now we're clearly moving towards the inescapable series of film themes, the Bonds, so we'll skip all the annoying ones (anything with Shirley Bassey in it is out the window, for a start) and pick out a couple of real gems. Louis Armstrong's end-of-career high propelled ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE to the top of most people's Bond theme league (even when the film itself unfairly languished at the bottom of the Conference), but good as it is, it makes the cardinal error of not featuring the title in the lyrics (though to be fair that would sound a tad odd), so we'd take Nancy Sinatra's theme to YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE over that, and Carly Simon's sublime Nobody Does it Better from THE SPY WHO LOVED ME over both. We just love the way it sneaks the film's title in as a cheeky aside.

For the richest seam of theme songs, however, we must head back to comedy. Specifically British comedy, as US comedy films of the Cream era tended to either plump for wimpish Love Themes, which are always rotten (although Christopher Cross' theme from ARTHUR is a notable exception), or, if the comedy was of a broader, vehicular-oriented stamp, whack on a country and western tune (see EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE, HOOPER, SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT III, HONKY TONK FREEWAY et al), for reasons we can't quite fathom (and while we're on a C&W tip, there was non-comedy CONVOY, which is possibly the only film - we can only think of the boring Frankie and Johnny in addition - to be built around what would become its theme song).

Britcoms, though, run the whole gamut of genres. Most prevalent is the laddish singalong, as exemplified by ON THE BUSES, which took the telly series' oompah theme and added the obligatory bawdy lyrics ("You can get it on the buses/Upstairs or down inside!") Comedies with a bit more depth avoided this route, on the whole, as fans of Joe Brown's lovely cockney protest song which drew the film of PORRIDGE to a close ("It's locked up in my 'ead!") can testify. Sometimes the choices were downright odd, as when the producers of useless Richard Beckinsale comedy RENTADICK hit upon the idea of teaming Dave Dee up with the King's Singers for a bawdied-up version of A Policeman's Lot, which, against all odds, works really well, especially as it builds, Up Pompeii! style, into a triumphant final chorus that no film, especially not the tenth-rate mish-mash that follows, could ever live up to. Our pick of the Britcompop pile is, inevitably, the charming, flute-led ballad written and sung by Annie Farrow (and arranged by soundtrack legend Chris Gunning) that graces the MAN ABOUT THE HOUSE film. As opposed to the raucous comedy instrumental of the TV version, the sedate film theme waxes light and pleasant, with lyrics that are cute ("I never have it easy with a man about the place/Steaming up the mirror while I'm making up my face") if often endearingly clumsy ("Must rearrange things/Not to estrange him"). A bit like the film itself, then.

As we burrow down to the bottom, in all senses, of the Britcom barrel, we happen upon a surprising tranche of cheapskate resourcefulness vs-a-vis the theme song, a level of innovation wholly absent from the films themselves. With pennies to spare, the Confessions films actually got in a nice enough poppy theme for most of the run - This Is Your Life, Timmy Lea, composed by Roger Cook, of Blue Mink and I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing fame. For CONFESSIONS FROM A HOLIDAY CAMP, though, they drafted in The Wurzels for a typically ruddy-cheeked celebration of British holidaymaking, Give Me England Every Time My Dear, in which the cheery trio unfavourably compare the nookie content of foreign holidays past ("In nineteen seven-ty, we went to Ita-lee/To sample all the delights down in Napoli"/"Haaar haaar haaaar!") with the good honest "birds and the booze" of an English summer. It's every bit as good as you'd expect. Even cheaper sexcoms roped the stars in to sing the theme - Adrienne Posta warbled the sugary opening to ADVENTURES OF A TAXI DRIVER, and Barry Stokes gamely lent his seesawing tonsils to the tuneless number that bookended UPS AND DOWNS OF A HANDYMAN ("Up and down all over town/I can make you smile, I can make you frown...") CAN YOU KEEP IT UP FOR A WEEK?, however, managed to get hold of classy jazz-funk act Zzebra to add some lounge suited sophistication to their theme song, written by the film's producer, polymath Hazel 'Crossroads' Adair (what a shame there was no lyrical input from the other driving force behind that production, Kent "greetings, grapple fans!" Walton).

The onset of the eighties, as ever, wound the fun up to a rather ignominious close. Bond themes became endearingly silly for a while, with A-ha and Duran Duran epitomising the instantly recognisable '80s vocal style known as "tuneless beseeching", but over the Atlantic was where the last great genre of film themedom took root - the power ballad. From brat pack teen flicks (prime example - John Parr's sleeve-rolling Man In Motion ("I will be your man in motion/All I need's a pair of wheels!") from the epoch- defining ST ELMO'S FIRE), ditzy romcom (Starship letting 'em see they're cray-zeh over the end rollers of MANNEQUIN) or chilling visions of technology run amok in a, er, ditzy romcom (Oakey and Moroder's peerless ELECTRIC DREAMS). Even fantasy got that highly- polished wall of sound treatment, as Bowie got his hands dirty for the LABYRINTH theme. But then it all went quiet, for which we blame Martin Scorsese and his love of already-extant 'found' songs. Soon practically every film was digging in the crates for their soundtracks, even if they weren't set in the relevant period. To put the old tin lid on it, original theme songs were now marketed as stand-alone hits in their own right, so the simple joy of the plot- explaining title song was lost under a tidal wave of irrelevant big name tie-ins, and the noble craft of encapsulating 90 minutes of action in a jaunty 200-odd seconds of music pretty much died out forever. A great, great shame.

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