Wednesday, 25 January 2017

The Sounds Of Star Wars: The Sonic All-Stars Conducted By Bruce Baxter - Pickwick 1977

I was the right age for the first Star Wars film (or 'part four for anyone under 30). I was nine years old when it came out with a hardcore love for all things horror and sci-fi that had been hardwired by late night weekend double bills of Universal horrors, 50's sci-fi movies midweek week, horror comics, fantasy magazines and Dennis Gifford books. All these and more flashed my hard drive from when I was old enough to read, and with the Star Wars hype machine grinding it's way through 1977 like the Iron Mole that took Peter Cushing and Doug McClure to the earth's core the year before (see? I loved my sci-fi), it was kind of inevitable I'd be caught up in its wake.  

Posters, models, figurines, plastic lightsabres, comics, games, bubblegum cards, stickers and any number of other tie-in products with a 'Star Wars' logo slapped on it - I think I had the lot. Everything but the film itself in fact; what's generally forgotten is that even though it came out in America over the summer of 1977, UK fans had to wait until after Christmas to see it, and then it was a London only release. The rest of us hicks in the sticks had to wait until the following year for our provincial cinemas to screen it, and six months is a very long time when you're nine years old. But wait we had to - in 1977 there was no internet, no illegal downloads, no blu ray, no DVD and no videos; it was the cinema or nothing, and if you missed it there for whatever reason, well that was just tough. A long time ago in a world far, far away indeed.

So until then us fans had to just make do in the meantime with all that merchandise and our imaginations. And what better way to fire those imaginations while playing with all that stuff than by humming John Williams' now iconic main theme over the top of our games? This was available too on the official soundtrack which came as a double album and was not cheap. And so no doubt buoyed by those ubiquitous seventies compilations that promised any number of popular chart hits (as performed by faceless session players) for half the price of a normal album, certain clued up individuals with an eye for a quick buck cashed in on the craze with releases of their own for fans on a budget Like this one, hotter out of the traps in 1977 than the film (or even that official soundtrack) itself.

With 'Rogue One' still doing good business as I type, what immediately springs to mind when holding this is the question 'how the hell did they get away with it'? If an entrepreneur tried to put out something similar as a cash in on 'Rogue One' now then Lucasfilm and/or Disney would shut that shit down faster than you could say 'copyright infringement'. I don't know if squaring off the Star Wars logo on the cover was enough to put the lawyers off the scent in 1977 (though I doubt it was), but I'm guessing the team behind this probably felt that small concession to intellectual property pushed their luck as far as they dared, and from the garish pizza planet cover in to the non-specific close up of an eye and some bared teeth on the back cover, there's no other reference to the source material it plagiarises at all apart from the track titles.

"This lethal weapon is said to affect the cerebral system, or to put it in earthly jargon, to blow your mind. You will embark on a spectacular, music filled journey into space, to a galaxy millions of light years from your own planet, Earth. Your senses will be stretched to the outermost realms of the imagination as the music pounds through your brains. You will become totally involved in the Star Wars and you will be powerless to stop it" - so runs the carefully non George Lucas world referencing back cover blurb and  for sheer bloody cheek this deserves full marks. 'Star Wars Main Theme', 'Ben's Death', 'Princess Leia's Theme', 'Cantina Band', 'Tie Fighter Attack' - all titles are exactly replicated from the official release and cherry picked to boil them down to a single disc, though in place of John Williams and the London Symphony Orchestra we have Bruce Baxter conducting The Sonic All Stars.

That sounds futuristic enough on paper, but in actuality the 'All Stars' sound remarkably like one man in a garden shed trying to make the present sound like the future by squeezing every last drop out of technology out of a Botempi home organ. As a case in point, where the main theme should be heroic and sweeping, an empire defeating blast of pomp and grandeur, Bruce's take is as thin and tinny as C3PO's leg. Whining and droning in equal measure like an angry wasp, this version could have been lifted straight off the soundtrack of an 8 bit Nintendo Entertainment System game, or else a universe where the Millennium Falcon has all the power of a Hillman Imp. There's nothing heroic sounding about any of it really and it sets the tone of the whole album to come.

Throughout, the main motifs and riffs of William's original score are recognisable, but they're prone to breaking down without warning into an empty whoosh of galactic winds and squawky 'laser gun' effects whilst Baxter takes time out to input a new 'Disco Beat #3' setting as a click track to play the next section over. The end product has the feel of a one man band, one take live recording with very little overdubs or post production work. Cheap and cheerful, if you will, with its only aim being to get something 'Star Wars' onto the market pronto to hoover up some of that cash that was going begging.  There's no doubt there's something quite charming about the whole ramshackle affair, and there's a certain novelty value in harking back to a time when you could get away with something like this. But like most novelties, it wears thin fairly quickly and this isn't something that's going to bear too many repeated listens. Not by me anyway.

No comments:

Post a Comment