‘If You Ride Like Lightning, You’re Gonna Crash Like Thunder’ (Soundtrack Sundays)

This week, a couple of tracks from The Place Beyond The Pines, the second of which is something really special, one of the most mesmerising pieces of music you could ever hope to hear.

Directed by Derek Cianfrance in 2012, The Place Beyond The Pines is a recommended watch, even though I never quite believed in some of the events that take place. On first seeing it, I stepped out of the cinema not even knowing if I was supposed to or not. It’s a film consisting of a triptych of stories and might have worked better with just two. There’s a massive coincidence and some far too obvious foreshadowing.

On the plus side, the direction was often striking and the acting was very strong across the board, with Ryan Gosling the standout in one of those man of few words roles that he specialises in. He plays Luke, a fairground motorcycle stunt performer who zigzags around a circular metal cage at great speed with two other daredevil riders. On discovering he has fathered a son while in Schenectady, he decides to quit his travelling job, win back Romina (Eva Mendes), the mother of his baby son, and become part of a family.

He also decides that, in order to make enough money to help achieve these goals, he should begin robbing banks. His actions will have wide ranging ramifications, even down through to the next generation.

Eva Mendes is superb too, and Ben Mendelsohn displays why when Gosling directed his own movie – Lost River in 2014 – he was so keen to get the Australian involved.

But the best thing about the film is its use of music.

Composed by Mike Patton, one time singer of Faith No More (a band that failed to ever remotely interest me), the score is surprisingly impressive with The Snow Angel and Schenectady particularly effective – the latter with its brooding, twanging guitar wouldn’t have felt out of place in something by David Lynch.

There’s also Fratres For Violin, String Orchestra And Percussion by Arvo Pärt, the Estonian minimalist adored by Hollywood, while Suicide’s Che injects an instant jittery intensity to a scene where Luke prepares to commit his first raid. Another highlight is Please Stay by The Cryin’ Shames, a ballad I’ve previously judged to be borderline saccharine, but which works beautifully in its context here.

A tail-end of Merseybeat combo, they hooked up with Joe Meek and scored a hit early in 1966 with this Burt Bacharach and Bob Hilliard song, which had originally been recorded by The Drifters – featuring backing vocals by Doris Troy and Dionne Warwick’s sister Dee Dee Warwick, no less.

Arranged by Ivor Raymonde, the father of Cocteau Twin Simon Raymonde, this would be the final chart hit produced by Meek before he shot and killed his landlady, before turning the gun on his own head and committing suicide.

It’s been claimed over the years that Meek also pointed a gun at the head of Cryin’ Shames’ singer Charlie Crane in order to achieve the vocal take that he craved but really, does this sound like a man singing while under extreme duress?

Time now for Ennio Morricone’s Ninna Nanna Per Adulteri – not to be confused with Ninna Nanna Per Adulti, which I previously featured here.

Originally written for Cuore di mamma, a 1969 Italian movie directed by Salvatore Samperi, A Mother’s Heart, to give it its English title, was very much of its time, inspired by Jean-Luc Godard and politically confusing. Or maybe I only found it confusing as I watched it on YouTube with auto generated English subtitles. These resembled reading a William Burroughs cut-up novel.

In The Place Beyond The Pines, its first appearance accompanies Luke spending an idyllic day with Romina and his son Jason, imagining all three living together happily ever after.

Morricone’s simple but sublime lullaby acts as a clear counterpoint, conveying an overwhelming sense that these good times are never going to last. It’s used again later with similar results, introducing the same almost unbearably poignant sense that as hope blossoms, bad things surely loom ahead.

This is Morricone at his brilliant best.

McCafferty, Your Tea’s Oot – Just A Boy’s Game

In the current climate of British television, it’s almost impossible to imagine something like Just a Boy’s Game being shown today.

Positive role models? Not remotely. There is no diversity to be seen, and there’s a massive gender imbalance. This is a man’s world and a working-class man’s world at that. Any female characters who appear are far from strong women: one has been spent decades in a loveless marriage with a bitter man; another puts up with a reckless and feckless chancer. Then there’s a hopeless alcoholic nicknamed Clatty Bella – and if you’re wondering what clatty means, in Scotland it’s someone with very poor personal hygiene. Oh, and don’t expect any uplifting message either.

Made by BBC London (rather than BBC Scotland) in 1979 and part of the Play For Today strand, Just a Boy’s Game is set in the grey streets of Greenock and is a night, day and night in the lives of Jake McQuillen (Frankie Miller) and Dancer Dunnichy (Ken Hutchison). Dancer’s a wisecracking wastrel, an ageing likely lad, while Jake’s more a likely to get into a fight kinda lad. Unlike a later fictional Scottish hardman, Francis Begbie, Jake isn’t one to start fights. He has mellowed to some extent with age, but he still has his reputation and is never going to back down from trouble if it rears its head. And it certainly does here. Repeatedly.

A crane operator at a local shipyard, you sense a disaffection gnaws away at Jake from the moment he rises till he falls into sleep at the end of a night usually with the aid of some booze. He no longer has any relationship with his mother, and he suspects his granda, an infamous local hard man in his younger days, killed his father. Bizarrely, this is who he chooses to live with, together with his kindly grandmother. I’m sure a psychologist would have a field day with him.

Just a Boy’s Game starts outside local bar The Voyager where The Cuban Heels (a band with strong Greenock roots) are belting out a punkish version of Paint It Black. The pessimism of the song is appropriate. This, as you’ve likely guessed, is a dark drama.

A scuffle starts over an argument between Dancer and a narky young woman, who bumps into him (played by Elaine Collins, the future Mrs Peter Capaldi), Jake taking on the girl’s boyfriend. This is nothing compared to what follows. A fierce fight breaks out and escalates rapidly, with a fair percentage of the bar becoming caught up in the chaos. One young man wields a razor blade and soon glasses are being thrown at the gantry and punches and kicks being swapped. 999 is dialled, but the police are in no rush to quell the aggro. Jake watches on impassively. He’s witnessed this a hundred times before.

The next morning he sees his granda cough blood into a metal bucket. The morose auld fucker (Hector Nicol) is dying and most viewers might think the sooner the better and good luck to whoever is tasked with delivering his eulogy. He’s nasty to the core and even in his last few days, he’s determined to belittle Jake and boss around his long-suffering wife.

Dancer, meanwhile, has declared the day a holiday. This entails a trip to the offy for a bottle of VAT 69 and some Eldorado (a cheapo fortified wine that is still popular in Inverclyde – until recently they even sponsored Port Glasgow Juniors FC), followed by a climb up the giddying heights of Jake’s crane cabin, clutching his carry-out bag. ‘How d’you get on wi’ the seagulls?’ Dancer asks, looking as if he’s suffering from altitude sickness. Either that or a shocking hangover.

Next up, is a rainy visit to the aforementioned Clatty Bella’s tip of a house, where they can’t even dry off as Bella’s son has taken the house’s single towel with him to go swimming. The bevvy flows, and before too long Dancer leads her into the bedroom to ‘make sweet music.’ Hopefully sweeter than her impromptu pub singer rendition of I Left My Heart in San Francisco.

Suitably refreshed, Jake and Dancer head across town to pick up their pal Tanza (Gregor Fisher) from the garage where he works. All the while stalked by some local wannabe hard cases, the trio visit an old snooker hall where Jake’s Granda was once a regular. A man comically miscues a shot after over-reaching across the table. ‘Ah needed a rest for that shot,’ he observes.

‘Aye,’ Tanza tells him. ‘You should have had a week in bed, ya diddy.’

‘Who are you?’ the bemused man asks.

With his liking for cowboy film references, Tanza jokes: ‘I’m the man that shot Liberty Vallance. I hope you didnae know him.’

A few minutes later, Jake, Dancer and Tanza will face their own High Noon, as they slip out the back door of the club into a container terminal to be greeted by a wild bunch of tooled up neds, eager to establish their own tough guy credentials. Especially their leader Dunky McCafferty.

It would be hard to see the violence here as being glamourised. The fight ends with one man running into a thick steel cable hawser at the level of his throat.

Ken Hutchison, then best known for a role as a thug in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs and starring as Heathcliff in a 1978 BBC adaptation of Wuthering Heights, is first class as Dancer, albeit the jaws of any Emily Brontë fans tuning in to see him in another Heathcliff type role must have dropped as the play progressed.

A binge drinker (or maybe borderline alcoholic), Dancer is as irresponsible as a child but he does possess a decent line in banter and a rogueish charm. He’s perfectly cast. The revelation here, though, is Frankie Miller as Jake.

With the success of top ten British single Darlin‘ fresh in the memory, the idea of branching out with a lead role in a gritty Play for Today strand was unexpected.

‘Frankie had that wonderful Glaswegian gallusness,’ McDougall explained recently in an online interview. As an example of this, he mentioned the first day of shooting when Miller indicated the camera to Mackenzie and advised him: ‘Just fucking point it at me.’

This attitude helps explain why he was confident enough to let the camera linger on him.

McDougall is Scotland’s greatest ever TV dramatist, and with the ongoing homogenisation of television, I don’t expect to be changing that opinion any time soon.

Martin Scorsese went as far as calling Just A Boys’ Game the Scottish equivalent of Mean Streets and later Mean Streets’ co-star Harvey Keital flew over to Scotland to appear in McDougall’s Down Where the Buffalo Roam.

Mackenzie went on to make The Long Good Friday (1980) and collaborated with McDougall again, this time on his adaptation of Jimmy Boyle’s A Sense of Freedom (1981). After that, McDougall continued writing for TV, film and theatre. Shoot For The Sun (1986), examined the heroin problem in Edinburgh before Trainspotting got round to it and more recently he penned a modern interpretation of Whisky Galore! with Gregor Fisher taking on a leading role.

Miller never acted again, turning down a number of offers as he wanted to concentrate again on his music. Few would deny the power of his voice, indeed, Otis Redding’s widow Zelma has been one of many to shower him with compliments over the years, once observing: ‘That little ol’ white boy, Frankie, has the blackest voice since Otis.’

Sadly in 1994, Miller suffered a brain haemorrhage while in New York and since then he has been unable to perform.