ANGELO BADALAMENTI

MOOD AWAKENING

by STEVE GRANT

Angelo Badalamenti and Julee Cruise provide the haunting sound to David Lynch´s peculiar vision. as their latest collaboration, `Twin Peaks`, arrives on BBC2, the duo talk about their work with Hollywood´s favourite weirdo.

There are very few memorable movies or TV films that haven´t been enhanced or even made by music: take Bernard Hermann away from `Psycho`, Ennio Morricone away from `Once Upon A Time In The West`, `Tubular Bells` from `The Excorcist`, Clannad away from `Harry´s Game`... well, you get the picture.

`Twin Peaks`, the American TV series described by creator David Lynch as a `soap opera version of "Blue Velvet"`, received a record of 14 nominations at this year´s Emmy awards, of which it won two. When the series starts here on October 23 our `Neighbours`-addled viewers are likely to be hooked, not merely by the `Peyton Place-on-acid`plot, but by the soundtrack courtesy of Angelo Badalamenti, David Lynch and a soulful angel from Creston, Iowa, called Julee Cruise.

The album of `Twin Peaks` has already sold over half a million copies in the first two weeks of its American release; it´s unveiling here this week, coupled with the single `Falling`, could well enhance the reputation of all concerned. `Falling` is a song from the from the first two-hour opener which Cruise performs as a lead singer in a rather bikery-looking roadhouse band, a band which should be belting out hard-rock standards by Janis Joplin, but instead is captured in a shadowy, womb-like half-light performing this slow, mournful, pleading ballad which rises beautifully before crashing like the waterful that features in the series´s opening shots.

The first collaboration between 53-year-old Badalamenti and 42-year-old Lynch came during `Blue Velvet`, when he was initially called upon to coach Isabella Rossellini on the title track, but ended up working on the soundtrack. `David presented me with what was essentially a few lines on paper, nor metre, no rhyme, and he would come to my office and I´d sit at the piano and he´d describe the mood of a particular scene or, in the case of this poem, the themes he had in mind; he wanted something which conjured up the wind, very cosmic and angelic, all that from just six lines.`

The result was `Mysteries of Love, the closing hymn of hope in what still remains Lynch´s most celebrated movie. Badalamenti had worked with Julee Cruise when he was musical director for a theatre in the East Village. He asked her if she knew any singers with very pure, very clear, upper-register deliveries; after finding most of them unsuitable, the composer asked Cruise to take on the job herself, a strange decision since Cruise was something of a belter at the time and had been playing Janis Joplin in a revue called `Beehive`. She even had to give up cigarettes.

`I went to university as a French horn player,`says Cruise, `a classical musician rather like Angelo. But the French horn is a very unpredictable instrument. It´s very hard to play, insanely intricate, and it´s one of those instruments that can really screw up the whole orchestra if it´s played even a little bit wrong. The better I got, the crazier it made me. So I took the easy way out - acting and singing!`

In between `Blue Velvet`and `Twin Peaks`, the trio collaborated on Cruise´s début album, `Into the Night`, which contains both the songs from `Blue Velvet`and three tracks, including `Falling`, which ended up as part of the score fro the `Twin Peaks` TV series. The album was released here in January but there´s expectation that it may receive a new lease of life from the `Twin Peaks´ exposure here. As for Badalamenti, he also wrote the incidental music for `Wild at Heart` and is presently working on `several other projects`with the impish Lynch: `We intend to become the Bernard Hermann and Alfred Hitchcock of the ´90s.

Badalamenti´s career has encompassed everything from songs for George Benson and the Pet Shop Boys to the scores for movies as diverse as `A Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 3`to `A Christmas Carol`, to commercials work for Calvin Klein. But his initial contact with Lynch has turned him into a cult composer, a result he says simply of `a meeting ot two minds that get off on very similar things; I´ve always been interested in the off-beat and because of my background I share David´s interest in the ´50s. For "Twin Peaks" I was very aware that he wanted music that would be intensely evocative of pain and sadness but which was also quirky and playful, and so there are fusions; there are very ´50s melodies such as "The Nightingale" and things like jangling guitars and tenor saxes for the main theme.

Whatever, Badalamenti has produced a haunting theme, a mix of pianos, strings, bass clarinets and saxes, which can break your heart, and when joined with Cruise´s pleading, smokey vocals, can put it together again.

`At the time we worked on "Twin Peaks" it was going to be called "North West Passage" and nothing had been shot. David likes to work from what he sees inside. He isn´t musical but he knows what he wants as soon as he recognises it, and I guess that we gelled as soon as I wrote the meldody for the poem in "Blue Velvet", because he just shouted out, "that´s it". Take the "Twin Peaks" main theme: he wanted something in a minor mode; dark and ominous, but also beautiful, something which makes you ache with anticipation, builds so it rips your guts out and then falls away slowly. But the details he left to me.´

While `Blue Velvet` may be Lynch´s masterpiece, it is without doubt the variety of `Twin Peaks` and its music which will fix the long 25-year career of Badalamenti in popular mythology. He is no machine operator either; over 40 per cent of the score for the series is played on acoustic instruments rather than synthesizers. As for those Emmies, Badalamenti was nominated in four categories, one of which was later withdrawn, and was pipped by, among other things, the theme to the American TV series, `Beauty and the Beast`. `We were upset we didn´t do better; but after a couple of days we got philosophical. I mean these people are real judges.`

`Twin Peaks`, the soundtrack album featuring Julee Cruise, is released by WEA on October. The single `Falling` was released on October 15. Julee Cruise´s `Into the Night`, with songs by Lynch and Badalamenti, is also available on WEA.