(no subject)

 Okay, there are four instances and counting of this fifteen-question you-and-me meme on my friends list now, and if I tried to answer all of them I would, depending on where and when I did it, have either no job or no sleep, so I’m going to pass on this one and move straight on to some content...

Hawk-eyed readers of this journal will have noticed that I have a passion for old horror films in general, and old horror film music in particular. I think it’s vastly underrated. Such names as Clifton Parker, Gerald Fried, Hans J. Salter and Ronald Stein may mean nothing to most people, and I’m told some even believe Frank Skinner to be some kind of chat-show host, but to me they are stars in their field, working miracles in one take with an orchestra that dwindled as the session went on because the film couldn’t afford to pay all the musicians for the full time.

 One of my favourite scores is that to Roger Corman’s “Masque of the Red Death.” It’s very nicely through-composed, with little recourse to repeated bits, there’s a lovely dance tune in there and a climactic Bolero-like passage that I definitely want played, on kazoos and biscuit tins, as my bin-bagged corpse is reverently carried by rusty wheelbarrow to the Corporation dump. And for years I have believed quite firmly that this music was the work of one Les Baxter, who did score quite a few of Corman’s pictures…and every time I’ve watched it I have been surprised to find that it’s actually by a David Lee. I don’t know why my brain does this.

 So anyway, this last time I had a thought. The film was made in Britain (a new departure for Corman, and like every other decision he made, for sound financial reasons) in 1963-64. Could this (I wondered) be the same David Lee who, under the impenetrable pseudonym of Dave Lee, wielded the baton for I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again, and made the Angus Prune Tune the thing of beauty it remains to this day? There seems no way to find out. Googling is no help: everyone and his dog is apparently called David Lee something-or-other these days, and I know of no way to sort through the Roths and the Millers and so on. Till somebody puts the soundtrack of “Masque” on a CD, preferably with exhaustively informative sleeve notes, I am left guessing.

 Anyway, it’s too late. The damage is done. I’m going to have to watch the film again, and again and again, to try to blot from my memory the horrific image of that climactic moment when John Westbrook, as the Red Death personified, announces portentously: “It is time for a new dance to begin…The Dance Of Death.”

 Ya-ta-ta-tah tah tah ta-ta-ta-ta-tah ta-ta-ta ta-ta-ta-tah ta-tah tah….