Music Arcades: Stewart Copeland: Rumble Fish

At the time, I really liked the post-Apocalypse Now hubristic films that Coppola made in the early '80s, including One from the Heart. That was before I'd even seen The Conversation or even The Godfather films. I haven't seen them since, and I don't know what I'd think of them now. My hunch is that there might be some parts of Rumble Fish that would make me wince (take a theatrical bow, Mickey Rourke), but that I would still like the overall ambition. According to Wikipedia at the moment, "the film is now considered a classic, and is consistently rated one of the best films of the 1980s ^{[citation needed]}". Yep, show us the citation!

Anyway, none of that explains why I bought the album, which I did at least a year after I saw the film. I bought the album because Salli Ramsden said it was really good — it might have even been that time she visited us in Cosin Court and 'came out' as a big fan of CSN's Cathedral. Well I ignored the CSN lapse in judgement and trusted her recommendation.

It's kind of OK, but that's as far as I can go. Imagine Moondog (on a slightly off day) meets The Police (on a slightly off day), and you've got a feel for it. It suffers from the condition of some other soundtracks, where you have a main theme that you don't mind hearing repeated a few times over the course of a full movie, but gets kind of irritating when it's repeated several times over the course of 40 minutes. The only thing that leavens the theme is some very light music, which, to be fair, was only ever meant to be incidental and underscore the action on screen; and consequently doesn't add up to much without the screen.