WHEN YOU include the commercial releases of his film scores, Danny Elfman has issued more than 100 albums. When you narrow it down to solo studio LPs in a pop format, the number is three. The third of which, released this month, is a remix version of the second.
“Big Mess”, an uncompromising industrial art-rock record, was released last year. Its new sibling, “Bigger. Messier.”, features collaborations with stalwarts of alternative music ranging from garage rock to electronica: Iggy Pop, Trent Reznor (of Nine Inch Nails), Blixa Bargeld (Einstürzende Neubauten, The Bad Seeds), Squarepusher, Xiu Xiu and more. This might seem a startling new direction for one of the most celebrated film composers of recent decades. In truth it’s quite the opposite: a return to his pop-music roots.
Mr Elfman first found recording success as the leader of a ska/new-wave group, Oingo Bongo, best remembered for their gold-certified album of 1985, “Dead Man’s Party”. By that point Mr Elfman had been approached by two fans of the band, Tim Burton and Paul Reubens, to provide a score for “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure”, in which Mr Burton was to direct Mr Reubens. Mr Elfman was initially hesitant because of his lack of formal orchestral training, but eventually agreed.
It was a mainstream feature film debut for all three men, and it proved an auspicious one. Mr Elfman would go on to write scores for most of Mr Burton’s films, including such major critical and commercial hits as “Beetlejuice”, “Batman” and “Edward Scissorhands”, as well as providing the music for a further array of blockbusters and cult favourites (“Midnight Run”, “Mission: Impossible”, “Men in Black”, “Good Will Hunting”, “A Simple Plan”, “Spider-Man”, “Fifty Shades of Grey”). It placed him squarely in the vanguard of a new type of Hollywood composer, one with origins in pop music—some three years ahead of Hans Zimmer, a former rock keyboardist and Buggles associate, who broke through in 1988 with “Rain Man”.
True, such musicians had been scoring films outside Hollywood since at least the late 1960s, almost entirely within European genre or arthouse films, and usually in a pop-music style. “I decided from the start that I wanted to embrace film scoring from a classical approach, not a pop or rock approach,” Mr Elfman says. “I was a big fan of films and film scores in my youth. My ‘gods’ were Bernhard Herrmann, Nino Rota, Max Steiner, Franz Waxman, Jerry Goldsmith, Ennio Morricone and many others.” He has said that hearing his own music played by an orchestra for the first time was one of the most thrilling experiences of his life.
Do composers who emerge from pop music have a different sensibility to those who were trained in classical forms? “I think that totally depends on the composer,” Mr Elfman says. “Some you can tell right away they come from pop music: the compositions are simple and often almost have a song structure. But there are certainly others who reject that.” He points to Jonny Greenwood, the lead guitarist of Radiohead, who has written “beautifully complex music” for films including “There Will Be Blood”, “Phantom Thread” and “The Power of the Dog”. Mr Elfman describes Randy Newman as “a gorgeous orchestral writer” and Mr Reznor’s film work as “unique and evocative”. One of Oingo Boingo’s principal influences was Devo, a pivotal new-wave band, and Mr Elfman sees its frontman, Mark Mothersbaugh, as a kindred spirit whose style as a pop musician is not discernible in his film work.
Perhaps the single best-known and loved piece Mr Elfman has ever produced is the theme for “The Simpsons”. It combined all the playfulness of his pre-film career with the orchestral chops he then pushed himself to acquire. The tune alludes to music from earlier classic cartoons with a spirit of mischief and anarchy; it is music in which the usual rules are suspended, and which makes sense only in the visual world in which it appears. “When I saw the rough cut of the opening titles to ‘The Simpsons’, I was reminded of classic Hanna-Barbera [cartoons], probably because the wild driving sequence brought to mind the opening of ‘The Flintstones’,” he says. “The tune came into my head almost immediately and I worked it all out while I was driving home from the meeting. By the time I got home it was essentially done.”
Like other major film composers (including the late John Barry and Morricone, and more recently Mr Zimmer), Mr Elfman has staged live orchestral performances of his film work. “I started in 2013 at the Royal Albert Hall [in London] and never really stopped.” But this, it transpires, was a doddle compared with taking “Big Mess” to the stage at Coachella festival in April. “‘Big Mess’ live is a real bitch,” he says. “It was an experiment in combining rock band and orchestra in a way that had been intriguing me for a while. Much as I’d love to take it on the road I couldn’t have made it logistically more difficult if I tried.”
Nevertheless, the very existence of “Big Mess” and “Bigger. Messier.” testifies to something Mr Elfman has been itching to accomplish since he made his triumphant switch to film scores. “Starting in the late 1980s through to the 1990s, my personal tastes ran heavier than what I was producing at that time…Now I simply find myself free to express myself in a much wider range.” You can take the man out of rock music, but you can’t take rock music out of the man.
“Bigger. Messier.” is available on streaming services now
By The Economist
