Various, Party Party (Soundtrack)

Album of the Week, February 15, 2025

Let’s cut to the chase. Why am I writing about an obscure British movie soundtrack in the middle of this series of posts about the Police? I have one good reason: Sting singing “Tutti Frutti.”

Now that I have your attention, let’s talk about movie soundtracks.

Movie soundtracks are profoundly strange, particularly if you never see the movie. There is presumably some underlying narrative or unifying conceit in a reasonably well made movie soundtrack, but rarely does the soundtrack by itself provide a clue as to what happens in that narrative (in this way, at least, Brimstone & Treacle was an exception to the rule). Or the musical selections may provide an idea of the aesthetic of the film; probably the best example of this is the soundtrack to any Wim Wenders movie (Wings of Desire or Until the End of the World).

Then there’s Party Party. A British comedy film in the style of John Hughes, most of the material on the soundtrack is cover songs—many of which are of 1950s rock’n’roll tunes, but some of which are of much later material—by a who’s who of early ’80s British pop artists, including Elvis Costello, Bananarama, Madness, and Sting. I can’t imagine a narrative that would string all these songs together, and my attention span long ago shortened beyond my ability to sit and watch a movie from start to finish. So we’ll have to take the material on the soundtrack solely on its musical merits. Whether this is advantageous to the material remains to be seen.

Party Party,” by Elvis Costello and the Attractions, appears to have been written specifically for the movie; it doesn’t appear on any of the earlier albums or odds-and-sods collections. This was 1982, the year Elvis released Imperial Bedroom, so the band was at one of its career peaks of musical energy and the lyrics were at his acidic best: “The last thing I remember I was talking to some fellas/Then she said to me she’d have a word with her good-looking mate/And handed me a pint pot filled with Advocaat and Tizer/And I woke up in the flowerbeds of beer and fertilizer.” The sound of the song is baroque in the spirit of Imperial Bedroom but takes its point of departure from Motown rather than the Beatles, with a fantastic horn section over Bruce Thomas’s agile bass line and Steve Nieve’s boogie-woogie piano part. It’s a pretty great opener.

The movie Party Party is apparently set at Christmastime, judging from the next cover: Chuck Berry’s “Run Rudolph Run,” here covered by pub rocker and Nick Lowe collaborator Dave Edmunds. Edmunds always had a taste for 1950s rock and roll, and this faithful cover leans into that lane; it’s well made but not especially eye opening. At least the next cover takes some risks. “Little Town Flirt” was a Del Shannon number before Scottish new wave band Altered Images got hold of it, and you can hear the bones of the song but it’s fully transformed by Michael “Tich” Anderson’s Siouxsie and the Banshees inspired drums on the opening and by Clare Grogan’s adenoidal vocal, as well as the constant heartbeat of Johnny McElhone’s bass. The only part of the arrangement that hasn’t aged well is the cheap synthesizer line, but at least that updates the song.

Bad Manners was a “two-tone” and ska band, but you’d never really know it from this cover of the Coasters’ “Yakety Yak,” at least not the very end when the outro is transformed into a ska number. The saxophones do some mildly interesting things at the end of the verse, but otherwise there’s not much to talk about here.

That’s not true about “Tutti Frutti.” 1982 was not a year in which Sting had great fun, between the collapse of his first marriage and the tense partnership with the Police, so hearing him do a howling, hooting Little Richard impression is astonishing. It feels ungenerous to complain about such a performance, but I have to note that his vocals are not completely in the pocket; then again, neither is the pub rock band that backs him up. They’re convincing at the chugging undertone but don’t quite capture the manic energy of the original. Then again, Sting does a good job of making up for it, especially on the wordless third verse.

Bananarama’s version of the Sex Pistols’ “No Feelings” should feel out of place, given the twenty year jump forward from Little Richard, but the band invests it with a driving energy and just enough handclaps to underscore the 1950s flavor lurking beneath the sleazy punk surface of the original. The band’s vocals pull the song forward to the New Wave moment; you can imagine it being played on radio alongside the Go-Gos.

Driving in My Car” by Madness is one of the other originals on the record, and was a hit for them on the UK Singles chart. Its energy is squarely in line with the New Wave moment, but the arrangement, with car horns and even dog barks, feels more like a novelty record. More successful is Modern Romance’s cover of R&B single “Band of Gold,” given an electro-pop makeover with synthesizers and Chic-esque guitar, along with the quintessential British New Wave vocals that somehow call to mind a little Erasure mixed with a touch of Duran Duran. It’s a lot of fun in a way that feels like a precursor to Wham!

Bad Manners makes up for the disappointment of “Yakety Yak” with “Elizabethan Reggae,” a piece with a complicated history. Beginning life as “Elizabethan Serenade,” a piece of light orchestra music originally performed by the Mantovani Orchestra, the 1968 reggae cover by Boris Gardiner and the Love People became a hit single. Bad Manners plays it as a straight ska number, and it’s a blast. The same, regrettably, cannot be said for Pauline Black’s version of “No Woman, No Cry.” Her vocal is fine, interesting even, but the leaden arrangement, particularly the joyless bass, take all the air out of the performance.

Sting’s “Need Your Love So Bad” is more successful. Here he proves adept at R&B balladry, displaying the wonderful flexibility of his lower range, and is able to overcome the unremarkable guitar (played by Micky Gee, the guitarist in Dave Edmunds’ band) in a convincing version of the bluesy song originally performed by Little Willie John. The backing vocalists (unfortunately uncredited) definitely help, as does the gospel-tinged piano. Sting knew the material well, having sung it in Last Exit, and he inhabits the pleading lovesickness of the narrator.

The big tonal shift on the second side is the Midge Ure cover of “The Man Who Sold the World.” Ure’s voice strongly recalls Bowie’s, and the late post-punk synths make for a good arrangement of the original, but it’s a complete left turn stylistically, presumably coming at the big plot climax of the movie (I love you, my readers, very much, but I’m not going to spend time watching this movie to find out where the song comes in). The arrangement slowly falls away, leaving just the synths to take the song out. It’s a pretty great cover, just a strange choice here. Chas & Dave’s version of “Auld Lang Syne” returns us to the 1950s-esque world of the rest of the soundtrack with a rockney (their word – Cockney rock) cover of the New Years Eve favorite.

There are a lot of inessential soundtracks out there, but sorting through the chaff can occasionally bring some reasonably good wheat to the surface. Sting’s tracks are probably the best reason to check this album out, but the title track is a great find for fans of Elvis Costello and the Attractions, and “Elizabethan Reggae,” “Band of Gold” and “The Man Who Sold the World” are all highly successful covers. Not a bad strike rate, on the whole. Thankfully Sting had bigger horizons that he was working toward, in the form of one more tensely-recorded record with the Police. We’ll hear that next week.

You can listen to this week’s album here:

BONUS: I may be too chicken to watch the movie, but it turns out that it’s on YouTube, so you can if you want:

Various, Brimstone & Treacle (Soundtrack)

Album of the Week, February 8, 2025

When you’re the frontman of an increasingly successful band, with multiple Grammy awards to your name,1 and you’re photogenic to boot, the well established career move is to extend your brand to other arts—specifically, film. Sting was not immune to this trend, but, as befits a cerebral songwriter given to quoting philosophers in his writing (and rhyming “shake and cough” with “Nabokov”), his initial movie roles were art-house rather than blockbuster: first appearing as Ace Face in the film version of the Who’s Quadrophenia, then his first starring turn in an art house film.

Brimstone & Treacle started out as a BBC television play by Dennis Potter (who also wrote the television serial Pennies from Heaven, substantially rewritten into a 1981 flop starring Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters). The play, about a woman who becomes nonverbal and disabled following an automobile accident, and a mysteriously charismatic young man who charms her religious family with his piety, with predictably awful results, was withdrawn before broadcast by the BBC due to the final scene in which the angelic, or devilish, young man attempts to rape the disabled girl, who is subsequently returned to consciousness and regains full control of her body. —I watched this movie as a Blockbuster rental in 1989, having no idea what I was getting myself into, and was sorry.

The soundtrack, on the other hand, has some redeeming virtues, though tonal consistency is not one of them. The opening begins with a fairly ominous chord in the synths with a rolling slightly squelchy sound atop it, but fades out after about eight measures to the sound of a small brass band and the Finchley Children’s Music Chorus singing “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder” (a recording that does not appear to be on YouTube), a Christian hymn written in 1893. In the film this accompanies a scene of happy choristers leaving a church, at which point the camera cuts to a brooding Sting in a raincoat, watching them. (Sting broods a lot in this film). The music too changes, returning to that squelchy synthesizer over the sound of the wind, for the title piece. “Brimstone & Treacle” is mostly dark atmosphere, but it introduces a catchy theme (V – XIII – V – VII – V – V – IVx3 – VII – V), here played in a high register on a keyboard, that repeats over and over. If you feel like we’ll be hearing that theme again, you’re right.

But first: a saxophone and some echoing marimba introduces “Narration,” wherein Sting reads somewhat ominously from the script of the television play, introducing the choirboy scene we’ve just heard and the sudden appearance of Sting’s character, Martin; the introduction of Mr. Bates (the father of the disabled girl), who’s shown writing treacly verses to his wife with a “face heavy with contempt”; and a series of images of the end of day commute home, bookended with the ominous whisper “Which one? Which one will it be?” As a teenager hearing this track, I was impressed with the use of music and spoken word; it is still musically interesting and appropriately moody, but the narrative seems less ominous and slightly forced now.

This bit of writing leads into the first of three tracks by the Police on the soundtrack. “How Stupid Mr. Bates” features some of the same squelchy synth in the introduction, but this is quickly overcome by Andy Summers’ guitar synth and the throbbing bass line, which stays constant on the tonic throughout the song. Stewart Copeland lays down a consistent backbeat with slight flourishes of irrepressible high hat magic around the edges, and the guitar and synth duet on the theme, a rare major key punctuated by intervals of modal suspension. As Police instrumentals go, it’s no “Shambelle” (the brilliant Andy Summers-penned B side to “Every Little Thing She Does is Magic” which might be their best non-album track), but it’s no “Behind My Camel” either.

We stay in a pop vein with “Only You,” a Sting solo number that feels as though it was written with disco in mind—just listen to the play of that funky bass line against the saxophone and that four-on-the-floor drumming (here performed by Jeff Seitz, Stewart’s drum technician!). But the instrumental and the chorus are a jam—at least, until we hear Sting start to shout Martin’s prayer that he offers up for the healing of the disabled Pattie for the benefit of her gullible mother. (He has by now insinuated himself into the family, presenting himself as an upright, devout young man who wants to help them and their daughter.) The combination of the disco and the prayer are, to quote a line from “Narration,” “ridiculous… incongruous… disturbing.” Someday I’d like to hear “Only You” without the prayer atop it; I think it’d take its place alongside some of the other great early 1980s funk classics.

This leads us to “I Burn for You,” a song that Sting had carried around since the days of Last Exit, and which he had offered to the Police during “Zenyatta Mondatta.” The band rejected it as “too sentimental,” so Sting gave it to the dance troupe Hot Gossip, who released it as a single. Perhaps as result of hearing their performance, the Police finally agreed to record it (see: “Demolition Man” and Grace Jones), and it showed up here. Where the Hot Gossip version was pretty faithful to the Last Exit original, the Police did much the same as what Miles Davis did to Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints”: played it a little faster, a lot more ominously, and with an absolutely incredible drum part. The ominousness is largely courtesy of the washes of guitar under the verse that rise like a tide under Sting’s lyrics; the drums mostly lift themselves out of the mix in the chorus and in the extended outro, where the “Brimstone” theme, played in the bass, merges into the song and the band members wordlessly sing and shout with the rising energy of the thing like a ritual. Stewart’s drums sound like Can’s Tago Mago collided with Tony Williams and Fela Kuti, and then it all rises to a crescendo and a sudden end. “I Burn for You” bookends a tight, spellbinding first half of the album which is musically and thematically consistent throughout. If the second half of the album continued this way, it might have been numbered among Sting and the Police’s best.

Instead, we open with an incongruity: Sting’s solo cover of 1929 musical comedy song “Spread a Little Happiness.” Released as a single, the first by Sting as a solo artist, it hit #16 in the UK charts, and is meant to underscore the insincere optimism of the slippery Martin. It is deliciously ironic and fun to sing along with, but definitely a break from the mood set by the first half.

As is “We Got the Beat.” Yes, the Go-Gos single from their first album. Aside from their position as the Police’s labelmates on A&M/IRS Records, it’s not entirely clear what the song is doing on the soundtrack. It does appear in the movie, in a disturbing scene where Martin puts on Mrs. Bates’ necklaces and and lace glove, gazing at himself in a trifold mirror, but it’s an interruption of the steadily bleaker mood.

That mood returns with “You Know I Had the Strangest Dream.” Functionally “I Burn for You, Pt. 2”, the soundscape expands the quiet two bar intro of the earlier song in a quiet meditation until the “Brimstone” theme loudly returns once more.

If “We Got the Beat” is incongruous, “Up the Junction” is a complete non sequitur. While it too technically appears in the movie (ten points to the first person who can tell me where), the only reason for its appearance here seems to be Glenn Tilbrook and Chris Difford’s mention of the devil in the penultimate verse, as we start to get an idea of the monster that lies beneath Martin’s pious surface.

“Bless This House” is the ultimate moment of disconnection on the album, an impromptu choir singing the hymn as the bourgeois Mrs. Bates enjoys a moment of domestic bliss, all while Martin rapes her daughter in the next room. This bridges crashingly into “A Kind of Loving,” featuring a full-out trio jam by the Police with the screams of actress Suzanna Hamilton (Pattie) and Martin’s vicious command to “shut up!” over the top. While the jam is top notch, high form Police, I literally cannot bring myself to listen to the track because of the screaming as Pattie awakens from her nonverbal prison. After Martin makes a hasty exit, she is shown to be fully restored in body and mind, leaving the question: was the devilish young man the agent of her restoration after all?

We’re left to ponder this question as “Brimstone 2” plays us out. An extension of the theme with an interpolation of the “I Burn for You” tune, it attempts to wrap the album up with a bow. It does a better musical job of this than the film does in bringing closure; we are left with a foul taste in our mouths from the thoroughly malicious Martin, magnetically watchable though he might be thanks to Sting’s movie-star cheekbones.

Sting was to take other movie roles, most notoriously playing the young Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in David Lynch’s Dune alongside Kyle McLachlan and Patrick Stewart, but also appearing opposite Meryl Streep in Plenty and playing Baron Frankenstein in The Bride with Jennifer Beals. His movie career took a back seat to his music over the years, with a memorable turn as JD the bar owner in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels as his last major role. There would, of course, be plenty more music from Sting, including another life for “I Burn for You,” which we’ll explore in a while. But first in 1982 he made one more soundtrack appearance, and it’s one of the odder moments in his catalog. We’ll hear it next time.

You can listen to most of this week’s album (minus “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder” and “Bless This House,” neither of which are on YouTube) here.

BONUS: The whole movie is on YouTube. Don’t watch it with your family.

BONUS BONUS: Here’s the Last Exit version of “I Burn for You,” with a video taken from Brimstone and Treacle.

BONUS BONUS BONUS! The Hot Gossip version of “I Burn for You” is … something else.

  1. (The Police had won their first Grammy, for best rock instrumental performance, for “Regatta de Blanc” in 1981 (yes, two years after its release. What can I do? It’s the Grammys), and their second for “Behind My Camel” in 1982. Also in 1982 they won a Best Rock Performance Grammy for “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” meaning that for the first time one of the band’s singles featuring Sting’s singing received the award. One imagines that was a validating moment.) ↩︎

Various, The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball

Album of the Week, February 1, 2025

A benefit show that was initially held only every two to three years, hosted by British comedians whose television heyday was a decade earlier and featuring a clutch of rock musicians playing in acoustic settings, would seem to be an odd source for transformative insight on anything. But when the benefit show is for Amnesty International, the comedians were Monty Python, and the musicians included the likes of Pete Townsend, Eric Clapton, Bob Geldof, Phil Collins, and Sting, literally anything could happen.

Amnesty International loomed large in my 1980s teenagerdom, thanks to their work to bring attention to abuses of human rights such as torture, miscarriages of justice and prisoners of conscience. The way they chose to bring attention was to involve musicians and other celebrities to perform at events designed to raise awareness of the international problem. The Secret Policeman’s Balls were the first of these benefit events, coming 18 years after Amnesty’s founding and two years after the group won the Nobel Peace Prize.

We’ve talked about how the Police’s touring in 1979 and 1980 began to open Sting’s eyes to poverty and injustice on a global scale. When comedian Martin Lewis, who had partnered with Python alum John Cleese to create and produce the Amnesty International benefit shows, invited Sting to participate in a four-night benefit concert series at the Drury Lane theatre in London in September 1981, Sting wasn’t a hard sell. Never mind that he had never performed solo before, ever; he was game not only to play some Police songs live, but also to lead the assembled musicians in the theme song.

These initial performances, later released under the title of The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball (a sequel to the original The Secret Policeman’s Ball from 1979), offer a unique view of Sting as he takes the first steps away from the Police and into solo performing. And he wasn’t alone; both this record and its predecessor are full of unexpected performances and pairings.

The Drury Lane concerts happened just a month after the final recording sessions for Ghost in the Machine, which as we discussed last week were full of challenges and confrontations among the members of the Police. It may very well have been a relief for Sting to perform on his own these nights, even they were his first-ever solo performances. What we know is that he went back to his two oldest, biggest hits with the Police and remade them as solo arrangements that allowed him to take total control.

The record opens with “Roxanne,” here re-imagined as a gentle ballad. Sting accompanies himself on guitar, outlining the chords of the song but otherwise leaving the focus directly on his voice. This performance, coming a few year’s after the song’s 1978 debut, showcases the evolution of his voice. In the original performance it’s an uncannily high tenor, but much of the color is provided by his diction. In this performance the first verse feels a good deal like the performance with the Police, but in the chorus he lengthens syllables for emphasis, and going into the bridge he lowers his volume considerably, pulling the listener in closer. In the final chorus he replaces the fade-out of the record with a descending chord, adding a syllable and singing to “Roxanna.” It’s an effective performance and presages the way he would treat the song for years to come.

Message in a Bottle” gets a similar treatment, but with Sting playing the arpeggiated riff throughout the verse, turning to chords on the chorus beneath an intimate rendering of the chorus that outlines the musical pivot and pulls the listener in even closer. On subsequent choruses he improvises on the melody, moving around the chords and bringing the vocal line higher to emphasize the alienation of the narrator.

Confession time: I have never been a Jeff Beck fan, and my respect for Eric Clapton has gone dramatically downhill in the last ten years. The performances here don’t really shift my opinions that much. “‘Cause We’ve Ended as Lovers” is a meh ballad, and “Farther Up the Road” an OK blues number. When “Crossroads” arrives it’s a relief; Clapton’s retelling of Robert Johnson’s pivotal Delta blues song is iconic enough to survive any number of re-arrangements and retellings, let alone the blues-rock guitar flourishes both men bring to the performance.

Bob Geldof was, at the time of the recording, probably best known as the frontman of the Boomtown Rats, whose 1979 hit “I Don’t Like Mondays” is an unlikely single about a school shooting (specifically, the Cleveland Elementary shooting in San Diego). Here the song is given a vocal and piano performance by Geldof and Johnnie Fingers, the Rats’ keyboard player and co-author of the song. After the blues rock of Clapton and Beck, it’s a bracing performance, especially the final verse and chorus as Geldof embraces the madness of shooter Brenda Ann Spencer. (Geldof was among the musicians whose career was radically changed by his work with Amnesty International; in 1984 he responded to television coverage of famine in Ethiopia by writing “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” with Ultravox frontman Midge Ure, collaborating with a who’s who of rock and pop musicians to record it under the name of Band Aid, and then organizing the massive sixteen-hour cross-Atlantic all-star benefit concert Live Aid. That “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” also spawned the maudlin charity single “We Are the World” cannot be entirely laid at Geldof’s feet.)

The second side opens with another musician in the process of going solo for the first time. Phil Collins had released his first solo album, Face Value, earlier in 1981, and the lead single “In the Air Tonight” had been a huge hit, reaching #2 on both the UK and US charts and Number One in several European countries, largely on its use of gated reverb on the massive drum solo that arrives at the climax of the song. But this performance is more restrained, with Collins on piano and longtime guitarist Daryl Stuermer playing acoustic. While the performance loses something in drama, it does underscore Collins’ songwriting and vocal abilities on the cusp of what would turn out to be international superstardom in the 1980s. (Famously, Collins played in both the London and New York Live Aid concerts, taking the Concorde across the Atlantic so that he could both perform his own solo material and take the drums with an attempted Led Zeppelin reunion.) Collins’ first album was all over the place musically, and the folk-inspired “The Roof is Leaking” is a less iconic performance, though Collins’ vocal performance tells the story effectively and Stuermer’s banjo adds some welcome texture.

There were two types of artists involved in the concert series; the up-and-comers like Sting and Collins, and the established draws like Clapton and Beck. Folk singer Donovan clearly fell more into the latter category than the former, perhaps even inhabiting his own category: the legacy artist. He had gone to a good deal of effort in the 1960s and 1970s to shed comparisons to Bob Dylan, but here he was in 1981 performing “The Universal Soldier” and “Catch the Wind,” two of his most Dylan-like songs from the earliest days of his career. Perhaps the overall atmosphere of protest and social justice inspired him to return to these tunes; “Catch the Wind” in particular is effective here, with a gentle but steely vocal and understated harmonica.

The concert and the album close with an all-star performance of Dylan’s own “I Shall Be Released,” acting as an informal sort of theme song for the night and resonating with Amnesty’s core mission. The band plays what is credited as Sting’s arrangement of the song, and Sting performs admirably on lead vocals, backed by every performer on the rest of the album and then some (Midge Ure and a large group of singers that includes Sheena Easton join on vocals, Python-adjacent musician Neil Innes on guitar, and a full horn section including Mark Isham). The performance devolves into a full on jam session, particularly in the reprise that follows the applause break at around seven minutes. Oddly, it would not be Sting’s only collaboration with Eric Clapton; we’ll hear more from that odd pairing later.

The Secret Policeman’s Ball concerts were the start of a number of influential threads in 1980s pop music, notably star-studded charity singles and concerts and political activism by artists. As we’ve noted above, this performance led directly to “Band Aid”, Live Aid, and “We Are the World”; it also was Sting’s introduction to both solo performance and activism, both of which would be threads of his career for years to come. Next week we’ll look at another (mostly) solo excursion that he undertook following Ghost in the Machine that picks up another thread of his career.

You can watch the whole program, including both the comedy and the music bits, on YouTube (the video is age-restricted thanks to the comedy so can’t be embedded on my page).

BONUS: The video that was released of the event included a few songs from the 1979 Secret Policeman’s Ball, including what I believe are definitive versions of the Who’s “Pinball Wizard,” “Won’t Get Fooled Again” and “Drowned” (from Quadrophenia), performed solo by Pete Townshend. You can watch that bit here: