Vintage Item no. 1
For a long time this was my favourite record in the world.
When Star Wars first came out I went mad on getting every record that had anything to do with it. There was one with Ben Kenobi telling the story over the music and there was another with Holst's The Planets on the other side. And then there was this.
Geoff Love is a marvel. In more recent years I've fallen completely in Geoff with his other records - especially his fabulously 1978-sounding Christmas album. There's just something brilliantly light-entertainment-on-Seventies-telly about everything he does. Something cosily epic. Groovy and jaunty and somewhat slightly over-enthusiastic. But grand, and sometimes spooky.
This Space Themes one was a thing of beauty. The disco version of Star Wars with the cantina band going mental! The bombast of Space 1999 and unexpected funk of Star Trek. The way Geoff Love did them made me feel nostalgic for shows I hadn't even seen or been bothered about. And that cover - moody blue and purple like a box of Milk Tray, with sexy sirens and underwear model men in space with laser guns. A pointier version of the Enterprise. A very busy-looking, exciting-seeming outer space vista.
It has that magnificent version of the Who theme. The one where I could imagine that the raucous brass coming in was the discordant sound of his mechanical foes. To me that track seemed the very essence of Seventies Doctor Who on a huge, universal scale. Even Sarah Jane had her own romantic theme coming in, weaving through the Doctor's headlong flight through the time tunnel... heedless, scarf streaming behind him...
When I was a kid and first had a tape recorder I'd read out Target novelisations and make my own audiobooks with this record (and its even jauntier companion, featuring Super Hero themes) playing the background as accompaniment. There'd be gaps in the narrative where I'd flip the vinyl over. Making my own audiobooks, reading Terrance Dicks out loud with the Dick Barton theme galloping along in the background at full tilt.
Is no one doing that these days? Taking brilliant TV themes and doing orchestral disco versions of them? Is it a dead art form?
3 Comments:
I had that. On tape! I don't even know if I've got it anymore.
I'm not sure whether anyone's doing orchestral disco versions commercially (I think the days of soundalikes are past, except for those tapes they play in lifts), but there must be people out there doing weird mash-ups of theme tunes in different genres, then sticking the MP3s online. Isn't that what the internet is for?
This is a great album! I bought this in '78 and it was was my first LP. Geoff Love is very faithful to the originals on this album. This was a very difficult album to obtain even in the early days. In the summer of 1981 I coudn't believe my luck when my local HMV (Glasgow branch) was having a summer sale and amongst the LP soundtracks were the Geoff Love albums; 'Star Wars and other space themes' and 'Close Encounters Of The Kind snd other disco galactic themes'. They were shrink-wrapped and only 50 pence each! I managed to buy five of each! This album also has a touch of sentimentality, too, because it brings back happy memories of my mid-teenage years. I have a couple of tracks from Geoff Love's 'Close Encounters' album on YouTube! Check the link. There are more in my channel.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kc_M5GCWZvY
Absolutely my favourite childhood album! I still have it in quite decent nick. I was always a bit confused why the Enterprise looked so different and the characters looked nothing like Han and Leia, and the music sounded so different (Space 1999, though was better!). And yes, I had my own "radio station" which I recorded to tape with my friend. Halcyon days.
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