Scary Night Out

Look out, behind you! I selected a couple of creepy tracks for a 'scary night out'. It's my fictitious soundtrack to a funny horror movie. The opening track from R. Dean Taylor has some nice haunting sound effects, like running up and down the stairs. R. Dean Taylor was one of the few white employes of Motown. He wrote some great tracks, like 'Love child' for The Supremes, but he was a magnificent singer/songwriter too, although he wasn't very successful. 'There's a ghost in my house' became a British hit in 1974, which was seven years after its original release. It was picked up by the so-called 'northern soul' scene at the time. The Asteroids Galaxy Tour is well-known for their Heineken commercial and I selected a track from their latest album. Check out their new single 'Heart attack' as well.

Tracks 4 and 5 are produced by Joe Meek, who was way ahead of his time in the early 1960s. He's often compared to Phil Spector, but he's lesser known. Meek experimented with the weirdest (electronic) sound effects and built his own early versions of synthesizers, a decade before Kraftwerk did. The spacy Tornados instumental 'Telstar' is particularly noted for being the first British record to hit #1 in the States. You can hear Joe Meek sing on it as a drunken sailor at the end. He also created 'Have I the right', the first glam rock track, almost ten years before this kind of extravagant rock and roll became popular. The members of the Honeycombs ran up and down the stairs to create a louder beat. This beat became the characteristic of glam rock in the early 1970s, like Cozy Powell's 'Dance with the devil'.

Meek was not only highly creative, he was quite a dark character too, to say it carefully. He was obsessed by the death of Buddy Holly and life from out of space. In 1967 he tragically took his own life, after killing his landlady with a gun. It was on the same day Buddy Holly died 8 years before, the 3rd of February. You have to check out the works of Joe Meek, because he's one of the main architects of pop music in the 1960s.

I tried to make the Michael Jackson track spookier by adding more of Vincent Price’s raps and a few horror effects in the beginning. The picture above and the track from Heaven 'N' Hell Orchestra are from the movie 'Nocturna'. My favourite (comedy) horror movie of all time is 'American werewolf in London' from John Landis, who would later direct the 'Thriller' video from Michael Jackson. The song was originally called 'Starlight', by the way, as engineer Bruce Swedien once revealed (check out the link for this early version). The picture below is from 'Blacula', starring William Marshall and the beautiful Vonetta McGee.

The remixed track from Human League (originally on 'Dare') contains dialogue and sound effects from 'The Day The Earth Stood Still' and 'Forbidden Planet' and samples from ITV's sci-fi series 'Sapphire & Steel' which ran from 1979 to 1982. The main characters were played by Joanna Lumley ('Absolutely Fabulous') and David McCallum. This remix will surely give you the creeps, just like the last track that seems to be about an eerie French guy who is stalking a little girl.

'Soul dracula' is a German project from Stefan Klinkhammer (Boney M) and Keith Forsey (Billy Idol, Giorgio Moroder) played drums on it. A rework from Betamax, called 'Disco Dracula', will be out on the 20th of April. Enjoy!