How to stretch your budget, part II comes courtesy of the “Velvet Goldmine,” soundtrack. The difference is doing it right.
Todd Haynes first foray into musical hagiography (his Dylan film arrives this fall) started with a paean to glam rock. The problem was, at the time, David Bowie was developing his own glam rock movie (yeah, where’s that now?) so he refused Haynes the rights to any of his Ziggy Stardust-era’d songs.
So that effectively shutdown the use of all Bowie songs (even cover versions), which in turn forced Haynes to become an allusionist and extra creative with both script and musical approach.
Cost-prohibitive classic Roxy Music and Stooges tracks weren’t easy to come by either, so Haynes went the inventive route of asking modern musicians to cover classic songs. The difference between this attempt and say, “I Shot Andy Warhol,” was both the choice of artists and their spot-on covers and adaptations (though both had the excellent Randall Poster as the music supervisor; a man practically a deity in the music supervision field, more on him another day). It should be noted there was some extra scratch lying around, original songs by Lou Reed, T-Rex and Brian Eno are sprinkled through-out, but to score the entire film to original songs was obviously out of the question.
Rather than stick to straight glam history (due in part to the Bowie shackles), Haynes mashed and amalgamated eras and characters in that sexually ambiguous and androgynous early ’70s millieu.
Venus In Furs: The Bowie/Roxy Mashup
For this fictional Roxy Music sound-alikes, Haynes and Poster went to some seemingly unlikely choices in Radiohead principals Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood. The duo coupled with Suede’s Bernard Butler, David Gray (yes, that David Gray) and Roxy Music’s Andy Mackay became: Venus In Furs, the backing band to the David Bowie surrogate in the film played by Jonathan Rhyes Meyer (though the character does appropriate strong traits from Brian Eno and T-Rex’s Marc Bolan). Yorke effectively becomes Roxy’s Bryan Ferry and does a terrifically good approximation of his voice on a couple of classic Roxy tracks.
Wylde Rattz: The Iggy/Stooges Band
For the Iggy Pop character, Curt Wild (played by Ewan McGregor who seemed to happily embrace every bi-sexually flamboyant aspect of his character) Hayne had less historical fudging to do and enlisted Stooges actual Ron Asheton, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Steve Shelley, Minutemen’s Mike Watt, Gumball’s Don Fleming, and Mark Arm of Mudhoney to convincingly portray Iggy & The Stooges (McGregor’s character sings “Gimme Danger” and “T.V Eye” in the film)
Covers are a plenty: Placebo (who appear in the film as another fictional glam band, Flaming Creatures) cover T-Rex, and Teenage Fanclub and Elastica’s Donna Matthews bang out a fine facsimile of the New York Dolls. Shudder To Think and their head writer cum soundtrack composer Nathan Larson contribute many original, made to seem legitimately glam songs from that era for Jonathan Rhys Meyers’ Bowie character to sing onstage in the film.
Download: Venus In Furs – “Ladytron” (Roxy Music)
Download: Wylde Rattz – “TV Eye” (Stooges)
Download: Teenage Fanclub & Donna Matthews -“Personality Crisis” (New York Dolls)
Download: Venus In Furs – “2HB” (Roxy Music)
Download: Brian Eno – “Needle In the Camel’s Eye”
