UNDERRATED ALBUMS # 5

‘the soundtrack works extremely well as an independent entity and is a fine, if slightly avant garde Folk album, in its own right.’
 

The Wicker Man (OST 2002)
by Paul Giovanni & Magnet

I first saw The Wicker Man when it was released in 1973 as part of what must have been one of the last cinema double-bills with Don’t Look Now – a memorable pairing of films if ever there was one (double-bills are pretty much defunct nowadays, as is the dear old Fosse Cinema with its art-deco façade in Leicester where I saw the films – demolished to make way for a Tesco Express and petrol station as part of the city’s ongoing policy of architectural vandalism).
 

The music for The Wicker Man always stayed with me though, and my love for it grew whenever I watched the film again. The soundtrack, however, didn’t become available until the late 90s and was only issued in its entirety in 2002. The relationship between the music and the film is an unusually close one in The Wicker Man: you simply couldn’t imagine the film without its sixteen songs and instrumentals (Christopher Lee, who plays Lord Summerisle and sings a duet with Diane Cilento, still thinks it ‘probably the best music [he’s] ever heard in a film’). Even though it may seem indivisible with the film, the soundtrack works well as an independent entity and is a fine, if slightly avant garde Folk album, in its own right.

Comprising a melange of old folk songs, Celtic tunes, Robbie Burns ballads, nursery rhymes, sound effects and snatches of dialogue, the music was assembled, adapted and arranged by Paul Giovanni, who also wrote some of the lyrics and music, and his assistant musical director, Gary Carpenter. It is played by them with Carpenter’s  folk-rock band, Magnet, who are augmented at various points by a brass section. Vocals are handled by a chorus of voices including those of children, with Giovanni himself often taking the lead. The instrumental palette is a collection of folk paraphernalia and includes guitars, various hand drums, pipes and recorders, fiddle, concertina, ocarina, Jew’s harp, harmonica and Nordic lyre.

For the uninitiated, the plot of The Wicker Man involves a tightly-buttoned Christian police sergeant played by Edward Woodward (aka TV’s Callan and The Equalizer) being lured from the mainland to the remote (and fictional) Scottish island of Summerisle to investigate the disappearance of a young girl. Sergeant Howie, still a virgin in his thirties, is appalled by the pagan customs and erotic atmosphere on the island, but sets about his search with tenacity, only to be frustrated at every turn by a conspiracy between the islanders and their laird, Lord Summerisle. The missing girl, Rowan, eventually turns up alive, but it is Howie who burns up alive in the towering edifice of the film’s title, a Mayday sacrifice of innocence and purity contrived to turn around the previous year’s blighted harvest. Thus the hunter becomes the hunted and Howie, as the representative of the crown, becomes the ideal offering to the pagan gods, fulfilling the role of ‘king for a day’. 

Proceedings begin with ‘Opening Music’ – or track 12 if you don’t re-sequence as I suggest below. The noise of seagulls and the engine and propellers of a seaplane  announces Howie’s arrival amidst ethereal pipes and horns and a fragment of song about a penniless migrant shepherd (indicative of the policeman’s hapless fate as lamb to the slaughter).

‘Corn Rigs’, Giovanni’s rewrite of a Burns ballad, is the first song-proper. A nostalgic tale about a roll in the hay, it introduces the pungent eroticism that so disturbs the pious Howie - it’s also a classic little slice of Celtic folk-rock. It is quickly succeeded by a lusty rendition by the denizens of the local pub, The Green Man, of  ‘The Landlord’s Daughter’, a lollopingly salacious testament to the generous charms of the ‘strumpet of yore’ who, ‘when her name is mentioned /  The parts of every gentleman / Do stand up to attention.’
      
Giovanni himself can then be seen in the pub singing ‘Gently Johnny’ although we can imagine its sensual lilt as a duet with the heroine of the previous song:-

 

                              ‘I put my hand all on her thigh
                               And she said ‘Do you want to try?’
                               I put my hand all on her belly
                               And she said ‘Do you want to fill me?’

After witnessing all sorts of alfresco shenanigans on his post-prandial walk, a distinctly rattled Howie takes to his bed where he’s staying in the pub. The following morning, on his way to interrogate the village teacher (played by Cilento) he sees the boys of the school dancing around a maypole singing a song. Later, when he seeks out the laird, he can’t help but observe a stone circle where Cilento is directing a group of  girls who dance around a fire - naked. That night, following an unsuccessful exhumation of the girl Rowan’s ‘grave’, he returns to the laird, finding him and Cilento (who is clearly his mistress) engaged in a duet around the piano. Back at The Green Man, he retires but cannot sleep because the landlord’s daughter, Willow – for it is she whose name has such a salutary effect on ‘the parts of every gentleman’ – is seductively serenading him through the bedroom wall next door.

 

The four songs which accompany these scenes embody the pantheistic eroticism of Summerisle, as well as reminding us that music is a key element in pagan religion as well as the orthodox Christian church, in which we see Howie singing hymns early on in the film. ‘Maypole’, with its very neat lyric about pastoral unity and regeneration beautifully sung by the children’s chorus, whirls around with a twanging Jew’s harp, guitar and fiddle, periodically making dramatic stops along the way. ‘Fire Leap’, again sung by the chorus, plays as the naked girls metaphorically ‘take the flame inside’ preparing them for the spark of creation they will later carry

The duet between Christopher Lee (aka Dracula) and Diane Cilento (aka Mrs. James Bond / Sean Connery) is great fun, with Lee’s basso profundo something of a revelation. The giggly Cilento almost corpses as the bawdy tale of the tinker trying to fix her cracked ‘kettle’ unfolds, insisting that a ‘large, large nail’ is required to do the job. The rueful tinker, however, apologises:-

                             ‘There hath so many nails been drove
                             Mine own could not take hold’

 

 

The lovely ‘Willow’s Song’, probably the highlight of the set, drifts quietly in, all shimmering guitar and violin, over one of the most notorious scenes in the film. The naked Willow – played by Britt Ekland (aka Mrs. Peter Sellers) performs The Temptation Of Sgt.Howie, dancing sinuously in the bedroom next door, wrapping herself around the fixtures and fittings whilst miming to a vocal performed by Lesley Mackie, who also had a small acting role (although one of the many rumours that shroud The Wicker Man is that Scots jazz singer, Annie Ross voiced not only the song, but Ekland’s entire speaking part).
 

Somehow an increasingly desperate and sweaty Howie manages to resist this siren song despite almost literally climbing the walls as Willow promises to show him ‘How a maid can milk a bull / And every stroke a bucketful!’. Phew! If he had been less tightly buttoned, poor old Howie might have saved himself from the martyrdom that rolls inexorably into action the following day.

The sense of tension and dislocation gathers momentum in ‘The Masks / The Hobby Horse’ and ‘Searching For Rowan’ with dischords, hurrying footfalls, various splashings, knockings and scratchings, scornful laughter, a sawn fiddle and a bicycle bell moving into an interlude with organ and electic guitar and a girl singing ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’. All of this provides telling accompaniment to the surreal goings-on amongst the islanders as they prepare for the Mayday rite.

A trumpet and funereal drum are joined by more brass as the procession begins and a bagpipe takes up the tune which I will forever associate with the TV commercials for Scots Porridge Oats. Then the Nordic lyre eerily announces the brass march up to the cliff-top where the wicker man waits as the daylight dims.

As days by the seaside go, this is not a good one for Howie. To the sound of crashing waves, gulls, and Lord Summerisle’s  pronouncement of his ‘Appointment With The Wicker Man’, he is anointed by the three blonde harpies - Cilento, Ekland and Ingrid Pitt (aka Countess Dracula), then caged with the other assorted livestock (Edward Woodward, as well as sustaining a badly sprained foot during this scene, was also pissed upon by a goat through an upper chamber of the structure). As the fire is set at the base, Howie prays vigorously, defiantly belting out ‘The Lord Is My Shepherd’ as the assembled islanders and their laird join hands to sing a rousing ‘Summer Is A- Cumen In’ (possibly the oldest song in the English language).
 

The flames rise up and the structure crumbles, paradoxically suggesting a kind of salvation for Howie as well as the fulfilment of the islanders’ offering to their heathen gods. Finally, in the sombre trumpet fanfare of ‘Sunset’, the camera focuses on the glowing seascape as the sun sinks below the horizon. It’s a tremendous climax and an unforgettable moment in the history of British cinema.

The Wicker Man, along with some of the other more outré British films of the era – If (1968), Performance (1970) and Get Carter (1971), for instance, benefits from surprising and fascinating choices made with music. None of them, though – or, indeed, many films in general – feature such a coherent, imaginative and simpatico soundtrack as The Wicker Man.
  

N. B.

The 2002 issue of the complete soundtrack on Silva Screen Records has its virtues – including remastered sound and an excellent CD booklet that details the complex history of the film and music – but track-sequencing is not one of them. The album separates four tracks of incidental music from the main programme, tacking them onto the other twelve songs – for no good reason that I can detect. I would therefore advise anyone buying the album to immediately do what I did and burn a rearranged copy which commences with track 12, continues with tracks 1-7, followed by tracks 13-14, reverting to tracks 8-11 before concluding with tracks 15-16. In this way, the correct chronological order of the music can be restored as effectively as possible in line with the order of events in the film.

At the risk of adding yet more fuel to the smoking monument of rumour that surrounds The Wicker Man, I noticed that Oak, the imposingly large, bearded character who lugs the doomed Howie up into the actual wicker man, is named in the cast list as one Ian Campbell. Notwithstanding that this must be a common Scottish monicker, the actor does bear a striking resemblance to the leader of the well-known Ian Campbell Folk Group who just missed the UK Top 40 with their cover of  Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’. I can’t verify that they’re one and the same person, but the singer, Ian Campbell (1933 - 2012), would have been about the right age to have played the part in the film…

 In 2011, the director, Robin Hardy, now in his eighties, who had made only two films since The Wicker Man, neither of them successful, suddenly delivered The Wicker Tree, the first of two films he described as completing what he referred to as ‘The Wicker Man Trilogy’. Confusingly, neither of these films (the third in the series is to be titled The Wrath of The Gods) are intended as sequels to the original, but are designed as thematic companion pieces.

The Wicker Tree attracted only lukewarm reviews. I’ve yet to see it, but I have seen the 2006 Hollywood remake of The Wicker Man starring Nicholas Cage which deservedly met with a frigid response and featured utterly unremarkable soundtrack music.

Paul Giovanni died at the age of 57 in 1990 of an AIDS related illness in his native New York. Curiously, The Wicker Man is the only soundtrack he ever worked on. 
      c. 2013 IGR