"The report would be: 'Routine Retirement of a Replicant', which didn't make me feel any better about shooting a woman in the back."
Blade Runner - original voice-over
This is a kind of follow-on to the previous post about directors not being able to source the music they want for films and having to improvise instead. This time, rather than Blue Velvet, the film in question is Blade Runner. There's a scene where, after 'retiring' the replicant Zora - the source of the quote above - Deckard heads to a one-eyed street vendor and buys himself a bottle of whiskey, intending to head home and drown his sorrows. In the background, a radio is playing an old-fashioned sounding tune. It is, in fact, 'One More Kiss, Dear', co-written by Vangelis (music) and Peter Skellern (lyrics), and performed by Don Percival.
Now, while the incidental music of the film is all high tech synthesised twiddling by Vangelis, this song is an oddity on the Blade Runner soundtrack. It is clearly intended to evoke something of the 30s and 40s Noir that the film takes as its visual inspiration (so much so that Ridley Scott even re-used the Bradbury Apartments in Los Angeles for the climax of the film, first glimpsed in 1949 noir classic D.O.A.). Indeed, it sounds particularly like 1930s black harmony group The Ink Spots (that name, yeah... well, it was the 30s I guess), and especially their 1939 hit 'If I Didn't Care', with its spoken part (about 2:02 onwards). It turns out this is far from accidental, as Scott originally had in mind to use If I Didn't Care for that scene, and indeed, the original theatrical trailer actually uses the Ink Spots' song (from 2:12 onwards). However, it seems that, as with David Lynch and This Mortal Coil, Ridley Scott either wasn't able to secure the rights to If I Didn't Care, or else found them too expensive, and he came up with the same solution: get your soundtrack composer to write something that sounds similar enough that it will work, but different enough that you won't get sued.
Vangelis in turn seems to have looked to Noel Coward-esque singer songwriter Peter Skellern to help out, and the two of them have clearly taken another 1930s crooner, Jessie Matthews as their starting point, as there are uncanny similarities to her 1932 song 'One More Kiss, Then Goodnight'. But the thing that really left me blinking in surprise was the discovery that Demis Roussos was originally down to sing 'One More Kiss', until Ridley heard the demo version, which had been voiced as an interim measure by music impressario Don Percival, and decided that he liked it so much that it could stay as it is.
By such happy accidents are great things made, and even trends begun - in this case using the carefree 30s sound of the Ink Spots as a soundtrack for dystopian fiction, as this rather wonderful blog post notes, including video games Fallout and Bioshock, and the TV series The Walking Dead. Blade Runner was an incredibly influential film, and sometimes its influences are subtle but far reaching.
"Drink some for me, huh, pal?"
