4. Silent Running
I bought this when I was first in love with the film. I remember being taken up town to see it by the father of a friend of mine, who funnily enough it turns out is a famous conductor, although I don’t think I knew that at the time, his name was Johann Furst. It broke my heart – it was one of the most brilliant films I’d ever seen and it started my Bruce Dern obsession, which has recently come to the fore with Nebraska. I loved the music, the soundtrack album has two songs by Joan Baez as well as Peter Schickele’s score: ‘Rejoice In The Sun’ and ‘Silent Running’, or ‘Running Silent’ as she says. I remember it has that thing where you put the needle down on the record and it starts with the sound of Joan Baez singing that song, and I played it to death. It was one of those times where you play the record over and over again, and you have the movie playing in your head. We didn’t have videos then, so if you didn’t go back to the cinema you couldn’t see it again, but if you had a soundtrack album you could see it over and over in your own head. When we did a concert recently with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra we did a selection of stuff from Silent Running and loads of people said, "I’ve never heard anyone do Silent Running before", which I was very pleased about.
