6. Fire Walk With Me
The reason this is particularly important is that, if a film does badly the soundtrack just doesn’t get heard, and in the case of Fire Walk With Me when it came out it was reviewed terribly. There was a review in America which said: "In Twin Peaks nothing is ever what it seems – Fire Walk With Me isn’t the worst movie ever made, it just seems like it". I remember thinking that was the most wrong-headed thing I’d ever heard, because Fire Walk With Me was one of the best horror films of that year, and arguably one of the best films of the year. When it first came out my wife and I were in America and we went to see it in a mall, and went straight from the film into the local record shop and bought the cassette soundtrack album, and then we drove around listening to the soundtrack from Fire Walk With Me. I just loved it, I love the music of Angelo Badalamenti, I love the way he uses suspended chords. Some time later I did an onstage thing with him in Edinburgh, and it was one of the first onstage things he’d done where he talked through how he wrote the piece. He’d sit there at the keyboard with David Lynch behind him with a hand on his shoulder, and David Lynch would go, "you’re in the woods…", and "but now there’s an angel", it was wonderful. In fact again, when we did the CBSO concert we did an arrangement of the music from Fire Walk With Me and Badalamenti has been really nice about it, because when the film came out it got absolutely killed, yet he loves the music and is really really glad it’s getting the recognition it deserved.
