Sounds unlimited

April 2, 2005
Team players: left to right, Pele dos Santos (Seu Jorge), Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) and  Vladimir Wolodarsky (Noah Taylor) in <i>The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou</i>.

Team players: left to right, Pele dos Santos (Seu Jorge), Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) and Vladimir Wolodarsky (Noah Taylor) in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

A matching sense of humour has contributed to some inspired soundtracks, writes Jackie Chowns.

Mark Mothersbaugh is the lead singer of the pioneering electro-rock band Devo, who came to fame wearing matching yellow overalls and red plastic hats on their heads.

"We liked the idea of dressing alike and being a team, not like being five individuals on stage expressing their own personal feelings," says Mothersbaugh, on the phone from his studios on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. "We liked the idea of being like, 'Team Devo, a well-oiled machine'."

The band had a satirical core - their name, a contraction of the word devolution, spoke of their manifesto, which was that culture, rather than progressing, was actually going backwards.

Their first album Q: Are We Not Men? We are Devo! (1978), brought the catchy riffs of their unique sonic universe - guitars, drum machines and synthesisers - to an ecstatic underground audience, while their 1980 album Freedom of Choice launched them into the mainstream with the hits Girl U Want and Whip it!

While their popularity faded in the mid-'80s, Devo has experienced a renaissance performing in the United States, Japan and Australia since the late-'90s. The band had never actually disappeared though, finding a home at Mutato Muzika, Mothersbaugh's recording studios, where he has developed a successful alternative career composing scores for films, television and video games.

His latest is for Wes Anderson's wondrous The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and if you swap Devo's red plastic hats for red beanies, you have an outfit very similar to that worn by Team Zissou in Anderson's fanciful film. (To be fair, Jacques Cousteau, who inspired Anderson's oceanographic tale, also had a penchant for the red woolly cap.)

"He [Anderson] likes the uniform look," Mothersbaugh says. "We share that in common."

The pair are friends as well as musical collaborators and over the past 10 years have produced some of the most distinctive soundtracks to come out of Hollywood. The much-loved 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums recontextualised lesser known songs from the '60s and '70s and in the currently screening The Life Aquatic, the Brazilian pop star Seu Jorge sings 11 David Bowie songs in Portuguese.

Mothersbaugh has composed original scores for Anderson's four films, but he is reluctant to take credit for the total soundtrack, even though they work closely together, often during the scriptwriting stage. "I think, yeah, a lot of people contribute to it. A lot of people bring music and come and play things for Wes, but ultimately he chooses everything. He takes advice and if he likes it, he incorporates it, and if he doesn't, he throws it out."

Devo, circa 1980, with Mark Mothersbaugh at the front.

Devo, circa 1980, with Mark Mothersbaugh at the front.

But David Bowie songs sung with a bossa nova feel in Portuguese with only an acoustic guitar as accompaniment? "Well, he originally said, 'Mark, I'm thinking about putting 12 Devo songs in the movie.' And I'm like, 'Oh really! How would that work?' and then we talked about it and we decided that Bowie's songs you could sing in Portuguese and people would recognise them, but Devo songs, people might not know 'em, you know, on an acoustic guitar.

"The idea was to make it like a Greek chorus, and this guy would be commenting on what was going on in the film." The strongest emotional cues in Anderson's films often come from music, such as in The Royal Tenenbaums, where each song is critical in conveying the melancholy mood of regret and loss, and equally critical in the construction of character.

In The Life Aquatic Seu Jorge, who first came to Anderson's attention after appearing in the Brazilian film City of God and who had never heard the Bowie songs before he got the job of translating them, sings and plays Starman, Rebel Rebel and Life on Mars.

In the liner notes to the soundtrack Anderson says that during shooting in Italy, he tried to understand the Portuguese. "Thinking of the lyrics in English, I asked, 'Jorge, which word means cigarette?' because none of them sounded anything like it. He nodded and said something very poetic about friendship and hope and the future, but no 'cigarette'. I took a minute and thought about this and then said, 'OK, but every once in a while add in a rebel rebel, will you?"

Mothersbaugh scored the rest of the film with a trademark instrumental whimsy, but he also wrote a chintzy, deliberately outdated Casio track for the character of Vladimir Wolodarsky (played by Australian actor Noah Taylor), the ship's onboard composer, using some of Devo's old analog synths dragged up from his basement.

Anderson's influences are widespread and eclectic. He even took advice from Noah Taylor, who introduced him to the music of the Norwegian composer Sven Libaek, who scored the oceanographic film Innerspace by Australians Ron and Valerie Taylor. He used several tracks in the film.

"Wes makes soundtracks that he wants to listen to," says Mothersbaugh whose all-time favourite film score is To Kill a Mockingbird by Elmer Bernstein.

"A lot of the time, you work on films and the director isn't really part of the music - he steps out and other people take over. And they put together a soundtrack based on what kind of deal they can swing with MTV. Wes is not interested in any of that. He sees the album as an integral part of making a film."


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