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The Pastels return after a long absence with a spooky original score written for independent Brit-flick The Last Great Wilderness.

The Last Great Wilderness OST by The Pastels

"The Last Great Wilderness - currently on release on DVD and video by Universal - is a supernatural thriller set in the Scottish Highlands. Director David Mackenzie’s full-length debut, it does not seem to connect with the prevailing moods of contemporary British film-making, with reviewers instead referencing lower budget neo-gothic one-offs such as Michael Reeves’ film Witchfinder General, the fabulous Wicker Man and This Filthy Earth.

Undoubtedly much of the film’s distinctiveness comes from its use of music and the type of rare collaboration which David Mackenzie established with The Pastels, on this, their first film music commission.

"A Soulful, Melancholy"

Director David Mackenzie says: "Music is so central to the flavour of a film and The Pastels’ music for our film is an enormous contribution to its vibe. I wanted to give Last Great Wilderness a soulful, melancholy and slightly anarchic feel. Well, we certainly got that. It's amazing to look back on it now and feel how close it ended up to the original intention.

"Some of the music came early in demo form and we used it in the edit to shape the film. The rest was scored to fit the final cut of the film and here the music is shaped by the film. It was a great pleasure for me to be in the recording for these moments where the musicians were watching the video playback and playing along to the rhythm of the film in a sort of semi-improvised way. It felt so much like the process of shooting the film, with performance bending to the flow of the material - Stephen directing and John McEntire on 'camera'."

But The Pastels also get to step in front of the lens for the film – in an on screen moment eerily reminiscent of composer Paul Giovanni’s appearances as a singing villager in Anthony Schaffer’s The Wicker Man, which he both scored and performed. The director continues: "In ’Wilderness the musicians have an extra dimension in that they are actually characters; most of The Pastels performing as ‘The Wilderness Seven’ and covering one of their great tracks, Unfair Kind of Fame, as Highland villagers in drag, at a pagan wake. This for me is one of the absolute high points in the movie. Not only that, the starting point of the story is basically motivated by I Picked A Flower, a song performed, of course, by The Pastels and featuring Jarvis Cocker."

"So music for a film is a complex mesh of necessity and atmosphere, sometimes subtly underpinning emotion, sometimes spreading out and letting the audience just breathe it all in. I am very glad to have had the opportunity to work with this group and have been utterly impressed by their gentle creativity."

Pastels main man, Stephen McRobbie, explains how the band’s first cinematic collaboration came about. "The first thing we learnt about film music projects is that everything either takes place in slow motion or in fast forward. David Mackenzie first suggested the possibility of us working together in 1999 (on a film, High Tide, that is still in development). Previous experience had taught us that the surest way to check out the veracity of such high spirited proposals is the request of a showreel. Not only did David come through with an excellent showreel, but we were able to note his use of (uncleared) Pastels music and acknowledge that here was a potential fellow traveller."

Laid-Back Tunes

So what does this extraordinary, long-awaited new Pastels record sound like? Well, fans of the band will know what to expect - laconic, laid-back tunes complete with off-kilter melodies and angular instrumentation. This may be largely instrumentals, but it really is classic Pastels. As this was written to accompany images the band gives every member of the principle cast of the film their own theme. The opening Wilderness Theme is a breezy, gentle track, complete with swooning trumpets.

Second track Winter Driving features probably the most Pastels-like of the whole album - on first hearing. You could almost be forgiven for thinking this was an intro to a new version of the band’s track Yoga (from the excellent Mobile Safari). Track six, Everybody Is A Star is the first to feature vocals on the album – and makes a lovely, wistful diversion from the instrumentals that have come before.

On I Picked A Flower, Pulp front man Jarvis Cocker displays his usual lugubrious half talking, half singing style, while The Pastels provide a suitable guitar backing that gets surprisingly close to being funky(!) for this least funky of bands. With its quiet refrain: "A rose knows nothing of her beauty, unless you reflect it back to her" the track could almost be a TV theme tune. Perhaps The Pastels have found a new direction!

At under 25 minutes the whole album is a little short for a modern CD, but when the quality is this good, the width doesn’t matter nearly so much – and it really is lovely to have the group back after the long wait since the release of Illuminati and the One Wild Moment EP back in ’98.

Post-Trainspotting

Stephen McRobbie continues: "In the first place we tried to establish a sense of what we both felt the role of music in film is, and its central importance. Ironically we seemed to reach a common consent that music was often getting in the way of the narrative, particularly in contemporary British film-making. A new tendency had emerged post-Trainspotting for music to be used mainly as a hip signifier, whereby songs from Iggy Pop, Lee Hazlewood, Primal Scream seemed to be slotted in without apparent motive. We couldn’t help but contrast this with the freshness of Paul Giovanni’s Wicker Man music, with Jacques Tati’s use of sound, with Godard’s risk-taking, and of course with the incredible work of Morricone, Komeda et al...

"We felt we already had established some ground rules by the time David asked if we would like to participate in a different project, The Last Great Wilderness. When we got the rough script we decided that what it needed was a simple approach of responding to images and conveying its Scottish location through notes and intervals which are completely natural to us.

"We talked of the music not giving too much away, of tracking the actors in places and at other times being absolutely neutral. We talked of the music not giving too much away, of tracking the actors in places and at other times being absolutely neutral; what we were really hoping to achieve was a kind of homespun lushness which would correspond with David¹s gritty digital images of some very epic looking locations.

Soundtrack

"We wanted to try to deal with every aspect of the soundtrack and asked that we be given responsibility for everything from songs crucial to the narrative to incidental music to background sound. When David asked for a ‘dirty pop song’ we managed to persuade Jarvis Cocker to collaborate with us ‘in character’; for ‘1980s jukebox tracks’ we worked with our friends, Quinn. We treated the whole process as a massive learning curve, and have to be grateful that David was mostly prepared to indulge us, especially those moments when we were so close to it, we were thinking of it as ‘our film’. In the end we realised that wasn’t the case, but that we’d been given the opportunity to develop our music in a completely satisfying way."

The Pastels are a Glasgow-based independent music group. On this project, other participating musicians were Stephen McRobbie, Katrina Mitchell, Tom Crossley, Alison Mitchell, Gerard Love, Bill Wells, Tori Kudo, Colin McIlroy, James Rutledge, Jarvis Cocker, Bal Cooke, John McEntire.

All wrapped up in a great atmospheric sleeve - painted by Annabel Wright - The Last Great Wilderness is a great moody little soundtrack album that should win the band new fans, as well as making a few old ones break into broad grins. Don’t leave it so long next time though, eh fellas?

Read a whole feature about the film The Last Great Wilderness here.

The Pastels – a selected discography

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