Straight to Hell ~ Being a Review of the OST

Back in '88 I had the ost of Straight to Hell on vinyl and it was one of my favourite records. It was released on CD several years ago and went quickly OOP. I managed to track a copy of the CD down on ebay recently, at a decent price, and it arrived earlier in the week.

After seeing the film, which is quirky at best and not well thought out at worst, and then listening to the music, you realize that the music was the only aspect of the project that had any effort or thought put behind it. The film may have been an excuse for some drunken revelry in a dusty part of Spain, but the music was what really mattered.

If the film doesn't quite work as a pastiche of Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns, the music is an excellent pastiche of Ennio Morricone's music for Leone's western films. There's the right amount of tongue-in-cheek humour mixed with bravado. Ringing electric guitars, martial drum beats and mariachi trumpets on the Straight to Hell ost, from the MacManus Gang's (Elvis Costello) Big Nothing to Joe Strummer's ghostly Evil Darling and the breakneck Ambush at Mystery Rock where Strummer's gutturally garbled Spanish mutterings lend the right touch of menace. The Pogues contribute two frantic ballads, a re-worked version of If I Should Fall From Grace With God and Rake at the Gates of Hell plus a Morricone-esque instrumental, Rabinga. Surprisingly, their version of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a real winner, heavily mixed and sampled with snippets of Eli Wallach's character Tucho shouting abuse. One track is utterly out of context and thus the weakest track ... Xander Schloss's Salsa y Ketchup.

A new edition of the Straight to Hell OST is available featuring more instrumental music but leaving out several tracks from the original OST ... shockingly The Pogues version of The Good, the Bad & the Ugly. What?!