Sometimes when you are watching a film the music used is so perfect it gives you goosebumps.
I had one of these moments earlier in the year watching Richard Ayoade's The Double. The song that strikes up over the end credits just felt so right I couldn't help but sit there until the very last frame with a massive grin on my face. In this case it was a song I hadn't heard before, an obscure but sublime South Korean psychedelic folk track The Sun By Kim Jung Mi.
It can also give you goosebumps when a song is used that you know very well but haven't heard in a long time. At a pivotal moment in John Michael McDonagh's Calvary Brendon Gleeson's Father James drives his car to Roger Whittaker's New World in the Morning. This immediately struck a chord with me, a cassette of Whittaker's Greatest Hits accompanying many a family car journey when I was growing up.
Driving scenes in films lend themselves to musical accompaniment. An obvious way of moving the story forward from A to B whilst giving a clue to a characters state of mind using an appropriate track, the history of film is littered with great driving montages; some of my favourites include Hal Ashby's beautifully cut Cat Stevens backed sequences in Harold & Maude, the tour bus singalong to Elton John's Tiny Dancer in Almost Famous and the two Withnail & I scenes set to Jimi Hendrix tracks; All Along the Watchtower as they head out of London in Withnail's battered old Jaguar and Voodoo Chile in the scene that has Marwood waking up in the car to find an intoxicated Withnail has taken charge of the wheel; 'I'm making time..!'.
The use of All Along the Watchtower has the added advantage of being one of my favourite songs. Other tracks to appear in my Top 30 and also be used in perfect music/ film moments include Be My Baby in the opening credits of Mean Streets and the unsettling use of Jackson Browne's Late for the Sky in Taxi Driver, both directed by Martin Scorsese, one of a handful of directors you can always rely on to fill their film's soundtracks with fantastic pop music.
One of my favourite pop soundtracks of recent years was Sofia Coppolas divisive take on Marie Antoinette (above), that combined historical costume drama with 80's/ 90's Post Punk and New Wave to beautiful effect.
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