Mystery Train and other soundtracks

There I was in the late teens, right at the age when music is the most important thing in the world to you and all your peers, and all I really wanted to listen to was movie soundtracks on the walkman.

My mates would come back from university visits with things like the first stirrings of Britpop - I still remember how baffled I was by Simon's 'girls who are boys who like boys to be girls' song when he tried to explain it - and there I am, listening to the fucking Mystery Train soundtrack as I walk around town

The wife hates Jarmusch, but I've been there for his films since finding the chunky Mystery Train video tape at Video Ezy, sometime in the early 90s. I turned out to be a complete sucker for that effortless cool, that lack of rush, the bright minimalism.

I had to get that soundtrack after that, and got the tape from Warren at Rhino Records, and got heavily into the most laid-back Elvis I ever heard, the soft, fast pulsing of Roy Orbison and the languid strolling of John Lurie's score.

I still went and got sweaty at all sorts of gigs and we all blasted the speakers on the cars we were driving with the latest heavy tunes, but music can be enjoyed in so many different ways, and I was also deeply into walking around town with the walkman, stretching the legs and feeding the head.

And the Mystery Train soundtrack was fucking perfect for walking around town on an Sunday afternoon. That's what the music was created for, to go with the visuals of foreign people on the wide streets of Memphis, and that's what it produced in my real world steps.

After dark, I would burn off all that frustrating adolescent energy with another soundtrack, and the Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me album was often on the headphones - the empty darkness of the world filled with the stuttering bass of The Black Dog Runs At Night, but all that dread was defeated by the inevitable strut of A Real Indication.

I had the soundtracks for In The Name Of The Father, and Flash Gordon, and all the Tarantino movies - Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, True Romance and Natural Born Killers - and they were the perfect intersection in the love for both movies and music, and they were all played hundreds and hundreds of times.

Tapes endure over time, and I still have all of these cassettes. I've got them out of the cupboard and onto the alarm clock tape player. My kids don't seem too impressed, but these tapes will still be here when they're struggling to find their own musical tastes, and I have a few ideas to get them started.