John Carpenter
Usher Hall
Edinburgh
Four stars
And so at the age of 68 John Carpenter, the film director who gave us Halloween and The Fog (and who wrote their accompanying soundtracks), has decided to become a rock star.
At the Usher Hall he wandered onto stage dressed in black, giving us an old man's half-jig in delight at the applause and then he and his band started to play rather more loudly than some may have expected. Halfway through he even apologised to a man who was putting his fingers in his ears.
We live in an age when Michael Bay can get money to make movies but Carpenter cannot, so of late he has been working with his son Cody and godson Daniel Davies on two albums of imaginary soundtrack music.
Tracks from both were threaded through the performance but, really, the audience had come to hear the music Carpenter had written for his own films. And so the theme fromEscape From New York kicked things off.
Carpenter the composer was one of the pioneers of electronic soundtracks, but this performance was amped up with drums, bass and electric guitar (impressively provided by Davies).
The synth purist in me was slightly put out but it would be impossible to deny that the resulting sound - all concrete, gravel and pig iron - had a weight to it.
It did mean that the knifing electronic pulses of the theme to Halloween were given an added rough-hewn ballast that blunted their serrated edge. But you couldn't deny the gut punch of the impact.
It wasn't perfect. The visuals - brutally paring back the films to their best bits - distracted attention and were at times slightly out of sync with the music. Even so, this was a potent night out.
And he brought the whole thing in on a running time of less than 90 minutes. B movie length.
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