The phenomenal Trunk label keep up their unique work by giving Marc Wilkinson's score for a 1971 cult British horror movie its first ever release. Film fans, soundtrack aficionados, and addicts of obscure music will all be thrilled, as Blood on Satan's Claw is beautiful and disconcerting in equal measure.
Most of my memories of the golden age of British horror involve sitting on couches in the homes of various friends sometime around 11:45 pm on a Friday or Saturday night, drunk, eating chips or toast. Hopefully, on the television would be a historical drama that was ever so slightly camp, fairly nasty (without excessive gore), reassuringly predictable in terms of plot, and full of titillating flesh! Ideally, the craft of solid character actors could allow the proceedings to avoid both tongue-in-cheek complacency or wooden heroics, and the nudity might provide lashings of conflicting evidence for what may now be called the Darryl Hannah/Betty Page conundrum. For sure, the shifting atmospheres of suspense, lust, confusion, mystery and fear would always depend upon the music.
As befits the soundtrack to a quality movie from the Tigon production team that three years earlier had made the remarkable Witchfinder General, there is something decidedly off-kilter and addictive about this music. It was designed that way. For starters, composer Marc< Wilkinson added a couple of twists to the standard orchestral lineup. The eerie swooping sounds were created by using the Ondes Martinet, a keyboard which he describes as "without doubt the first really successful electronic instrument." In addition he used the cimbalom, a kind of piano played with mallets that in Eastern Europe has sometimes been associated with the Devil. The unease that this music stirs has roots that are deep and ancient. As Wilkinson reveals: "The descending chromatic scale which features throughout the music omits the perfect fifth (the only true consonant in the chromatic scale) and therefore highlights the diminished fifth, which ever since the middle ages in Europe has been known as the Devil's Interval!"
If that all sounds rather academic then fear not, for parts of this disc are almost as lush as the theme from the 1964 TV series Robinson Crusoe, a tad spookier than the Dr Who theme, and as alluring as both. Blood on Satan's Claw fits perfectly with the vision of label boss Jonny Trunk. Trunk unearths gems which transcend kitsch and nostalgia by celebrating the sonic quality of their essence. The label has issued John Cameron's music from Kes, sublime smut from a 1970s English porn queen on Mary Millington Talks Dirty, original music by Delia Derbyshire and others from the TV series The Tomorrow People, and the lost advertising sounds of Music For Biscuits. Trunk has also put out an unreleased soundtrack to George Romero's Dawn Of The Dead, Oliver Postage's music from the children's TV show The Clangers (the first 26 vinyl copies in pink and gold hand knitted sleeves) the soundtrack to the insane biker movie Psychomania, and music from Gerry Anderson's still sexy and hip space TV show UFO. That's not to mention Resurrection (an album of holy jazz, altar rock and Christian freakouts) or Desmond Leslie's Music Of The Future—the "musique concrete" of an ex-spitfire pilot who created music from the sound of the destruction of musical instruments. It would be remiss to forget to mention the records of "ambient godfather" Basil Kirchin. His band sometimes included Jimmy Page and Tubby Hayes and Abstractions of The Industrial North is but one of his fabulous records. Doing justice to the Trunk catalog in a single paragraph is impossible but it's safe to say that the wise will want to avoid missing their limited issues. The recent sampler Now We Are Ten is a great place to start.
Of course, not everyone has Trunk's ear or cultural instinct: the film Blood on Satan's Claw was released in the US as Satan's Skin but, without wishing to give away the plot, it's hard to escape the feeling that whoever chose that title missed a great opportunity to call it Satan's Eyebrows.
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