07-2003 / The Sunday Herald, Glasgow / The Sex Pastels

The Sex Pastels

Music: Graeme Virtue gets the dirt on how Glasgow's guardians of sweet guitar sounds got sleazy with Jarvis Cocker to produce a movie soundtrack full of midsummer menace

THE Pastels are many things - consistently brilliant musicians, keepers of the flame of the Glasgow music scene for almost 20 years, custodians of the endlessly surprising Geographic record label - but it's fair to say that their fragile, folk-influenced guitar sound has never really challenged Nelly or the late Barry White in terms of bump'n'grind sexiness.
So it's surprising to hear them backing Jarvis Cocker on I Picked A Flower, a sweet-sounding but gutter-minded song that isn't afraid to get its hands dirty by employing gardening terminology as a metaphor for sex. In the course of the radio-friendly ditty - recorded under nom de tune The Nu Forest - a sleazy-sounding Cocker berates a lazy lover he's successfully cuckolded.

"Maybe you didn't dare plant your seed in her flowerbed, so she turned to me instead," he intones in a husky whisper. "And as she lays across my big brass bud … your name is mud, my friend."

Although it's only very recently been released as a single, you might have heard I Picked A Flower if you were one of the few people who managed to catch director David Mackenzie's oddball Scottish road movie The Last Great Wilderness when it briefly visited cinemas back in May. In the movie, it enrages protagonist Charlie (played by David's brother Alastair Mackenzie) whenever he hears it on the radio, probably because his wife actually has run off with the pop singer.

The Pastels had been recruited to compose the soundtrack to the film after a chance meeting between band-leader Stephen McRobbie and David Mackenzie on a train, back in 1999. But while the pastoral setting and dark undertow of the movie seemed to jigsaw with their sound, weren't the band concerned about coming up with a plausible pop hit?

"There was some pressure," remembers McRobbie. "The way that we are and the music that we do always seems so far away from pop. So the rest of the soundtrack was easier because it felt closer to how we are."

"But it was quite touching that David thought we could do it," interjects Katrina Mitchell, the other half of The Pastels. "Because we weren't sure at first. It's not like we've ever had a hit!"

Getting Cocker - a friend of The Pastels since Pulp played their first Glasgow gig years ago - to collaborate on the song was certainly an inspired move. But then, if you're after louche, literate, convincing sleaze-pop, where else could you possibly go?

"I couldn't really think of anyone apart from Jarvis," says McRobbie, "because he's got this depth that he gets things really really quickly but he's also got a good pop sensibility and has had a lot of stuff in the charts. And he was really good about it - he made himself really available and just got stuck in. He's got no attitude."

"I don't think anyone could have written better lyrics for that song," adds Mitchell. "He got really into the character and wrote screeds and screeds of slimy lyrics that we weren't able to use. I think he really enjoyed it."

I Picked A Flower comes at the end of The Pastels' soundtrack album, released next week. But why is the record coming out now, four months after the film was in cinemas?

"I'm not sure," says McRobbie, carefully. "Ideally, we would have wanted The Nu Forest to be on the radio when the film was out because it would have added to the confusion. But it's really disastrous to release an independent film in the summer and we just weren't ready to go with the record in May."

But despite this lack of marketing synergy, McRobbie and Mitchell insist that their first soundtrack experience was utterly enjoyable - remarkable considering the film industry is usually characterised by endless artistic compromises. But it probably helped that Mackenzie and the band shared a similar vision when it came to the music.

"We all discussed our ideas about how film music should be," explains McRobbie, "and we felt that the way it was being used in British cinema was starting to detract from the film. You'd be so aware of the songs - there's an Iggy Pop song, there's Primal Scream - that it got in the way of the narrative. And I don't think David wanted to locate his film anywhere time-specific, he wanted a warped reality, so it would have been really wrong to have all these signifiers."

The end result is a lapping, transportive soundtrack, full of fairytale foreboding and midsummer menace. Paul Giovanni's celebrated score for 1973 horror flick The Wicker Man is an acknowledged reference point, but the band have carved out their own eerie niche, with the help of various collaborators, including Teenage Fanclub's Gerry Love, jazz pianist Bill Wells and John McEntire from US avant-garde experimentalists Tortoise. The movie was shot on digital video, making it relatively easy to see rough edits during the compositional process. But one track on the record - a breathy cover of Sly And The Family Stone's Everybody Is A Star - didn't actually make it into the final cut of the film.

"Sly's people were looking for £12,000 to clear it for one minute's use," says McRobbie. "There just isn't that kind of money available when you're making an independent film."

The Last Great Wilderness may have bombed at the box office, but the forthcoming release of David Mackenzie's next movie Young Adam - starring Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton - might inspire audiences to re-examine the first film when it comes out on DVD later this year.

For their part, The Pastels are planning to begin work on a new album proper later in the year, although working in pictures hasn't lost its allure - they were recently thrilled to field a request from director Ken Loach to license their song The Viaduct for use in his new film Ae Fond Kiss. And they certainly didn't charge £12,000 for the privilege.

The album The Last Great Wilderness is released on August 4