SOUNDTRACKS
VARIOUS/CLIFF MARTINEZ | LAKESHORE
Listeners, it’s Drive time!
When a film isn’t overburdened with idle natter, the music can step in and take over the emotional satnav. Still fresh a decade on, the soundtrack to Nicolas Winding Refn’s existential romantic thriller nails the job without once losing its cool. Exquisitely curated and evocatively scored, it plays like a crash course in atmosphere, emotion and style, designed to fit the film like a silk jacket.
Just as its songs seduced fans into fancying themselves as Ryan Gosling at the wheel, so their makers steered the soundtrack as a whole. One key influence was Johnny Jewel, of the Italians Do It Better label and nightowl hipsters Chromatics. From its title down, Chromatics’ Night Drive album (2007) helped set Drive’s neon-noir tone and furnished Refn with the John Carpenter-ish ‘Tick Of The Clock’.
In the blissed-out synth-pop mix, Desire’s ‘Under Your Spell’ and College/Electric Youth’s ‘A Real Hero’ provided warmth beneath the wheels. Produced with Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, French house don Kavinsky’s ‘Nightcall’ is another expressive beauty, evoking distance and longing between Kavinsky’s electro-treated vocals and Lovefoxxx’s unguarded coo. If charges of arch electro-nostalgia never stuck to Drive, one vital point explains why: among other virtues, its music is meltingly, sincerely gorgeous.
Jewel was initially hired to score the film, but the gig ultimately went to the more experienced Cliff Martinez, who was brought in on a ferocious deadline. Luckily, Steven Soderbergh’s wingman had an indie-schooled head for working at speed – and he had the songs to navigate by.
Duly, Martinez eloquently evokes the one-step remove of a world seen through glass in the rain-slicked shimmer of ‘Rubber Head’ and ‘I Drive’. By emphasising mood over momentum, monkish minimalism over mayhem, he also gives himself room to move in tight spots, sliding elegantly between narcotic reveries (‘Wrong Floor’) and throbbing intimations of volcanic violence (‘Skull Crushing’). Martinez’s man-machine marriage displays impeccable tonal control right up to the closing ‘Bride Of Deluxe’, where a supple shift into top gear summons the sensation of waking from a dream.
If certain ’80s influences - Tangerine Dream, Vangelis – linger, Drive also honoured their pioneering spirits by pointing the way forward. Its influence stretched from Kung Fury and The Guest to Taken 2. More pointedly still, Stranger Things’ Duffer bros drew deep inspiration from its mix of retro-cool and in-the-now emotion. Drive may not say much, but it makes sure you feel every flickering heartbeat.