Sound and fury
This month’s conjuration chosen by Paul Weller: avant-garde medieval brutality for Shakespeare. Third Ear Band
Music From Macbeth HARVEST, 1972
TODAY, DIRECTOR Roman Polanski remains a fugitive from US justice, after he left the country in 1977 while awaiting sentencing for “unlawful intercourse with a minor.”
Five years earlier he’d released his film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. His first project since his wife Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson Family in Los Angeles in August 1969, it was rejected by the major US studios and was eventually financed by Hugh Hefner’s Playboy organisation. Stricken with bad weather on-set in Wales and Northumberland, the violence-and-nudity-packed production went massively over budget and then bombed, losing more than $3 million.
Less troubled by the curse of the Scottish Play was the haunting soundtrack by London transglobal, transtemporal ensemble the Third Ear Band. It’s a favourite of MOJO guest editor Paul Weller. “I remembered the name from the music papers in the ’70s, but I’d never listened to them,” says Weller. “Since then I’ve listened to a few of their records but I love this one – I think it’s really special.”
The group came together in the later ’60s, after percussionist Glen Sweeney’s spells in such free-form freak collectives as The Giant Sun Trolley and The Hydrogen Jukebox. “Glen always claimed that he was a junkie who cured himself of heroin by taking lots of acid,” says TEB manager and producer Andrew King. “He was a complicated, determined little chap – he wasn’t a great drummer, but things happened around him and he attracted good people, like Paul Minns – the Coltrane of the oboe!”
By 1971, Third Ear Band had opened for The Rolling Stones at Hyde Park and released two LPs and a soundtrack for German TV film Abelard & Heloise. Then the call came from Polanski’s office. Now with cellist/bassist Paul Buckmaster, future Hawkwind/Bowie violinist
Simon House and guitarist Denim Bridges in the ranks, they were hired to soundtrack the Bard’s bloody tale of regicide, fatal flaws and devilish equivocation in medieval Scotland.
Band and manager went to Shepperton studios (“it was quite fun sitting in the canteen with all the film stars,” says King) to confer as the production neared its end. When the film reached the editing stage, reels were brought two at a time to Air Studios on Oxford Circus. “They were played on a projector, and the band improvised to them, recording live,” says King, who recalls three months of daily recording from summer 1971.
“There was the proper level of concentration for what was hard and tiring work. They’d do several takes but I don’t remember any editing.
Polanski was involved, he popped in. I think he thought Buckmaster was the easiest guy to deal with, but I don’t remember him interfering in an A&R, why-don’t-you-do-this? sort of way. I think he just felt he’d set it up and let it happen. He’d have known straight away if something was going wrong.”
In contrast to the lengthy, floatational pieces so far recorded by the TEB, the soundtrack’s cues are short and intense. Building on the Sweeney/ Minns core of hand drums, oboe and recorder with spider-like guitars, strings, electric bass lines and electronic sounds, its droning evocations of horror, murder and supernatural gloom echo northern European medieval rites and revels, but also head for Neolithic tombs of the Mediterranean and further east, with folk rock, (burial) chamber music and aleatoric elements adding to the occult mystique.
“It’s kind of hard to place what they do,” says Weller. “Is it avant-garde? Is it medieval music? It’s like, halfway between early electronic music and madrigals! At first they sound really dissonant, but then after a while you work out that it’s not – it’s just a harmony you’re not used to. It’s not hippyish; it’s brutal. Kind of harsh, but in a cool way.”
The song Fleance uses an adaptation of Chaucer’s 14th-century poem Merciless Beauty, sung by future British TV presenter Keith Chegwin, then aged 14. “I presume Keith Chegwin came in and did it at Air with the group,” says King. “He was a proper choirboy, he had a ver y good unbroken voice. It wasn’t typical Third Ear Band – I think they thought it was a little bit coy and poppy, and a bit wet.” Fleance later appeared in songs played on Johnny Rotten’s Capital Radio appearance in ’77.
When the film was completed, King recalls a party at a London Mexican restaurant with much dancing on tables. It premiered in London on Januar y 31, 1972, with Princess Anne in attendance. However, Third Ear Band did not achieve soundtrack success like Tangerine Dream or Popol Vuh. Buckmaster soon left – he’d already arranged for Bowie and the Stones – and in spring they lost their deal with Harvest. A new song-oriented album themed around Tarot cards for the Island label went unreleased, and the group went on hiatus in ’74, finally disbanding in 1993. Paul Minns took his own life in 1997; Sweeney died in 2005.
“I don’t think they ever thought they’d be a big group, but they wanted to make enough money to make it viable, and that did happen for a time,” reflects King. “They sold rather more records than anyone would imagine – they always out-sold Kevin Ayers, for example. And they should have got more film commissions, and probably should have done better… it’s probably because they had a rotten manager – ie, me.”
As for Weller, he admits he hasn’t seen the film – “I’d like to” – but wouldn’t mind more soundtrack work, after 2017’s boxing drama Jawbone. “I’d like to do a horror,” he says. “Not a slasher movie. I saw [2019 British psychological chiller] Saint Maud the other night – something like that…”