(Credits: Far Out / Ronald Grant Archive / Alamy)
David Lynch loved music as much as he adored movies, there’s no doubt about that.
Often including musical performances in his films (who can forget Dean Stockwell lip-syncing to Roy Orbison in Blue Velvet, the movie itself named after Bobby Vinton’s track?), the director saw music as one of the most vital organs within a cinematic body.
From James Hurley’s laughable laments of “just you and I, together, forever, in love” in Twin Peaks to Rebekah Del Rio’s powerful Spanish-language performance of ‘Crying’ by Orbison in Mulholland Drive, the filmmaker’s work is packed full of memorable musical moments. The theme song of Twin Peaks alone, composed by Lynch’s close collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, is enough to instantly transport you to this gloriously dark world, where tragedy is at least soundtracked by something beautiful.
Somehow, Lynch was able to find the time to make music as well as multiple acclaimed films and a groundbreaking television series – oh, and paintings and sculptures, too. His whole life revolved around creating art, and sometimes that practice was based around evoking the essence of his films via sonic means, as though he’d bottled up his Lynchian world and poured it into one of those liquid-filled records, probably a murky grey colour with some flecks of silver and gold swimming around.
Place the needle down and you’ll hear something that can only be attributed to Lynch, seductive and dark, an industrial sleaziness evoking scenes of American desolation and mysterious cityscapes. This is the best way to describe BlueBOB, the album Lynch and John Neff made (sometimes calling themselves BlueBOB, too) in 2001.
Lynch began the project as a way to experiment with his interest in industrial rock, which he’d earlier shown a love for when he made 1997’s Lost Highway, its soundtrack including contributions from Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor. With Neff, Lynch created an album that is as mesmerising as it is haunting, and it was only appropriate that two of the songs, ‘Go Get Some’ and ‘Mountains Falling’, made it onto the Mulholland Drive soundtrack.
Describing the album, Lynch told the Los Angeles Times, “BlueBob started because I love machines. I said, ‘John, I want beats like machines, like dogs on PCP – when they bite down you feel it.’”
That visceral intensity is certainly present, from the slow hammering of ‘Bad Night’, which is punctuated by rough, western-inspired guitars and Neff’s deep voice, to the ambient fuzz of ‘City of Dreams’, a sonic interpretation of a bad migraine that prevents you from seeing or thinking clearly.
While Lynch was never a proper performer – he preferred to be confined to the studio – the filmmaker was still thrilled to have made an album that could be given life on stage. “John is a performer, and we had a killer band. I am not a performer. I just sat there like an idiot. It was torment,” he explained. It might have been torturous to feel unable to give a performance that replicated what he was able to do in his studio, but Lynch found the project incredibly creatively fulfilling nonetheless.
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