Graeme Revell

The first soundtrack of Graeme Revell’s that I’ve ever heard is from a movie I still haven’t actually seen. My sister’s then-boyfriend acquired it, I think—I’m pretty sure he’d seen the movie; it’s the sort of person he was—and I listened to it on tape in those days and then recently found it on CD at a thrift store. I’ll admit that my fondness for it started because of things like “Death’s Door,” by Depeche Mode, and “Calling All Angels,” by Jane Siberry and k. d. lang. But the score included in it was lovely, and I was fond of it. Maybe not as fond as I was of Julee Cruise singing “Summer Kisses, Winter Tears,” but still.

Revell initially formed an industrial band with a coworker at a mental hospital where he was working in the ‘70s. SPK was apparently quite the show; there are not a lot of people whose Wikipedia pages include the time they accidentally set an audience member on fire with a flamethrower, that’s all I’ll say. But their music was well-received enough for him to be hired to score Dead Calm. Previously something called Escape: World Safari III, but I don’t have a ton of information on his association with it beyond a score credit.

After Dead Calm, though, he did a few obscure Australian works and some American horror sequels—Child’s Play II and Psycho IV—before Until the End of the World, the soundtrack referenced above. The music on that was intended to be what the various recording artists saw themselves as making ten years later, when the film was set. (Funnily enough, around the time the movie is set, in 1999, Revell would score Titan AE.) It seems to have been the score that made him something of a go-to guy for strange movies.

Actually, I own three soundtrack albums from movies he worked on. In addition to Until the End of the World, he did the score for those two beloved Goth films of the mid-’90s, The Crow and The Craft. The Crow soundtrack doesn’t include any of his work; you have to buy a separate score album. You can also buy a separate score album for The Craft, but the soundtrack, which I’ve owned since the movie came out, includes his “Bells, Books and Candles.” He also did the scores for Spawn and Tank Girl, pretty much cornering a specific market in those days.

His work is not limited to ‘90s Goth-beloved scores, either. Over the years, he’s composed scores for what appears to be an anti-Stratfordian documentary, thirty episodes of CSI: Miami, and The Adventures of Shark Girl and Lava Boy in3D. He did Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie and Pineapple Express. Apparently he enjoys the challenge of doing multiple different styles, as who can blame him. He’s not in the top tier of composers you think of in movies, but my goodness you know his work.