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Music has always been an integral part of filmmaking, all the way back to when live musicians provided the soundtrack for silent pictures. However, few directors have woven music as firmly into their filmographies as Quentin Tarantino. From the beginning, music has been an inextricable element of his cinematic style, starting with that classic introduction in Reservoir Dogs set to George Baker Selection’s ‘Little Green Bag.’
If you conjure a memory of a particularly striking scene in one of his films, chances are, it was backed by a killer needle drop. Think of the scene in Pulp Fiction when Uma Thurman’s Mia Wallace returns from a night of dancing with John Travolta’s Vincent Vega and hits play on ‘Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon’ by Urge Overkill. It might have been a Neil Diamond cover, but that version has become definitive thanks to that scene.
In Django Unchained, Tarantino achieved the sonic aesthetic he sought by simply recycling the theme song of the 1966 spaghetti western on which the film was based. It might not have been the most imaginative use of music in his oeuvre, but it does add another layer to the genre collage.
One of the director’s favourite uses of music in movies, however, wasn’t even of his own making. Even more surprising, given his vast knowledge of and love for cinema history, it was a contemporary filmmaker who did it.
Edgar Wright’s 2021 film Last Night in Soho is an homage to the giallo horror movies of directors like Dario Argento. It stars Thomasin McKenzie as a fashion student who moves to London and finds herself travelling back in time to Soho in the swinging 1960s, where she is enthralled by a young singer named Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) who falls victim to the predatory underworld of the local nightclub scene.
Wright was inspired to make a film about the era partly because of his love for his parents’ record collection. The soundtrack is full of classics from artists like Dusty Springfield, The Kinks, and Petula Clark, but it was a less famous band that would provide its greatest moment. Wright had originally called the film Red Light Area, only to decide it was too similar to another film. Then he called it The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, only to discover that a movie of that name already existed.
At one point before production, Wright was hanging out with Tarantino, his long-time friend, and was telling him about the music he was planning to put in the film. The Pulp Fiction director asked him if he’d heard the song ‘Last Night in Soho’ by Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich. He’d used one of their other tracks, ‘Hold Tight,’ in Death Proof. Tarantino played Wright the song and said (via GamesRadar), “This is the best title music for a film that’s never been made.”
Wright immediately recognised its potential, and the rest is history. Tarantino later revealed that it was filmmaker Allison Anders who had given him the idea of putting the song in a film, and Wright said that she ended up sending him a vinyl version of it in the mail after the film was released. Instead of using it at the beginning of the movie, he decided to make it the flashy coda just as the credits start to roll.
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