Music Sam Mallet

"Defecate On My Face" performed live by TISM

THANKS TO

TISM

The Moonee Valley Drifters & Brunswick Recording for use of the song "Here I Go Again"

The Dirty Hanks for use of the song "I Started To Forget"

The Breaknecks

The Quivering Quims

Composer Sam Mallet:

Mallet has kept a low profile with a career which began with him playing guitar in bands such as the 1970s Finch, which later became Contraband.

Mallet had a long break in terms of film composing, only returning to the scene via the original short for Wilfred, which spun-off into the TV series of the same name. After doing the first series of the TV show, Mallet did the affiliated low budget indie feature film comedy Rats and Cats.

In between times, Mallet did work for theatre, and director Leo Berkeley made these points about his relationship with the composer in an interview in Filmnews, October 1991:

About the music; I suppose my attitude was typical in that it's really the last thing you think about. You shoot the film, you edit the film, and then you go around trying to find a composer who can put some music onto it. Also the music in films often functions as a bit of a dramatic fix-me-up so that if a particular scene doesn't quite work, for whatever reason, you pump in a bit of music and try and get the emotional effect that way. That always happens, it's a reality of making films, but it's not a very good attitude. With this film, really early in the piece, before we started shooting I was thinking about a composer and a friend of mine gave me a tape of Sam's she had as part of her music collection. I'd actually been making that short film Summer was a Blur and she gave me the music as a possibility for using in that; I listened to it and it was quite inappropriate for the short, but as soon as I heard it I thought it had the perfect feel for Holidays on the River Yarra. So I got in touch with Sam and had a talk to him and he seemed to be quite interested, and we just proceeded from there. He'd done one or two short films, but he's got huge experience composing music for the theatre. The way a composer works in theatre is completely different than for film, principally in that the music has to be ready for opening night, so the composer works through the rehearsals with the director and the actors, on that whole process of working through the script, trying it out different ways, talking about all the objectives of the story. As soon as I started working with Sam, he was just fantastic at doing that with the film, really getting to the heart of it, working out exactly what was going on. Not on a literal level, but with all the nuances and levels. By the time we actually came to composing the music, he could speak with more detail and depth about the film than I could myself. He really understood an incredible amount of detail, and I think the music he's come up with reflects that. It's really exploring what's going along beneath the surface of the story. The result is one of the more interesting jazz-inflected scores for a low-budget 1980s indie movie. To add to the score’s exoticism, there is a live performance of TISM recorded in the film, albeit with poor quality sound. TISM (aka This Is Serious Mum) was a cult band, and as a result, it has an extended wiki listing here. It is easy to google many other listings for the band. (Below: TISM as they appear in the film. The band wore hoods to avoid identification, the theory at the time being that they started as well-off university students with alternative career prospects beyond alternative scabrous rock. The band’s wiki devotes much time to the anonymity, but later, players like Damian Cowell - drums and lead vocals - turned up with their own websites, as here. The band’s clothing did make their appearance in the film recessive, with the look hard to read in the darkness).