Incident at Ravens Gate Music Credits

Home , Albert Productions, Tail of a Tiger

Original Music Graham Tardif with Roman Kronen

Music Mixer Peter Smith

Music Recorded at Tar Music Studio Music Mixed at Hendon Studios

'Six Months In A Leaky Boat' Music & lyrics by T. Finn, N. Griggs, E. Rayner, N. Crombie and N. Finn Performed by Split Enz Courtesy Enz Music and Mushroom Music

'Libiamo Libiamo' and 'Parigi, O'Cara' From 'La Traviata' by Giuseppe Verdi Sung by Victoria de Los Angeles and Carlo del Monte Used under licence from EMI Records Australia.

'Jerusalem' Words by William Blake, music by W. H. Parry arranged by Tardif & Kronen Sung by Paul Philpott

'The Battle of Windsor' Music and lyrics by Paul Philpott Sung by Paul Philpott

'Sydney' Music and lyrics by Paul Philpott Sung by Paul Philpott

'Don't You Think' Music and lyrics by Paul Philpott Sung by Paul Philpott 'Sad Faces' Music and lyrics by Paul Philpott Sung by Paul Philpott

The Easybeats’ Friday on My Mind is too well known to dwell on here. The 1966 song was a hit that charted worldwide, and even reached #16 on Billboard in May 1967. It has its own wiki listing here.

The song makes an appearance relatively early in the film, and then begins again at the end as the battered couple, Rachel and Eddie walk into the Special Squad restored farmhouse. Lyrics for the song as they are heard over the final images and end credits of the film:

Monday mornin' feels so bad Ev'rybody seems to nag me Comin' Tuesday I feel better Even my old man looks good Wed'sday just don't go Thursday goes too slow I've got Friday on my mind (I’m) Gonna have fun in the city Be with my girl, she's so pretty (Chorus: nah nah dududinah - repeats after a few lines with assorted ‘do do’s’) She looks fine tonight She is out of sight to me Tonight I'll spend my bread, tonight I'll lose my head, tonight (end credits begin to roll over black at around this point) I've got to get to night Monday I'll have Friday on my mind Do the five day grind once more I know of nothin' else that bugs me More than workin' for the rich man Hey! I'll change that scene one day Today I might be mad, tomorrow I'll be glad 'Cause I'll have Friday on my mind I’m gonna have fun in the city (Chorus: nah nah dududinah - repeats after a few lines with assorted ‘do do’s’) Be with my girl, she's so pretty She looks fine tonight. She is out of sight to me Tonight I'll spend my bread, tonight I'll lose my head, tonight I've got to get to night Monday I'll have Friday on my mind Gonna have fun in the city (Chorus: nah nah dududinah - repeats after a few lines with assorted ‘do do’s’) I’ll be with my girl, she's so pretty I’m gonna have fun in the city I’ll be with my girl, she’s so pretty … (the song begins to fade out) I’m gonna have fun in the … (song ends)

The last ﬁfty seconds or so of credits run in silence over black.

Graham Tardif: The film’s music credits list the score as being composed by Graham Tardif, “with Roman Kronen.” Kronen doesn’t seem to have been credited with any other feature film or television work, and in the Cinema Papers’ production surveys he is listed as Roman de Cronenburg. This also happens to be very close to the French for film-maker David Cronenberg’s novels as in, Le roman de Cronenberg est tout aussi perturbant, sinistre et captivant que ses films, but as Cronenberg’s debut novel Consumed was first published in 2014, presumably there’s another explanation to the mystery. The music score also includes a couple of tracks by Verdi and some punk songs put together by Paul Philpot(t). (Kronen is credited as helping composer Tardif with a punk version of Blake’s Jerusalem). Philpott as ‘Philpot’, turns up in relation to de Heer’s Bad Boy Bubby and also is credited as Pinhead in Incident, but his credits cease after Bad Boy. Composer Graham Tardif became a long term musical collaborator with director Rolf de Heer, working on many of de Heer's later films, including co-composing the music with Steve Mason (better known as a DOP) for de Heer’s first film, Tail of a Tiger. Real Time features a profile of Tardif here: Since meeting de Heer when the budding writer/director/producer was still at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School, and composing the music for his diploma short, The Audition, Tardif’s subsequent career highs include The Tracker (2002) which he says “was built around the idea of these paintings [by Peter Coad] and these ten or eleven songs going through the film. To a large extent, the music informs [de Heer’s] thinking.” Certainly, de Heer is a director attuned to sound designer Randy Thom’s demand that directors should be “Designing a movie for sound” (www.filmsound.org), not simply leaving it to the end in the hope it may be somehow improved by the hasty addition of some great music.

Tardif explains how early he is usually involved by de Heer in the process: “We’d have a lot of discussions and we’d sit down and talk about what it should be like and we’d plot the film out together and then I’d come up with the music based on that discussion […] but I’d actually start serious thinking when there’s a finished script.” I asked Tardif how he communicates melodic ideas to someone without musical training: “We speak in terms of the feeling of the scene or the underlying emotion that he’s trying to convey rather than discussing diminished sevenths or anything like that. We can talk musical styles, I mean he’s not musically illiterate to the extent that we can’t talk about whether it would be a western style or a percussive, or, you know, he’ll understand that, or whether it’s classical or orchestral or rock.” Thus, Tardif and de Heer decided early in pre-production for The Tracker that they wanted the feel of a live band fronted by an Indigenous male singer. The result was Archie Roach later performing the songs—which de Heer had penned and Tardif had composed—live at a screening of the film in the Melbourne Concert Hall. Awards were received for best score from the Film Critics Circle and the IF Awards. The songs serve as an extra character, expressing the sorrow of a subjugated people, and Tardif’s music positively charges the text of the screen’s image.

But Tardif’s scores are not guilty of simply retelling the story or redundantly repeating what the dialogue or visuals have already made clear. He illustrates his occasional intention to juxtapose conﬂicting emotions by referring to a scene in The Old Man Who Read Love Stories (2000), a ﬁlm characterised by a lush, epic score performed by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and a 40-voice choir: “Where they were rowing back across the river after the leopard had been killed, now that was something where I think I used music against what was going on in the action to give a lot more depth to the scene, rather than just replicate what’s going on in the action, to juxtapose the visuals which were quite fast paced, but the music was quite slow and glorious in a way. Rather than give a sense of the pace of the boats and the rowing it was more a sense of what the homecoming actually meant: it was an achievement and a victory but at the same time, because the death of the leopard was not something the old man had wanted to happen, it was a tragedy as well.”

Alexandra’s Project (2003) had an entirely different kind of score. Within a minimalist, synthesised soundscape, the non-diegetic music evokes a sense of tense foreboding that maps the deterioration of suburban family life. Tardif identifies this as one of his favourite works because “unlike other films in which I had multiple tones and dynamics and instruments to work with, I wanted to push the tension with the minimum tonal range that would actually work with the minimum palette possible, so it was probably my most experimental film.” With such a spare, unobtrusive, electronic score, ambient sounds like the turn of a key in a deadlock take on an almost menacing aspect and the hyper-reality of these sounds, amidst the relative silence, informs the audience that Steve, the beleaguered husband, is very isolated and disconnected from any outside help. The sound scenarios in Alexandra’s Project transcend the traditional role of the soundtrack of merely supporting the onscreen image. The auditory elements of the film’s metallic timbre highlight not just Steve’s mental terror but also further the depiction of the suburban brick veneer house as family prison. The integration of all the aural ingredients communicates these ideas effectively, and rather than following the eye, they lead it.

In 2007, de Heer returned to Tardif to compose for his slapstick silent comedy, Dr. Plonk, which Tardif identifies as another film score he is proud of “because it was 90 minutes of wall-to-wall music.” Performed by Melbourne band The Stiletto Sisters, the combination of violin, piano accordion, double bass and piano is beautifully lively, and one senses this black and white homage to Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin would not have worked as well with de Heer’s original idea of accompaniment by a single Wurlitzer organ, regardless of any period authenticity it may have lent. But Tardif acknowledges the expense involved in composing and recording original music for films rather than pre-recorded songs, “Whenever you go into a studio you have to be really prepared because of the cost of time—$50,000 a day for the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. If you’re not ‘there’ when you go into the studio you’re just spending studio time rewriting and that’s really counterproductive. With The Stiletto Sisters I worked with them for a week after the score had been written...we got the score right and then went into the studio for three days to do the recording.”

De Heer’s reliance on original music is in stark contrast to the Australian film industry’s tendencies, as identified by Rebecca Coyle: “In the period from the so-called renaissance of Australian film that occurred in the 1970s, there have been two identifiable ‘eras’ in film music. In the first period, orchestral arrangements were frequently used [… as opposed to] the subsequent era, when Australian film followed an international tendency to include popular music in soundtracks” (“Introduction: Tuning up”, Screen Scores, AFTRS, Sydney, 1997). But de Heer’s bucking of the trend is not surprising, for as Tardif puts it: “With his combination of the sound and the music, he is an aural auteur.”

There is another feature on the sound design in de Heer's ﬁlms which mentions his colloboration with Tardif, here. Go to the original for footnotes etc:

… In The Old Man Who Read Love Stories, de Heer’s troubled foray into the larger-budget international film world, the ongoing sounds of the jungle maintain an intensity and tension throughout the film that has a more powerful effect on the viewer than Graham Tardif’s rather over-dramatic orchestral score. Sound designer James Currie also gives special attention to different locations in the film – the ambient sounds define spaces such as the riverside, a large hall, a small hut or the open jungle at night, enhancing the way viewers differentiate between these places – and to the colour and texture in the voice of the Old Man (Richard Dreyfuss) as he reads his trashy love novels, reinforcing this film’s emphasis on the pleasure in the simple things of life. Like David Cronenberg with Howard Shore, Joel and Ethan Coen with Carter Burwell or Fellini with Nino Rota, de Heer has used the same composer, Graham Tardif, for the majority of his films (one notable exception being a film about music: Dingo). It is interesting to follow the development of the de Heer/ Tardif relationship, leading to extraordinarily powerful results in their most recent collaboration, Alexandra’s Project. In conjunction with no less than three sound designers (James Currie, Andrew Plain and Nada Mikas), Tardif’s minimal electronic score inAlexandra’s Project implies the undercurrent of invisible electro-magnetic signals in an urban landscape, making an ordinary street seem like a harbinger of impending doom. This creates a tension that sets the scene for the entire film, echoing the atmosphere of other suburban thrillers such as Lost Highway (David Lynch, 1996). The score is electronic, a minimal collection of colours and depths; it leaves room for ambient sounds to play a significant part, as often occurs in de Heer’s other films – such as the wonderful moment in Dingo on a traffic island in the middle of Paris, where the trumpet solo of John “Dingo” Anderson (Colin Friels) mingles with night- time traffic and he searches for a sound he hears in a subway labyrinth. All atmospheric sounds in Alexandra’s Project are exaggerated: the keys turning in locks, steps in the carpet and mechanised blinds leading to the ultimate household appliance, the vibrator. A similar emphasis is present in the mise en scène, with close-ups of household objects such as the toaster and light switches. The powerful, central role of video in this film significantly changes the way the viewer hears the audio – like Steve, we are listening to Alexandra pre-recorded on video, allowing the film to be understood as “a critique on the way we watch so-called erotic entertainment”. The presence of the television screen is conveyed beautifully with actual boxy television sound, and the sequences were filmed with the video running on the television, allowing Steve to respond to it in real time and creating a complex sonic situation. Steve’s interaction with the television set allows him control over the pace of the film up until Alexandra’s broadcast becomes “live”, giving her the control she so lacked in their relationship. At one stage, Steve takes refuge from the television screen behind an overturned couch, but continues his discussion with Alexandra and is drawn out again by her vocalised threats. Until then he was able to stop and start the video, crunching the buttons on the remote control. The eerie vocal loop “cheers dad” accompanying the last remaining images of Steve’s children on tape is a piece of sound art in itself. Again breathing features in the soundscape – especially in the piercing scene where Alexandra’s tense breathing is the only audio provided, making us complicit with her actions; as she nears the camera and the volume increases we feel more and more uncomfortable. The most meaningful collaboration of de Heer and Tardif is perhaps in The Tracker, with Tardif as composer and de Heer as lyricist for songs performed by indigenous performer Archie Roach. This not only adds an extra layer of narrative to the film, but also personalises the de Heer/Tardif working relationship and gives it a new voice. After much experimentation, de Heer claimed the songs needed to be performed by an indigenous performer in order to “attach” themselves to the film(11). The songs comment on the action, putting a sympathetic white man’s words into a black man’s mouth for a tale of revenge, and thus emphasising the most potent themes in the film whilst retaining the concept that this is a tale of a group of individuals. Again the silences carry the greatest emotional tension in this film, allowing the outback to speak for itself, similar to the way Jon “Dingo” Anderson’s trumpet speaks for the outback in Dingo. This, in addition to the use of paintings by Peter Coad, makes this film an important combination of artistic media – perhaps a direct result of the film being an arts festival commission (by the 2002 Adelaide Festival of the Arts under the artistic direction of Peter Sellars). Roach later performed the songs live with the film in Melbourne and Adelaide, almost in the spirit of the silent movies – demonstrating how much narrative and emotional power the songs themselves hold. It would appear that Tardif has a separate life working for World Vision, at least according to this link here:

Graham Tardif is director of World Vision’s Australia Program, and composed the scores for Rolf de Heer’s ﬁlms The Tracker and Charlie’s Country.

That link shows this thumbnail photo of Tardif:

There is another link on the site (link no longer working) which leads to a YouTube video talking about the work of World Vision.

(Below: Graham Tardif in that video)