The story behind the soundtrack for Escape From New York

Thirty four years ago, Escape From New York burst on to the screen. Written in response to the Watergate scandal, John Carpenter’s film follows the attempts of its hard-bitten antihero, Snake Plissken, to rescue the US President from Manhattan, which in the dystopian future of 1988 has been turned into a giant maximum security prison. Quirky, thrilling and tough, it’s as vivid a nightmare vision of the city-as-hellscape as anything this side of Taxi Driver.

Crucial to its impact was its pulsating score, composed by Carpenter and sound designer Alan Howarth, who went on to work with the director on other films including They Live, Big Trouble in Little China and Prince of Darkness. The soundtrack made terrific use of synthesisers at a time when Hollywood scores were chiefly an orchestral beast, albeit with a few noteworthy exceptions (see Goblin’s indelibly creepy work on Suspiria or Tangerine Dream’s pulse-jacking score for Sorcerer) and set the template for a decade’s worth of hard-boiled crime thrillers churned out by Hollywood. It’s also been influential for a new wave of filmmakers looking to bring retro charm to their work ­– think Drive, or the throbbing synth menace of It Follows – so it’s strangely fitting that Howarth has decided to revisit the score by taking it out on the road for the first time. We spoke to him to find out how it all came together.

ALAN’S WORK ON STAR TREK GOT HIM THE JOB ON ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK

I moved to LA in the 70s to work with Weather Report, a jazz band I’d been touring with. An old biker buddy of mine was working in the sound department of a film studio making copies of tapes and he overheard two sound editors talking about how they needed someone who knew about synthesisers for this movie they were makng. So my buddy says, "Hey man, you have to talk to my buddy Alan, man he works for Weather Report" – like that’s going to mean something to them – and they look at him and go, ‘Weather Report? Is that the one at 7 o'clock or 11 o'clock?' Anyway they took my number and gave me a call so I went down and it turned out they were making Star Trek: The Motion Picture. It was my work on that (as a sound FX specialist) which brought me into John’s world (a picture editor working on the movie passed his tapes on to Carpenter).

JOHN CARPENTER CAME ROUND TO HIS HOUSE AND HIRED HIM

He just came over to my house in Glendale, California. I had my own rig at home, and it worked out well because Carpenter didn’t want to know anything about the equipment, he just said, "That's your job." We hung out and I played him some music and he was like, "Let's do it!" All very casual, no formal stuff, no attorneys or big-money exchange – just a bunch of guys, you know?

THEY MADE IT AT THE SAME TIME AS WATCHING THE MOVIE

One thing I brought to the party that John liked was the idea of using videotape. Normally when you score a film, you would literally do it to a stopwatch. You say, "I need some music that goes for a minute and 34 seconds," then you decide on a tempo, put a click track down and play blindly along, sort of imagining what the scene was. But I put up a video so that you could watch the video and play to it, which he loved because you could really sculpt a picture that way. He referred to that as a kind of colouring book. 

MOST OF IT WAS MADE UP ON THE SPOT

Pretty much everything was improvised. Occasionally, John would come in with something he wanted to do that he'd figured out at home. But a lot of the time he’d just kind of look at me and say, "Alan, give me something." One of the very first cues I did was one we called the "69th Street Bridge", where the car chase takes place and they go across the bridge and the taxi cab blows up. John let me run with that one to see what I would do, just to kind of figure out who I was. The last thing we did was actually the opening title sequence, because originally there was this whole bank robbery scene at the beginning of the movie that was taken out, so we had scored the movie starting with that. 

IT BLAZED A TRAIL FOR SYNTH-LED HOLLYWOOD SCORES

What we were doing was all relatively new at the time, I guess. Certainly the drum machine thing was new – that Linn drum I had literally been over to Roger Linn's garage and got one of the first ones. I remember when we first sat down to do the music for Escape, John brought two LPs with him, one was The Police and the other one was Tangerine Dream (German prog-rockers who composed early synth scores for William Friedkin and Michael Mann). So there were some clues as to where he was going with this.

IT’S TOTALLY INFLUENTIAL

I think we made some musical statements that appeal to younger filmmakers and musicians. It’s simple. Rather than trying to be the next John Williams, being the next Carpenter and Howarth is a lot easier! You never know when you’re doing it, you just do it, but here we are 30 some years later still talking about it, so there must have been something there that had some timeless quality, some vision that still holds up. It's funny, after we did Escape, John's next movie was The Thing, which he got Ennio Morricone to score Morricone-style. 

But it was a challenge for John because some of it wasn't really working for him, so he turned around and played Morricone our score from Escape From New York and said, ‘Can you do something like this?’ So Morricone went back and did a second pass, and that's where that opening title that sounds very much like John Carpenter came from. It was Morricone watching Escape from New York and going back and doing John Carpenter as Ennio Morricone! 

JOHN CARPENTER DGAF

I remember telling Carpenter I wanted to make an LP out of the soundtrack, and he was like, ‘Really? Someone will want to listen to that?’ I said, ‘Yeah, it's cool, man!’ His view was that it was just a utility item that we created in order to make the movie... If you ask him, he’ll tell you I was the cheapest guy he could get.

Alan Howarth will perform the Escape From New York soundtrack tonight (October 30) and a Halloween II-IV medley tomorrow (October 31) at the Union Chapel in London