DOWNLOAD JOHNNY EASTWOOD HERE (2.99Mb). Not really safe for work, especially if you’re a station announcer on Virgin trains.
Just realised, I should have called it “Naked Apesâ€.
So originally, I was trying to mash-up Gorillaz’ Clint Eastwood and a version of The Smiths’ Jeane by Sandie Shaw and Johnny Marr. Which kind of worked, but the vocals weren’t very clean, and the instrumental bit at the end of the original backing track went on a bit, so I ended up looking for something to perk the thing up.
I was watching Mike Leigh’s Naked (also known as Mike Leigh’s Naked), and thought I could pull some dialogue out of that and maybe drop it on top of the instrumental bit at the end. I decided to start with Johnny (played by David Thewlis) winding up Brian the Nightwatchman with stories about the impending apocalypse. It turned out to be pure serendipity – until I heard it back, I never even made the connection between Damon ending on a repeated “My future is comin’ on†and David starting with “Has no-one not told you you’ve got this kind of gleeful pre-occupation with the future?â€
By sheer fluke, the timing worked beautifully too. I had to edit the speech a little bit – on the actual soundtrack, Brian gets a word in edgeways early on, and that had to be excised. The first “six six six†is underpinned by a rising orchestral score, so I had to cut and paste from elsewhere in the monologue. Johnny refers to Brian by name at one point, and also names the year in which the alleged planetary alignment was due, so I edited those out. After those necessary changes, I found that I just had to insert one brief pause to get it to end at the right point, and apart from that it fitted together perfectly.
Much later, I found out that the Orb had sampled the same speech for their track S.A.L.T. on the Orblivion album. Bastards.
Weapon of choice: Cool Edit by Syntrillium (since bought out and rebranded by Adobe). These days, I would probably use Audacity.
Good consumer: Mike Leigh’s Naked isn’t currently available on DVD, but you can buy the screenplay from Amazon, and you can find the movie secondhand on Amazon or eBay if you look for it. Obviously, you can get the Gorillaz album from Amazon.co.uk.
Further reading: Dialogue from Naked, Chernobyl doesn’t mean “wormwood†and is 666 encoded into every barcode?