VA - Stardust - Original Soundtrack Recording (1975) [2×Vinyl]

There are two quite distinct faces to the world of the rock musician: faces so contrasting that it is little wonder that so many contemporary stars appear at times to have lost touch with any kind of reality. While mass adulation hounds and sometimes even destroys the successful ones, the road to that status remains a golden dream for generation after generation of young people.

Show me a boy with an interest in pop music who never once imagined himself as a rock superstar and I’ll show you a liar. Jim Maclaine, the anti-hero of the film STARDUST, was such a boy. To him success as a star was an end in itself, and before he achieved it he never questioned what price he might have to pay for that goal. And it is the way in which he achieves his ambition and the resulting pressures and despairs that are the subject of the film. Jim Maclaine is a fictitious figure, created on screen by David Essex. But the problems he faces are known and understood by all of today’s top musicians. And ironically it is out of these problems that some of the best music of the last decade has sprung. Rock music is to do with contemporary life: with the way in which young people see themselves and their problems. On stage, or in the recording studio, an artist can, by virtue of his creativity, cast aside the self doubts and neuroses which were frequently responsible for much of his success.

But once out of the spotlight he finds himself alone in an industry and life-style geared only to the accumulation of a wealth achieved out of all proportion to effort or talent. It can be a totally confusing and insecure world in which to find oneself, and it is frequently one of a quite transitory nature. Yet, in its way, rock music has, during the last decade and a half, developed and kept pace with a sub-culture of youth that no other art form has been able to match. And it is perhaps because of all of these conflicting pressures the desire to make even more commercial records; the need to express him-self artistically in a field of music which is still in its infancy; and the paramount need to find some acceptably bearable way of life which might enable him to successfully mas-ter the confusions oppressing him that the artist of the ‘sixties has been able to produce some remarkably inventive and emotionally perceptive pieces of music.

Many of the tracks of this album need no introduction or praise from me: they represent some of the best rock of the last ten years. But how much of that music was created, I ask myself, out of the provocations which daily impinge upon the lives of the performing artists? Since the film STARDUST is about a rock and roll band called ‘The Stray Cats’ it was necessary for them to also have a body of work of their own, and for the new recordings which appear on this album every-one connected with the film is deeply indebted to the outstanding work of Dave Edmunds, who arranged, played and sang on most of the tracks, and to David Puttnam, the film’s producer, for managing to find so many excellent songs, which while conjuring up the spirit of the ‘sixties were also of such a con-temporary nature that they appear in no way dated by today’s standards. STARDUST is a film devoted to showing all of the many faces of pop (even the most unacceptable ones) ; I think that this album is a musical illustration of the style of the film as well as being a testament to all that is creative and original in rock music.