The man who fell to earth : original soundtrack recording

"The long-lost The Man Who Fell to Earth soundtrack has a massive picture of David Bowie on the front but is not in fact a David Bowie album. Legend has it that he penned some songs for it, but nobody quite seems to know what happened to them (everyone was on an awful lot of drugs at the time) though as near as I can work out the most accepted school of thought is that he wrote some stuff that was absolutely useless as soundtrack music that probably ended up in the Station to Station sessions. The job of creating original music for the soundtrack together was handed to erstwhile The Mamas & The Papas member John Phillips, who recorded the wantonly ersatz country and western ballads that make up the bulk of the score. They're kind of awful by design, suggestive of the tacky, tawdry America that stranded alien Thomas Newton finds himself stranded it. But they're also also kind of magnificent, not least for the fact they were recorded in London, of all places.The best stuff onthereis the eerie instrumentals taken from the records of Japanese progger Stomu Yamash'ta, suggestive of the parched desert Newton lands in. It's a compellingly weird cocktail of music that makes relatively little sense without the film as reference. And yet it captures something strangely haunting about America's baked fringes, despite barely qualifying as an American album at all".

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