Roll up for the revolution

The Pet Shop Boys have written a soundtrack to Sergei Eisenstein's film Battleship Potemkin, which they will perform live in Trafalgar Square on September 12. Here Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant explains why

Wednesday June 30, 2004
The Guardian

Battleship Potemkin

We've never really worked on a film score before. We did write one for Stephen Fry's film Bright Young Things, but in the end it didn't get used because Fry went with 1930s music instead. We've always been comfortable working with film projections, though. Derek Jarman made a series of them for the first tour we ever did, and in the late-1990s we played a show at the Savoy Theatre in which we synched the entire performance to a film made for the event by Sam Taylor-Wood.

What's interesting is how music can change the way you feel about a film. Battleship Potemkin never had its own score, although the DVD is accompanied by a chopped-up version of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony. It makes the film seem much more Soviet - which is ironic, since that piece is actually anti-Soviet in intent.

We decided we wanted modern-sounding music with this 1920s black-and-white film. We studied it carefully, watching it with the music turned off, so it would be completely fresh.

Potemkin is in five chapters, and within them there are sub-chapters. We looked at it as though it were 11 pieces of music, and tried to develop themes that worked within those pieces, trying to sync into the different moods of each scene. There are three songs, whose lyrics were mostly inspired by the captions in the intertitles. There's a song about freedom - a slightly debased word at the moment; I hope this may help rescue it.

Writing a silent film soundtrack is great because you've got 73 minutes of clear space. It's not like writing a soundtrack to a talkie, where you have to fit the music around the dialogue. You have a completely clean slate.

Performing it in Trafalgar Square will be fascinating. The square is a political space: the poll-tax riots were there; most demonstrations in London go there. It's very, very apt for Potemkin, which is about people starting a revolution.

If such a thing ever happened in Britain, this is where it would take place.