Midnight Quatermass to Signal Loss
New direction. Same obsessions.
I meant to take a short hiatus from the newsletter to figure out what to do with it next. That turned into a longer break than planned, but now I’ve got a better sense of what this thing wants to be.
MIDNIGHT QUATERMASS has changed. Like a steaming Brundlefly, fresh from the telepod; rearranged, new, still a bit gooey.
Midnight Quatermass is now the umbrella title for a few things. You’re reading SIGNAL LOSS. This new version will kick in fully next issue, which should arrive in about two weeks. If it doesn’t get flagged as spam and I’m left talking to myself again.
Alongside the newsletter, I’m also doing a YouTube series called THERE’S A SCENE. Leaning into my face-for-radio, I’ll be talking about specific moments from favourite movies, or ones I don’t even like that much, as long as they still deliver a killer scene.
Here’s the intro:
You’ll get used to my voice. Just be grateful you’re not trapped in a car on a long drive while I talk about the differences between Battle of the Planets and Science Ninja Team Gatchaman.
But let’s get to it and dig into a few show tunes, dancing vampires and the floppiest of Broadway flops, via Jim Steinman.
Has music ever saved your life? For me it grabbed the wheel and nudged me onto a better road. Metal and punk, overlapping with literature and movies, offered me a path out of my increasingly small northern mining town. It introduced me to my tribe and a life-long love of what Exodus call ‘friendly violent fun’.
It started with a battered grey music cassette:
A gift from my uncle. He was our connection for pirate videos which is how I saw ALIEN (1979) and THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974) at the age of eight. In retrospect I should have maybe waited until I was nine.
A miner who once willingly held his hand inside a jaw-crusher, knowing the compensation for a lost finger was enough to buy a caravan. The guy had focus. The same modified hand dropped that Dead Ringer cassette on top of my ZX Spectrum 48k and walked away without saying a word.
No case. Just tape. My music collection at that point was mostly Johnny Cash recorded from Radio 2 so this was interesting enough for me to quit Jet Set Willy and hit PLAY.
And that was that. A battered cassette took me away from that world and eventually dropped me here writing this. Powerful stuff music. Jim Steinman understood that, but it took me a while to work out how important he was. I bought the first Meat Loaf album he didn’t have a hand in and the loss was obvious. I picked up his solo album, loved the songs, but no voice was ever gonna match Meat’s. Sadly it took them 12 years to reunite and now they’re both gone. But the music, man…
Let’s bring in Roman Polanski. I know. In 1967 he directed and starred in horror-comedy, THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS. It’s a trip. It also stars Sharon Tate and, well, you know how that ends.
The story - two bumbling vampire hunters out of their depth in Transylvania - refused to die and thirty years later, in Vienna, it rose again. As a musical.
Tanz de Vampire. Music by Jim Steinman.
The centrepiece of the show? Totale Finsternis.
Even if you don’t know German you’ll probably find it a tad familiar.
No powder keg giving off sparks in this one. Instead:
“Then you’ll leave this world behind. In this bond entwined together. Far beyond the void of time. We shall die and live forever… You are the blood of life. Realised in mortal form.”
The production side of things was a rollercoaster ride from the start and by the time an English version was being prepped, Polanski, onboard as director, was suddenly out and Steinman himself stepped up. A new version for the American palate was written, “A big Wagnerian musical with lots of humour… a lot of it Mel Brooks and a lot of it Anne Rice”, but it still needed a name to draw the crowds.
If you’re British and of a certain vintage then the name Michael Crawford will bring up memories of a sitcom called Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em where he played an accident-prone nincompoop. A kind of 70s Mr Bean crossed with Jackie Chan (he did all his own stunts):
To Dave (thanks for the new logo work!), he’s the lead in the only superhero movie that Disney seem ashamed of, CONDORMAN (1981). To me he’s the younger brother of Oliver Reed in Michael Winner’s Crown Jewel heist movie, THE JOKERS (1967).
To the rest of the world: The Phantom of the Opera.
To don the cloak of Count von Krolock, Crawford wanted complete creative control of the Count, $180k a week for a three year run and a guarantee he’d get to play the part in the movie version - still sore he wasn’t seriously considered for the lead in the then upcoming Phantom movie. He eventually signed on after some negotiation (along with Deep Space Nine’s René Auberjonois in the role of the lead vampire hunter) and then a number of things happened.
Crawford adopted what is described as a continental accent for the role, a combination of Italian and Cockney apparently. 9/11 put the whole shebang on hold, and then by the time rehearsals resumed Crawford was overseeing a new costume - designed to hide his weight gain with high collars to disguise his jowls. Sadly, the costume had the opposite effect, and the cast took to calling him ‘the fat rooster’ when he took the stage.
Harsh, Broadway types. Harsh.
By the time the much delayed previews were ready Steinman was out as director, Count von Krolock had a mullet, cast members were quitting and the whole thing was described as a runaway train. Those always end well.
Dance of the Vampires opened in December 2002. Steinman skipped the premiere. Instead he wrote a blog post calling it “UTTER SHIT”. Critics agreed. 53 performances later, losing $12 million, it was staked through the heart and put out of its misery.
On YouTube at least one brave soul suffered it, covertly recording an entire performance, Kramer style. But you get a better quality slice of it here:
I’d recommend the German cast version of the soundtrack though. It reworks tracks from Bat Out of Hell II, Welcome to the Neighbourhood, Steinman’s fantastic Pandora’s Box and even STREETS OF FIRE (1984).
Of course, it’s the vampiric version of Total Eclipse of the Heart that gets under your skin. And, American debacle aside, the German version is as popular as ever in Europe - currently playing to rave reviews in Stuttgart.
Last word to Steinman:
“I was trying to come up with a love song and I remembered I actually wrote Total Eclipse to be a vampire love song. Its original title was Vampires in Love because I was working on a musical of NOSFERATU (1922), the other great vampire story. If anyone listens to the lyrics, they're really like vampire lines. It's all about the darkness, the power of darkness and love's place in dark. And so I figured 'Who's ever going to know; it's Vienna!”
Reading that changed a song I thought knew too well almost completely. It’s great when that happens. Even if it does mean I now spend far too long looking at Bonnie Tyler’s neck.
Moving on… here’s episode one of THERE’S A SCENE:
Fuck it. Here’s episode two:
This is SIGNAL LOSS. New direction. Same obsessions.
Keep pressing play and I’ll keep your fingers out of the jaw crusher and promise never to rip your sexy throat out no matter how bombastic the music gets.
Mike