Some time in late 1988, the director David Lynch visited his friend and Blue Velvet collaborator, soundtrack composer Angelo Badalamenti at his New York studio. Would Badalamenti be interested in writing the music for a new TV series, Twin Peaks? “Sure,” said the composer, “what’s it about? Can I see a script?” “There is no script yet,” Lynch told him. “Just sit down at your keyboard and play. I’ll describe it to you.” Thus began one of the most singular episodes in the art of the soundtrack, a 20-minute ideas-session-cum-seance that crystallised Twin Peaks’ atmosphere of paranormal intrigue and birthed what Rolling Stone called “the most influential soundtrack in TV history”.
As Lynch described a beautiful, frightened teenage girl lost in an eerie woodland, Badalamenti found two foreboding chords that would become famous and began repeating them slowly, over and over. “I could see David was so happy,” he recalls over the phone. “He had his eyes closed. He was seeing pictures in his head. That music, Laura Palmer’s Theme, set the tone for everything that followed. The whole mood of the show is in there. I never changed a single note.”
First broadcast in 1990, Twin Peaks is the distant ancestor of today’s long-form TV epics. Impressionistic itself, Twin Peaks was itself akin to a piece of music. Badalamenti’s cues saturated every scene and its soundtrack CD became a student bedsit fixture, bleeding out into wider pop culture. Moby famously sampled Laura Palmer’s Theme for his single Go, and the show’s hallucinatory signature sound would reappear in music from the KLF to Bastille. Most conspicuously you can hear it in Lana Del Rey, a 21st-century recurrence of the spectral chanteuse who sang Falling, the hit vocal version of the Twin Peaks theme: Julee Cruise. “I actually never sang in that trademark ‘Julee Cruise voice’ before I worked with Angelo and David,” Cruise admits now. “I was always a real belter, lots of power. Working with them changed me.” A singer-actor from Iowa, Cruise met Badalamenti through musical theatre in New York. The composer recruited her to coach Isabella Rossellini in her starring role as Blue Velvet’s nightclub singer, Dorothy Vallens. Unable to license Song to the Siren by This Mortal Coil, Lynch had sketched out a replacement song.
“Angelo said: ‘I’ve met this guy David Lynch, he wrote lyrics on a napkin and Isabella Rossellini is going to sing it, but she’s really scared to sing,’” says Cruise. “I told him: ‘Aren’t we all?’” They used Cruise’s voice in the end, beginning a seven-year association that created a new persona for Cruise, a synthesis of her showbiz mystique and Lynch’s fascination with the American unconscious. “In the studio, David would always say: ‘[Sing] like an angel, like an angel…’” she says. “It was hard for me but it was a great way of working. We felt we could do anything.”
The huge success of Twin Peaks put Cruise in the charts, leading to a memorable appearance on Saturday Night Live where she ran a gauntlet of protesters picketing that night’s guest host, sexist comedian Andrew Dice Clay. “I had all these people yelling at me,” she says. “I don’t think they knew that back then I was still literally waiting tables.” Badalamenti, meanwhile, was too busy to appreciate the show’s sudden success. “Did I understand Twin Peaks?” he says. “I gotta tell you: no. I was so busy under the clock, recording 30 one-hour episodes.”
But, as the show aired, he began to understand its popularity. Paul McCartney invited him to Abbey Road to record Twin Peaks-inspired material, and told a story about a birthday gig he’d been slated to play for the Queen. Just before Macca took the stage, Her Majesty excused herself, saying: “I’m sorry, Mr McCartney, but have you seen the time? I must go upstairs and watch Twin Peaks.”
Soundtracks from Twin Peaks and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me are reissued on 19 May
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