JOHN BARRY DOUBLE-HEADER: BEAT GIRL and THE KNACK (AND HOW TO GET IT)

Two classic cult soundtracks by John Barry were re-issued recently – From el Records (a Division of the UK’s Cherry Red Records) comes Barry’s score for Beat Girl (1960), starring Bardot-esque British actress Gillian Hills, chart-topping cialis professional rocker Adam Faith, a young Oliver Reed and Christopher Lee as a seedy strip-club owner.  “Hop-Head UK Schoolgirls Get in Trouble!” the DVD cover blares, but the plot – in which a female JD falls in with the jazz-cats at the local beatnik club and discovers her young stepmother’s sordid past in the stripper scene – is only half the fun.  John Barry’s music raises this teen exploitation flick to a new level of danger!

With the sneaky surf-stomp of the opening title theme (and its lyric version courtesy of co-star Adam Faith), the toe-tapping back-alley jazz numbers, late-night boogie-woogie dance compare prices levitra groovers, swaggering rockabilly vocal performances and Cochran-riffs from Adam Faith, chugging striptease instrumentals, even trad jazz gets some play.

This new CD release from el records (a division of the UK’s Cherry Red Records) includes the original film soundtrack, seven further John Barry cuts including four of his 1960 hits, five early Adam Faith hits and six offerings from star Gillian Hills, who would go on to be a successful ye-ye singer in France. So while the original release of this soundtrack (incidentally the first British soundtrack LP ever released!) had 18 tracks, this release doubles that to 36 tracks!

The Knack (and How to Get it) was director Richard Lester’s follow-up to zany Beatles smash A Hard Day’s Night, starring kitchen sink/swingin 60s misfit girl Rita Tushingham as the naive country girl that becomes the target of conquest for two competing roommates – one a known womanizer (Ray Brooks), the other shy and inexperienced (Michael Crawford of The Jokers and Lester’s How I Won the War with John Lennon). Lester’s hyperkinetic movie romps became the stylistic backbone for countless late-60s US sitcoms, most cialis from india notably The Monkees. But aiding immensely in creating this mood was composer John Barry, whose satirical commercial-like jingles punctuate the film’s hopeless love triangle with absurdity. The Knack is less the stand-alone album that Beat Girl is, but it’s whimsical, funny, and a must-have for any swingin’ 60s cult collector. This new limited-edition CD re-issue  – remastered from original stereo tapes in the MGM vaults – comes courtesy of Quartet Records, accompanied by a 24-page booklet packed with stills and featuring liner notes by Geoff Leonard and Pete Walker (uncertain as to whether this is the same Pete Walker responsible for horror staples Frightmare, The House of Whipcord etc…)

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– Kier-La Janisse

About the author:

Kier-La Janisse

Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, publisher, producer, acquisitions executive for Severin Films and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. She is the author of Cockfight: A Fable of Failure (2024), House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012/2022) and A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007) and has been an editor on numerous books including Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (2021) and Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015). She wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021), and produced the acclaimed blu-ray box sets All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror (2021) and The Sensual World of Black Emanuelle (2023).