"This has to be one of the most underrated film scores and musicals of our time," states Justin Hawkins of The Darkness in the description for this video (above) that he posted last week. "Phantom of the Paradise is phenomenal and yet no one cares about it except of course, those of us who do. It's genius. Allow me, if you'd be so kind, to guide you through the soundtrack in hopes to inspire you to watch this masterpiece. The music is written by Paul Williams and it's directed by Brian De Palma (who directed Scarface!!). I love it and I hope that you will too. Let me know in the comments if you've seen it or if you're going to after this."

Here's a transcription of the beginning of the video:

Good day to you all. It is I, Justin Hawkins, and this is "Justin Hawkins Rides Again," my YouTube channel. Today I'm doing an album that's a top-to-bottom bangers, in my view. All of the songs are written, weirdly, by Paul Williams, who... I don't know if you guys remember Paul Williams. He played Little Enos in Smokey and the Bandit. Anyway, Paul Williams wrote all the songs for a musical called Phantom of the Paradise, which I've recently discovered, and I've been watching it religiously. I have a pathological hatred for musicals. I'm not a fan of the art form. That kind of musical theater is just one slice of ham too many for me, if you know what I mean. But on this occasion, I adore the movie and I think it's really a classic and it's one of those forgotten classics. It was only sort of considered worth watching in two places, apparently: Winnipeg (in Canada), and Paris, which is a cultural hotbed, of course. So, anyway, it was directed by Brian De Palma. It's an absolutely staggering piece of cinema and I really love the movie and I love all the songs, so I'm going to talk about the soundtrack to Phantom of the Paradise, and I hope you enjoy it.

It’s a kickass movie, first of all, with awesome set design and costumes and a story that would make the Théâtre du Grand Guignol think they should tone it down a little. The movie shares DNA with several cult films, which kind of puts it in that orbit by default. For example, Jessica Harper, the actress who plays Phoenix, also plays Janet Weiss in a kinda-sorta sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show called Shock Treatment. It also doesn’t hurt that movie is a musical with music that honestly rips ass. “Rips ass?” Is that what the kids are saying? Or, wait, is that farting?

The point is the music is legitimately good, thanks in no small part to Paul Williams. Williams plays Swan, but he also wrote and sang most of the film’s music. You might know Williams from his extensive work with the Muppets, or if you’re dealing with new and exciting forms of back pain like I am you may know him from his cameo on Dexter’s Laboratory:

 

There’s something inherently funny and fascinating about seeing a man responsible for writing some of the most important music of our childhoods – playing the literal devil and being a huge horny sleazebag on screen. It’s awesome.

Phantom of the Paradise is also a cult film because it’s one of those movies that was never commercially or critically successful but had a huge influence on later artists. When director Guillermo Del Toro (or as US audiences know him, “Billy the Bull”) was a teenager in Mexico City, he waited in line for Paul Williams to sign his copy of the Phantom of the Paradise soundtrack. Many years later, he’d ask Williams to write the lyrics to the stage adaptation of Pan’s Labyrinth. Edgar Wright also cites it as a huge influence. Daft Punk claim to have seen the movie together more than twenty times – and when you remember that the hero of a story is a man in a black suit with a metal helmet obscuring his face that sings in a mechanical cadence of another man over songs he composes on a synthesizer, you start to wonder if perhaps Phantom of the Paradise is more responsible for the birth of electronic music than readily-available MDMA and a music industry looking for an ever-cheaper production model.

Finally, the movie is of note to big music nerds like me for one very particular reason. I’ve mentioned several times that Winslow writes his music on “a synthesizer,” but it would perhaps be more accurate to say he composes his music on “the synthesizer:”

The gigantic instrument he’s sitting inside of is TONTO. No, not the Native American character Johnny Depp racistly portrayed in – holy crap, 2013? Didn’t we know better by then? No, this TONTO is an acronym for The Original New Timbral Orchestra, and if you don’t know the name you’ve definitely heard the sound. Stevie Wonder utilized it on many of his most famous songs, including the iconic riff in “Superstition” that’s so damn funky it’ll make you want to start wearing a vest with no shirt in daily life. It shows up in a huge range of hits from the 70s and beyond.

“Stereo” is first and foremost a danced rock concert. Is this a return to basics?

Yes, probably a little. Among my first spectacular shocks, there are concerts of Kid Creole and the Coconuts or B-52s and Talking Heads. I also remembered a show by American choreographer Karole Armitage called Drastic Classicism, which was punk and rock. I also share this passion for rock with my daughter Louise, who is a bassist, with whom I am collaborating for the first time. I created a trio around her composed of guitarist Arthur Satan and drummer Romain Boutin. Together, we chose standards like Oh! Darling, by the Beatles, or even Get It on, by T. Rex, but new songs have also been composed. And, of course, we play with the clichés of rock but also pop, disco.

What was your working method for “Stereo”?

I started from the music and started to imagine situations on it, overall pictures or a sequence written especially for a dancer. But, in general, the dance and the music work together and we no longer know who triggers what at a given moment. As I was immobilized for weeks due to a broken leg, I designed quite a few moves from and on the performers.

You have worked since your beginnings with loyal collaborators. You like to say that performers are irreplaceable. How did you meet the new performers who are in “Stereo”?

I am lucky to be surrounded by an exceptional team. We've all known each other for years. For Stereo, I find the set designer Jean Rabasse and the costume designer Philippe Guillotel, who were at the heart of the ceremonies of the Albertville Olympic Games that I choreographed in 1992. And there is also with me Olivier Simola for the video, Alexandra Naudet, who assists me with the choreography, and Begoña Garcia Navas in the light. Their trust is very important. I met two new performers during an audition. There were a lot of dancers and I plugged everyone into a 220 volt socket to see which ones lit up the strongest. We are going to spend two or three years together for the Stereo tour and it is better that it works between us.

Finally, your artistic trajectory is also a collective adventure…

Yes of course ! Alone, I would never have done anything. If I have ideas, they are then transformed and embodied by the dancers and my team. I am a kind of guide, I channel them. I feed them and they feed me reciprocally. I consider each of my partners as a specific color on a palette and their mixture creates emotions that allow the show to take shape.

Dance, circus and theatre, through the presence of the actor Baptiste Allaert, blend together here as in most of your plays. What issues does this braiding of techniques respond to?

I like that dance welcomes acrobatics as an enjoyable complement, that it also gives pride of place to acting. In my plays, the dancers, acrobats and actors do everything. They sing, play an instrument and even take on technical roles. I still have in me the fantasy of total theater inherited from the German Bauhaus and the American choreographer Alwin Nikolais (1910-1993) with whom I studied at the National Center for Contemporary Dance in Angers at the very beginning of the 1980s. likes to stage as many living elements as possible in order to combine them. Each performer uses their technique but also finds themselves in incredible sets far from the image of an army of identical beauties. I like that everything overflows.

Cinema, which is also your passion, has fueled this show. What films have inspired you?

There are many. I will quote Stop Making Sense, by Jonathan Demme, around a Talking Heads concert. David Byrne appears there alone with his guitar, then the bassist arrives, the drums arrive and they are finally an incredible number on stage. The construction principle inspired me at the beginning of the creation of Stereo. I also remember that my film Caramba opened the midnight session of L'Escurial, in Paris, at the end of the 1980s, before Stop Making Sense. There is also Phantom of the Paradise, by Brian De Palma, which I saw when it was released in 1974, and which was such a shock that I did two screenings. Finally, for its relationship to time slipping, to repetition, Groundhog Day, by Harold Ramis, whose humor I also appreciate.

One of the very first rock operas, based on the novel The Phantom of the Opera, which tells the story of a young and gifted composer; who when a diabolical producer steals his music, transforms himself into a masked phantom, haunting the theatre of his nemesis. De Palma asked Paul Williams to score the film—giving him the necessary freedom, to allow for his talents to unfold through all kinds of popular music, influenced from the 1950s to 1970s.

The opening and closing ceremony will be directed by awarded short film director Thanasis Neofotistos.

Brian De Palma (1940), after studying physics, studied theater and in the 60's lived in the artsy Greenwich Village, cradle of the Fluxus movement. He became the author of a political and critical cinema at the very heart of Hollywood and post-Vietnam America, with films like Obsession (1976), Carrie (1976), Scarface (1983), The Untouchables (1987), Outrage (1989). His work is both dark and spectacular, referential to Hitchcock in particular, and constantly inventive. Nowadays, Brian De Palma is still an active filmmaker and writer.

WRIGHT: So, you’ve been sitting on this amazing debut for nearly a year.

TEASDALE: Yeah, we finished recording, but then we had to do all the artwork and get it mixed and mastered. It doesn’t feel like it’s been a year, it feels like we only really finished it six months ago. When you finish a film, how long until it’s released?

WRIGHT: It depends on when it’s supposed to come out. Hot Fuzz came out like a month after it was finished. It was really down to the wire. But Last Night in Soho was disrupted by the pandemic, so we shot nearly all of it in 2019 and 2020, and it came out in 2021. It’s really emotional for me to watch that film, because it feels like so much happened in the space and time of the production. So it depends on what it is, really, and whether there’s a global pandemic or not.

TEASDALE: When you watch your own stuff, are you transported to that version of you? Do you put yourself into your art and your characters?

WRIGHT: Oh, yeah. That’s what’s strange—Shaun of the Dead is a film about a zombie apocalypse, Hot Fuzz is a film about cops in Somerset, Last Night in Soho is about a Cornish fashion student coming to London with supernatural powers—and I say, “Oh, they’re all really personal.” [Laughs] People are like, “How?” But you do put yourself into them, and you’re dramatizing your own mundane experiences into something more exciting. You guys are from the Isle of Wight, and I grew up in Dorset and Somerset, so a lot of what I’ve done is the product of being bored as a teenager. Somerset a very picturesque and beautiful place, but when you’re a teenager, picturesque is not what you want—you want to get to the city. Now I’m older and I think more fondly about my bucolic childhood in the country. So, all of the things you make become like love/hate letters to the place that you’re from.

TEASDALE: Yeah, I can relate to that.

WRIGHT: I can feel those country vibes in your work as well. The album seems to have themes. One theme is that it seems like you guys get annoyed at house parties a lot.

TEASDALE: Yeah. FOMO is such a thing, isn’t it? And you’re always trying to “live your best life,” but sometimes you just need to listen to yourself, and maybe just don’t don’t go to the party. I’m not able to do that quite often.

WRIGHT: I didn’t have Instagram when I was growing up, so I was always thinking that there must be something cooler going on without me. I grew up feeling like I was never going to the cool parties, but it seems like, from your album, that you’ve been to the cool parties, and you’re not impressed.

TEASDALE: Yeah, that’s it.

WRIGHT: I think it’s a good message to tell the young people out there: don’t worry guys, you’re not missing that much.

CHAMBERS: We’ve dipped our toes in the little pool of music videos, but you are a filmmaker. We are not filmmakers, but if you had a tip for us, what would it be? Also, what’s one of your favorite movies?

WRIGHT: Well, what makes you think that you’re not filmmakers? That doesn’t make any sense, because you already have a point of view and an aesthetic. You can tell what a Wet Leg video is just from the four that you’ve released already, which is great. Why don’t you make a Wet Leg movie? Here’s the pitch: every attraction at Blackgang Chine comes to life, and only Wet Leg can stop the chaos from spreading across the rest of the world.

TEASDALE: [Gasps] The Mouth of Hell.

CHAMBERS: The Weather Wizard!

TEASDALE: The Rumpus Mansion!

CHAMBERS: There’s also a really scary Humpty-Dumpty there.

WRIGHT: Okay, I’m going to suggest a favorite film of mine. If you haven’t seen it, I can’t imagine you guys not loving it. Have you ever seen the 1974 musical Phantom of the Paradise?

TEASDALE: Phantom of the Paradise? No, I haven’t seen that.

WRIGHT: I’m going to get it to you because I cannot imagine that you wouldn’t love it. It’s like a rock musical. It’s Phantom of the Opera meets Faust, it’s got a ‘70s score written by Paul Williams, and it’s fantastic. That’s one of my favorite films that I think you guys would dig.

TEASDALE: I’ve written it down. One last question, do you have a DVD collection?

WRIGHT: I do, I can show you. Hang on, we’ll take a little walk. Buffalo ’66 is not there because I looked for it earlier. Look, here you go, this is what I was doing during the lockdown.

[Wright shows Wet Leg his substantial DVD collection]

TEASDALE & CHAMBERS: Wooowwwww!

WRIGHT: Physical media—it hasn’t gone away! Who knows when the internet will go? I’ve still got a lot of Blu Rays to organize. I can’t stop buying them— I went on a bit of a crazy Amazon kick during the lockdown. The Oxfam around the corner from my house has had a steady stream of the ones I’ve been giving away. I donate a lot of horror films to the Oxfam. I wonder about the kind of the person that goes in there and finds all these really hardcore horror films. Somebody’s going to have a wild afternoon.

TEASDALE: We love horror films.

WRIGHT: What are some of your favorite horror films?

TEASDALE: Evil Dead.

CHAMBERS: I like Death Becomes Her, I think that’s such a funny film.

WRIGHT: I saw that at Bournemouth when I was at art college. I haven’t seen it since— I don’t want to guess a lady’s age—but probably before you guys were alive.

Tonight, the philm_philes watched Phantom Of The Paradise -- here are their reactions:

Joshua: on paper, there was almost a zero percent chance I was gunna dig this movie. Turns out I’m very thankful movies aren’t paper. What a ride! Why does no one talk about this movie?!??! And De Palma’s directing MAKES this film.

Hayley: THIS MOVIE RULES! It’s as if Phantom of the Opera and Rocky Horror made a baby on acid.

Where the Juicy Fruits come across as unselfconscious and ironic, and where Phoenix comes across as earnest almost to the point of desperation, their successor (Gerrit Graham) is willing to lean into knowing camp, and all the excesses that come with it. Even his improbable (incredible!) name—Beef—is a wink toward voracious appetites, and more than just a nod to sexual innuendo. Beef is artificial, swimming in irony. Beef knows the rules of the production game, and he’s in on the joke. He matches Swan’s excesses with excesses of his own, slipping across the stage in wooden high-heeled shoes, his hair caked in glitter and coiffed like that of a classical Greek statue. He pronounces the word “professional” with extra syllables. The Juicy Fruits’ presentation might have been cobbled together from genre to genre, but Beef beats the label band at their own game by performing dressed as Frankenstein’s monster—a man created by the label purely to sell music in spectacular fashion.

And De Palma—like Swan and his cronies—sells spectacle here, more than anything else. The entire film is soaked in color: crimson and gold in the hallways of the titular Paradise club, metallics shining in the microphones and musical instruments, and the flash of neon lights in pink, green, and yellow in the background at every show. Paradise attendees and auditioning hopefuls wear clothing in natural fibers and floral prints, nature untouched by Swan, the devil in a shag haircut and leisure suit. The performers on stage, in contrast, wear sequins and spandex, synthetic materials in spectacular colors and shapes. Phoenix starts off dressed simply enough, but dons a coat made entirely of pheasant feathers once she’s been crowned Swan’s newest favorite. The Phantom wears black skin-tight leather, a void of a man who’s been emptied of his art by a soulless producer. Even the blood, when it’s finally spilled, is cherry red. It pops off the screen, mortal seriousness masked in a cartoon shade.

The cartoony nature of the visuals sells the faux-glamor of the Paradise better than any realistic style could; the exaggerated nature of the sets, cheap as they might look, gives the movie an appearance of being that much larger than life. Swan’s production company, Death Records, features winding, impractical black-and-white corridors that twist through the building with no discernible logic, in an inefficient and extravagant use of space. Before he becomes the Phantom, Winslow Leach enters the building hoping to be signed by Swan. He finds nothing of substance: no recording studios, no instruments, no producer, just a woman in a Death Records t-shirt filing her nails behind a desk, and a record press that will maim Leach’s face, driving him to haunt the Paradise for revenge.

Where Death Records is sparse, the Paradise is ornate: the club is festooned with mirrors, doing double duty to make the building’s interior look bigger, even though the images those mirrors reflect have no real substance. Swan can see himself from any angle in those mirrors, can admire his own self-declared perfection whenever he’d like. He knows himself for the devil he is. The Phantom, on the other hand, can’t confront himself in those same mirrors. He shies away; they magnify his burned face, and with it his failure to hold on to the rights to his own music. The Phantom covers his face in shining metal armor to protect him from pity and scorn, including his own.

 

***

Before it all goes to hell, before Leach is signed to a contract under Swan, before he’s disfigured and trapped within the Paradise’s walls as the Phantom, before the opulence of the Paradise is shown to be a sham, Leach plays piano in a club. He might be an unsigned artist playing unpopular music, but De Palma treats that art with respect. The camera swirls around Leach as he plays and sings, the lens holding a tight focus on his face. Everything else falls away. There’s no artifice: Leach’s music, with no frills added, is the only art in the world that matters. He’s certainly the only artist in the building; he’s playing to an empty club. The only person in-film who can hear him is Swan, and tragically, Swan doesn’t hear Leach the way we do. He only hears a song that he wants to repurpose for the opening of the Paradise.

Months in the future and miles away, Phoenix is pushed on the stage at the opening of the Paradise. Beef has flamed out on stage, murdered by the vengeful Phantom, and in his desperation to keep the show going, Swan turns to the singer he’d rejected for being too perfect and too innocent. She steals the show with a song Leach wrote for her.

“Old Souls” is an anomaly—a slow love ballad, far more restrained than any other song in the film. The piano accompanying Phoenix’s performance takes a back seat to Jessica Harper’s voice. The maximalist stage setting from Beef’s performance is gone, replaced by a simple velvet curtain; the raucous audience screaming that they want Beef is silenced. They’re held rapt by everything Swan has previously discarded. Instead of glitter, darkness; instead of Beef’s stagy hypermasculinity, Phoenix’s unpracticed and unguarded femininity; instead of processed false youth, a song about a love older than the lovers experiencing it.

“All souls last forever so we need never fear goodbye,” sings Phoenix, and for a moment, the artifice driving Phantom of the Paradise falls away. There’s no need to sell youth anymore, because there’s nothing to fear from aging. Phoenix’s song is genuine because it embraces change and age, and it refuses to put a price tag on the love around which the lyrics turn. Phoenix isn’t selling anything to her audience; she’s giving it away for free.

It’s hard to say if Brian De Palma spent the majority of his career working in the thriller and horror genres just because he felt most comfortable there, or if Phantom Of The Paradise kept him there. The rock musical was a both a critical and box-office failure, but it has gained a cult following in the years since for how distinctly strange it is. Anchored by the original music (and an unlikely leading role) from pop maestro Paul Williams, the movie is a glitzy riff on The Phantom Of The Opera about a disfigured songwriter who lives inside a theater owned by a benevolent record producer who — as the immortal tagline states — sold his soul for rock ’n’ roll.

Despite its lofty ambitions as a modern-day Faust or Dorian Gray (in addition to Phantom of the Opera) that seeks to satirize the music industry, the movie is perhaps best viewed as a wonderfully gaudy spectacle that would make a great double feature with The Rocky Horror Picture Show. De Palma’s success with his next film, Carrie, launched him into the stratosphere of great genre directors, and though De Palma would never direct anything this zany again, Phantom Of The Paradise still has plenty of the director’s trademarks. Though his films often have a kind of meticulousness that lends him to the obsession of many a movie nerd, he’s also prone to the kinds of bombastic flourishes (see John Cassavetes’ entire body exploding in The Fury) that make this such a cult-y delight.