Most people, when they think of the music most closely associated with John Carpenter, will start hearing synthesisers in their head. While that’s definitely true to a large extent, the iconic filmmaker’s personal tastes are much more wide-ranging and eclectic than his signature theme songs.
As you might expect, since he was born in 1948 and turned 16 years old just weeks before the group’s seminal appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, he’s a big fan of The Beatles. In fact, he once shared that “all of my scores are informed by The Beatles and the Stones and the riffs and the sounds of that time,” so it’s not like he grew out of his adoration.
At the other end of the sonic spectrum, he also loves Metallica. So much so that he tried to secure ‘Enter Sandman’ as the theme song for In the Mouth of Madness, and when he didn’t get it, he admitted that he basically ripped it off wholesale, which he didn’t really need to confess to, since it’s patently obvious and almost hilariously blatant to anyone who’s heard both.
There’s also the influence of classic film scores, with the mastermind behind Halloween, The Fog, The Thing, Escape from New York, and Big Trouble in Little China captivated by the orchestral stylings of regular Alfred Hitchcock collaborator, Bernard Hermann, with Dimitri Tiomkin, James Bernard, and Elmer Bernstein among his other towering influences.
However, if there was one musician he would listen to forever, there wouldn’t be any debate. Despite his esoteric favourites and his synonymity with electronica, Carpenter owes a lot to his father, Howard, who was a classically trained violinist. He was exposed to the greats at an early age, and one of his earliest musical icons remains the be-all and end-all, as far as he’s concerned.
“Bach, Bach, and Bach,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “He’s my favourite. I just can’t get enough of Johann there. He’s the Rock of Ages of music. Everybody would go back to Mozart or Beethoven. They are astonishing, Beethoven is especially astonishing, but they’re not my style. I don’t feel it like I do with Bach. I immediately got him.”
It might seem strange that an auteur who worked almost exclusively in horror, fantasy, and sci-fi, who dedicated their composing career to synth-infused soundtracks that don’t exactly hark back to 18th-century classicism, would place Bach on such a high pedestal, but Carpenter has always been something of a renaissance man when it comes to his musical inclinations.
When asked how he felt about becoming an inspiration to other composers, though, his self-deprecating side shone through. “Well, see, I must be stupid,” he suggested. “Because I don’t get it.” He can’t quite grasp how his music has become influential for at least one generation of spiritual successors, but at the end of the day, it all comes back to Bach.
“It all comes, probably, from the years I spent in our front room with my father and listening to classical music,” he explained. “I’m sure I’m just digging this shit out.”