Tangerine Dream
THIEF
1981, Elektra/Asylum
When director Michael Mann decided that his first feature would be the story of a burned-out career criminal on the mean streets of Chicago, he somehow figured that German progressive instrumental group Tangerine Dream were the perfect ones to score it.
Thief is a story that we’ve seen before. Chicago is a setting that we’ve seen before. But this time, it was going to be a bleak, but day-glo, dream in a luminous night world and a new take on noir for the 1980s. It would be gritty and grimy, but also oddly beautiful. Its style wouldn’t be outlandish; rather, it would be a kind of hyper-reality. Every last light bulb and every shadow would be as vital as the pages of the script.
And it would all move to the zero-gravity swirl of Edgar Froese and company’s synthesizers.
It’s been a controversial decision ever since.
The Golden Raspberry Awards (the informal, smarmy anti-Oscars) nominated it as the Worst Music Score of 1981.
Even Michael Mann himself has said in recent years that he’s still not sure if he made the right choice when it came to the music (see the supplements on the Criterion Collection disc of the film).
Meanwhile, here I am still taking this album’s ride in 2019 to places far out where none of that matters.