John Murphy: "Helicopter Mayhem"

Spare a thought for composer John Murphy: his roof’s begun pissing water and he’s had to patch it himself. I know, it’s always the plumber’s house to have a leaky toilet, and Murphy—a roofer turned blockbuster tunesmith—should be able to heat bitumen as well as he can orchestrate, but you get the feeling that even if he did ring for help, all of Tinseltown would give him the engaged tone. No personal army of A-list enforcements, no Arnie to help hand-crank the resin mixer—just him, a house full of instruments, a wife and a dog, and a stepladder. Hollywood treats him like a pre-gong Scorsese—it shuns him and then poaches his output. After the trailer-friendly “In A House-In A Heartbeat” and the furor over his Sunshine OST, Murphy’s next excerpt to be hang-on-isn’t-this-the-one-from’d is an ident from 28 Weeks Later (2007), recently recycled into the teaser for Avatar for all you 3D-TV nuts to pig on. Murphy, of course, was the last to hear that yet another of his pieces had been snitched. He was probably out ordering timber or trying to repoint his gable end.

Listening to the piece in either its promotional/original form is likely to both pose/answer a question: yes, Murphy’s responsible for writing some of the most lusted soundtracks in Hollywood, but why in crikey do overpaid shmucks keep stealing them to save their big budgets. Avatar looks set to take a country’s economy at the box office and the suits don’t want to jinx that with royalties, so “Helicopter Mayhem” is the sound they’re going to use to help launch the second Titanic (that one’s for you, James Cameron). It sounds as if it’s been forged in a workshop from Hell—white noise and injury in place of lunch and First Aid—and its sneaky choral interlude becomes very quickly brutal; mutated hard house that carves up its listeners with Miniguns. Hideous electricity then takes over, the drums kicking in like overhead rotors but still nothing against the roar of engine: a churning, runaway bass line awash with voltage and brake cable shrieks. In Murphy’s own words it’s “Fat Boy Slim through a fuzzbox” and is just the right thing to the rig to the PA if you slice through a city with a Hind (or chop up a field of zombies, as happens in the cue’s first use). This is action music for people too shellshocked; a jingle by a short-changed roofer. He’s snuck into to your house via the keys he had cut and accessed your roof through a skylight, power trailing out to his van. I hope you’re packing earmuffs. And insurance.