Yesterday a bus whizzed by with a huge poster on its side, advertising Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (2024 version), with music by Danny Elfman. I paused for a moment, thinking of the sessions in Abbey Road’s huge Studio One a few months ago, when I was part of a team of singers who recorded the vocals for the movie.
It always feels good when the movie you’ve made a teeny contribution to actually hits the screens. When I say teeny, I’m thinking of the crazy-long closing credits in a feature film thesedays, showing a huge number of names. Most of those people spent months involved in the process, rather than just days, which is the case for the orchestral players and singers. But still, it’s satisfying having a connection with the whole endeavour. I’m sure tho’ that when my children were small, and a bus went by with a movie poster on it and I yelled, ‘Oh – I’m singing on that movie!’, they thought I was a fantastist. Clearly they’d forgotten the times when they were babes in arms and I brought them (and ‘Granny-Nanny’) to Abbey Road, or AIR Lyndhurst, while I was in the studio.
Anyway, back to Beetlejuice – the creative collaboration between Tim Burton and Danny Elfman reaches back more than 35 years, and for many of those years, I’ve added my two-cents’-worth to their movie soundtracks. At some point I’ll jot down a couple of memories of those sessions. For now, I have to decide whether I could handle watching Beetlejuice. Because even the snippets we saw in the studio were pretty intensely whacky!
