Tangerine Dream top 10 - #7 Exit (piano version)

Exit and the soundtrack to Risky Business

While there are other notable tunes on Exit (1981), like Choronzon and the atmospheric Remote Viewing, the title track stands out as TD’s most badass composition. It has a very dark and sinister feel to it and it certainly deserved far better fate than to be included in the teenage comedy Risky Business. I think it brings to mind the minimalist compositions of John Carpenter and it would have fitted perfectly in his awesome horror movie The Thing from the same period, alongside Ennio Morricone’s score.

I cannot say whether Edgar would agree with the above, but what I can say is that he considered Risky Business to be a really awful movie. His agent presented it to him as a brilliant, breath-taking pic by a first-time director (Paul Brickman). Having pushed the VHS demo in his video recorder, this is what he thought: “After five minutes I stopped the tape and picked up the cassette box in order to check what amateur shit they had sent me. I was really convinced that they’d sent me the wrong film…”. He feared that scoring it would damage TD’s image and musical reputation, “Just endless jabbering between two peers who talk with each other using verbal soap bubbles”.

Eventually however, after some extortion tactics from Virgin’s boss Richard Branson, he decided to accept the offer. After the successful score to Michael Mann’s movie Thief in 1981, TD were about to establish themselves as Hollywood film composers, but if they turned down Risky Business “you definitely won’t get any more offers for years, believe me”. Along side TD, the movie would include songs by Bruce Springsteen, The Policy, Prince, Phil Collins and Talking Heads. As far as the other group members were concerned, Chris Franke added that “We’ve already worked on some real rubbish as far as films go; do you think we’re going to wreck our careers with this one?” (Edgar’s biography doesn’t say which films he was referring to).

Edgar looked forward to a swift project, as “the scenes were easy to orchestrate due to their inherent lack of any emotional warmth”. However, he was soon awakened from this illusion by the director, who didn’t think any of the material they had been working on would fit the film. As he didn’t have any clear ideas as to what kind of music he needed instead, the trio played him different sequences, chords and melodies, and when that didn’t give any result, they turned to their extensive library of film music of other composer, from Vivaldi to Fleetwood Mac in the hope of finding something useful to emulate. As they were about to give up, Johannes sat down at his Jupiter 8 synth, absent-mindedly playing some minimalistic musical patterns using a delay, which doubled or tripled every tone. Suddenly the director rose from his chair, shouting “tape this, tape this right now, don’t lose the line!”. Johannes was hardly aware of what he had played, it was more of a finger exercise of the sort he used to practice his rhythmic precision. Although not stated explicitly, my conclusion is that this story reveals how the track Love On A Real Train was born.

Sources:
“Tangerine Dream Force Majeure”, autobiography by Edgar Froese.
© Eastgate Music & Arts 2015.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risky_B...

Sheet music: https://www.dropbox.com/s/tlq51hdemow...