I Spit on Your Rave

Following The Martorialist’s post regarding soundtracks played for when one carks it, my choice would be Ennio Morricone’s Dies Irae Psichedelico. While Il Maestro’s more familiar The Ecstasy of Gold would have been my most obvious choice, Metallica and JAŸ-Z have rendered it unusable thanks to their cultural appropriation of it and permanently making it a clichéd theme.

I had heard Dies Irae Psichedelico well before seeing Escalation (1968), the film it is featured in. Your host immediately imagined a scene with marching angels, sounding the horns for the Rapture, or a similarly epic biblical event which would be fitting of Morricone’s remarkable theme. Sadly, Escalation is a forgettable Italian sex comedy, and the particular composition appears when giallo veteran Lino Capolicchio (more of him in a forthcoming film review) is at a London rave with zonged out and tuneless hippies ruining the track by screaming all over it; one of whom having an epileptic fit on the piano by the sounds of it. Bond girl and Hammer starlet Madeline Smith dancing to Morricone's masterpiece in a brief and uncredited part, is a minor perk for what's otherwise a bitter disappointment for your host's expectations.

Thankfully, the legendary director Mario Bava managed to feature a hippie party scene that didn't ruin another personal Morricone fave, in the classic fumetti neri Danger: Diabolik (1968). I'm all over Eureka's Masters of Cinema release like gold on John Philip Law, by the way.

For what it's worth, Gen X fares no better than the previous generation when I'm seeing folks like the one below on my local high street blasting '90s techno trash upon the general public: