The Coup de Villes: Get to know John Carpenter’s 1980s synth band
Outside of his day job as one of the most iconic directors of the last 50 years who’s helmed a slew of classics, John Carpenter has always kept himself busy with multiple vocations.
Quite how he found the time to do so during the most fertile period of his career that conspired to gift cinema with such heavy hitters as Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, The Fog, Escape from New York, The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, and They Live is anybody’s guess, but the filmmaker has always held a soft spot for the musical side of life.
Of course, Carpenter is well-known for composing the scores to many of his own features and those made by others, something he’s continued dabbling in even after his self-imposed exile from behind the camera, with his most recent contributions coming on the soundtracks to David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy and the remake of Stephen King’s Firestarter.
An early proponent of the synthesiser who made a point of factoring it into virtually all of his most recognisable musical accompaniments, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Carpenter also had a brief flirtation with bringing his synth band to the forefront of his endeavours, for a very short while at least.
Alongside regular collaborators Michael Myers actor Nick Castle and multi-hyphenate art director, editor, production designer, and second unit director Tommy Lee Wallace, the trio dubbed themselves as The Coup de Villes. Even though they’d been making music together since the early 1970s, it wasn’t until a decade and a half later that they took their biggest – and ultimately only – step into the spotlight.
Appearing on the soundtrack to Big Trouble in Little China as the band behind the title track of the same name, The Coup de Villes would also record a seven-song album called Waiting Out the Eighties at the studio owned and operated by Alan Howarth, another long-time friend and collaborator of Carpenter’s who’d been working with the director since Escape from New York in 1981.
Never intended to be mass-produced or given a wide release, only 150 copies of the record were ever pressed, making it the ultimate Holy Grail for die-hard Carpenter aficionados. Each member of the band received 50 copies each and was free to distribute them as, how, and when they saw fit. Suffice to say, they weren’t passed out like hotcakes, with Dangerous Minds revealing a copy now valued at thousands of dollars, such is the scarcity and near-mythical status of both Waiting Out the Eighties and The Coup de Villes themselves.
Carpenter may have gone on tour several times to play the most recognisable tracks from his cinematic back catalogue, but as of yet, he’s resisted any and all inclinations to get the band back together with Castle and Williams.
