Keeping Score: ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ and the high seas banger
The current movie scene is so severely lacking in sword-wielding heroes swinging from ropes and untying damsels from train tracks, the ‘swashbuckling’ doesn’t get nearly enough use.
In fact, the most recent swashbuckler to be a big hit at the pictures was probably Pirates of the Caribbean, the Disney-backed high-seas action-packed adventures, which reintroduced an entirely new generation to the idea of pirates on the big screen, and the one thing we all remember about these movies is the music.
A lot of work went into turning a theme park ride into a fully-fledged movie series, and nobody worked harder than the music department, with the team’s biggest success the piece that became the unofficial theme song of the entire franchise, ‘He’s a Pirate’, a blood-pumping, goosebump-inducing combination of strings and drums. This piece is easily one of the highlights of Hans Zimmer’s career, and wait, it was Zimmer who composed this tune, right?
Well, while the German maestro is credited as providing the music for the rest of the original Pirates trilogy, he was actually too busy to score the entirety of The Curse of the Black Pearl, as he was working on The Last Samurai, which would earn him a Golden Globe nomination, and Alan Silvestri had already quit the movie after falling out with Jerry Bruckheimer, and so the studio was running out of composers. Luckily, Zimmer pointed them in the direction of a relatively unknown young man named Klaus Badelt.
Badelt had been working with Zimmer for a number of years up to this point, such that the two Germans had collaborated on scores like The Thin Red Line and Gladiator, the latter of which features a surprising connection to the world of Pirates. His solo ventures included submarine drama K-19: The Widowmaker, but he had yet to prove himself on a major project, and that all changed when Zimmer pointed the Pirates crew in his direction.
All of the music in The Curse of the Black Pearl is excellent, but the one piece that stands above the rest is the one that closes out the official soundtrack. ‘He’s a Pirate’ essentially became a theme song for Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow and the series as a whole, its racing strings and horns immediately conjuring images of sword fights and treasure.
It’s not a stretch to say that, without it, the franchise wouldn’t be nearly as popular as it is today, and that’s why we need to be extra careful when assigning credit for this masterstroke, which means returning to our old friend Hans.
Zimmer managed to send over a demo track to Badelt before his work had officially begun, having knocked up a synthesised brief for his colleague in a single night, which included many of the melodies and motifs found throughout the film. It also included a very basic version of ‘He’s a Pirate’, and upon hearing the demo, critics quickly pointed out its similarities to the score for the film Drop Zone, also written by the same culprit.
Regardless of who actually wrote the thing, ‘He’s a Pirate’ is one of the most instantly recognisable movie themes of the past two decades, and both Zimmer and Badelt have earned their spot at the captain’s table for their stellar work.
