The song Stanley Kubrick called “one of the great party records of all time”
The iconic auteur was called many things by many people over the course of his legendary career, but it’s hard to imagine any of his peers, colleagues, or contemporaries referring to Stanley Kubrick as a party animal.
He was studious, meticulous, and a perfectionist when it came to striving for cinematic greatness, but he never gave off the impression that he’d be caught crowd-surfing or knocking back shots in his downtime. That’s not to say he didn’t have any concrete levels of certainty when he was a notoriously private fellow, but it’s hardly part of his enduring mythology.
Kubrick may have never been snapped by the paparazzi being carted out of nightclubs, then, but music was a monumental influence on his professional life. His wife Christine said “he was addicted to music, he played it always all day long,” with his tastes ranging from classical and pop to jazz. When he needed the perfect score for 2001: A Space Odyssey, he realised that new compositions weren’t cutting it.
Instead, he opted to ditch the music created specifically for the film in favour of existing classical numbers, and it turned out to be the right decision. When the time came for Vietnam-era war drama Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick turned his eye to the more recent past in selecting the ideal tunes to accompany the movie.
Nancy Sinatra’s ‘These Boots Are Made For Walkin’, The Trashmen’s ‘Surfin’ Bird’, The Rolling Stones’ ‘Paint it Black’, and The Dixie Cups’ ‘Chapel Of Love’ were all present and accounted for on the soundtrack, with Kubrick accurately describing it as “the music of the period” in an interview with Rolling Stone, before explaining how he curated his playlist.
“The music really depended on the scene,” he said. “We checked through Billboard’s list of Top 100 hits for each year from 1962 to 1968. We were looking for interesting material that played well with a scene. We tried a lot of songs. Sometimes the dynamic range of the music was too great, and we couldn’t work in dialogue.”
Another song to feature in Full Metal Jacket is ‘Wooly Bully’ by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, which became the band’s first and biggest hit when it reached second place on the Billboard charts in 1964. When it was put to Kubrick that the song is “one of the great party records of all time,” the filmmaker was fully in agreement.
“An amazing piece, isn’t it?” Kubrick responded, blissfully unaware that a mere 16 years after Full Metal Jacket‘s release, celebrated crooner and musical superstar Vinnie Jones would release his own cover version of the song. He might have changed his mind after that, but long before the track was butchered by the football hardman-turned-actor, the influential director couldn’t speak highly enough of ‘Wooly Bully’.
