The classic Pink Floyd song inspired by Randy Newman: “The chorus I just love”
There’s a whole legion of folks out there who’ll cherish ‘You’ve Got a Friend in Me’ for life thanks to the childhood favourite, Toy Story, and never realise that the man behind it, Randy Newman, is a songwriter on a pedestal with only about a handful of other names. Newman himself has admitted that his fandom over the last half a century or so has perennially teetered around the 200,000 mark; new ones arise wondering what the world beyond Pixar entails for the songsmith, while the old died of gout or the mere threat of hard labour after a lifetime luxuriating.
Nevertheless, Newman has never minded plateauing out as a cult act too much because among his fans are a few names that carry more weight than the masses. Bob Dylan said he’s the songwriter it “doesn’t get any better than”. Don Henley called him a “national treasure”, and it appears David Gilmour is equally enthralled by his wider oeuvre—an oeuvre that is typified by the track ‘In Germany Before the War’; a grisly recapitulation of the twisted horrors of the Vampire of Düsseldorf, told from the unreliable perspective of infamous neck-chomper, Peter Kürten, himself.
That’s a million miles away from the province of Pixar, but it’s one that has proved equally influential, nevertheless. One record it notably inspired was the Pink Floyd classic ‘Sorrow’ from their 1987 album, A Momentary Lapse of Reason. The song closes the record, offering up a succinct encapsulation of its themes. Gilmour’s houseboat / floating recording studio, Astoria, which is moored on the Thames, has often meant that rivers feature as a common motif in his work. Still, this time, it was Randy’s sinister watercourse that provided a more active tributary of inspiration to the poem that resulted in ‘Sorrow’.
Speaking to Matt Resnicoff, Gilmour explained the context of his writing headspace following Roger Waters’ departure from the group. “I obviously had something to prove in that Roger was no longer a part of it, and obviously, I had the view that people may have misunderstood or misread the way it had been with him within our history,” he said. “It was quite important to me to prove that there was something serious still going on there.”
A sense of natural progression became a theme that flowed throughout the album, culminating in ‘Sorrow’. “‘The Sea Refuses No River’, yeah,” Gilmour began, quoting a track by his pal Pete Townshend, who also, as it happens, has a houseboat studio. This line got Gilmour thinking about ways water has been used in art. “‘Sorrow’ was a poem I’d written as a lyric before I wrote music to it, which is rare for me. The river’s a very, very common theme; rivers are a very symbolic, attractive way of exposing all sorts of things,” he said.
“There’s a Randy Newman song, ‘In Germany Before the War’, where he talks about a little girl who gets killed by an old pervert. ‘I’m looking at the river but thinking of the sea.’ The chorus I just love, the river has nothing directly to do with it, but sums it up perfectly.”
The Newman track from 1977’s Little Criminals is an ominous masterpiece. It’s one of the most unsettling and visual pieces of baroque pop music ever written. Taking on the romanticised perspective of a child killer is a bold move that plays out like a movie directed by Ingmar Bergman.
Kürten attempted the Vampiric slaying of over 40 people, claiming the lives of at least nine between 1913 and 1929. Just to ram the point home, that’s 16 years of unapprehended Vampirism on the streets of Düsseldorf! The master songsmith tells his tale as though it were a Peter Süskind novel, incongruously imbuing the pitch-black premise with sweet poetry.
Lyrics like “We lie beneath the autumn sky / My little golden girl and I / And she lies very still” colour his crimes with a narrative, while the stirring melody and production flourishes add an eerie atmosphere like finely-tuned true crime prose. If any one song crowns Newman the unreliable narrator, then it is surely this one. He tries to reconcile the actions of a killer by delving into his irreconcilable mind. ‘Sorrow’ treads an adjacent path, weaving a telling melody around a poem that speaks of things unfurling beyond our control, resulting in regrets and “promises broken”.
