John Carpenter, really. His movie soundtracks always had that ominous, pulsing, relentless feel - something wicked this way comes and there's nothing you can do about it. Pretty much how I felt about nuclear weapons in the '80s. I used to speculate on where would be the best place in the world to hide from a nuclear war. I thought Patagonia (after reading Bruce Chatwin's 'In Patagonia') but my pocket-money could never have covered flight and accommodation.
The samples are from Barry Hines' extraordinary Threads. My favourite horror films - The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Exorcist, Halloween... - they're all 'horrible' in their own twisted fantasy-worlds, but Threads is the horror of the possible; the thought of all those cosy provincial mundanities - milk bottles on a doorstep, the local pub, factory chimnies - being incinerated in an instant.
'Square Leg' was a "home defence" exercise in 1980 that calculated the result of an all-out Soviet nuclear attack. The (conservative) estimate was 53% of the population killed, with a further 35% short-term survivors and 12% suffering serious injuries. Obscene enough, but we'll get to Mr Oppenheimer later...
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A moment in time.
Of course it makes it all the more real because we were of a certain age.
Having nuclear devastation hanging over your head when your a sensitive teenage boy doesn't do much for the psyche.
And Threads just cemented it there. I think I can trace most of my innate paranoia back to that time :)
Listening to this track as I type this, I've got a slow pan through a bleak, blackened and lifeless Sheffield happening in my head.
Evocative stuff - both the song and the picture...
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