Splurging out ... a scene from Alan Parker's Bugsy Malone. Photograph: Allstar
I love synchronicity, when something that's been around for ages suddenly becomes ubiquitous. I remember this happening with broccoli sometime in the late 80s (ignored for years and then everyone went mad for it). And in music, the Bugsy Malone film soundtrack from 1976 is now experiencing a broccoli moment.
Dizzee Rascal has updated So You Wanna Be a Boxer (changing "boxer" to "gangsta") and turned it into a sparring duet with Lily Allen called Wanna Be, his new album's most pop moment. Carl Barât and Pete Doherty have sung Boxer together in the Libertines live shows, and Terry Hall (ex-Specials) has included it in his DJ sets at Guilty Pleasures for the past couple of years (he reckons the score is up there with Lionel Bart's Oliver! and I agree with him).
I've also heard the movie's closing You Give a Little Love in numerous places recently. At Glastonbury on the Saturday night I played it in the Old Queens Head (a "pub" that held 2000 people); Camden DJ duo the Filthy Dukes played it in an igloo disco up an Austrian mountain at April's Snowbombing festival and in May a team from the Fabric nightclub used it as weaponry in an iPod battle held in east London.
I've also heard it conclude a couple of weddings for which it is perfect: a bunch of mates, linking arms, knees pointing skywards, singing "We could have been anything that we wanted to be / And it's not too late to change ..." which after a few too many white wine spritzers you may find profoundly moving. Alongside Grease, I'd argue Bugsy Malone is the last great musical.
Tomorrow (sung by a six year old in the film mouthing the voice of a teen whose balls have long dropped) and Jodie Foster's salacious My Name is Tallulah are equally brilliant. The score was written not by some rascally Brits with visions of Albion in their sights, but by American Oscar winning composer Paul Williams, who thrashed out the basic ideas for the songs in a Las Vegas deli with director Alan Parker. Not quite the romantic vision lovers of the score hope to conjure.
So why is the soundtrack everywhere now? Two summers ago So You Wanna Be a Boxer was also used to soundtrack an advert for a product called Cheese Strings. Being too young to experience the film first time around (and perhaps low on calcium) I'm betting this is where Dizzee got the idea from. What do you think?
