Welcome to Blood City

Track Listing Legend:
* unused

Caldera Records is proud to present Roy Budd's score for the motion picture Welcome to Blood City, directed by Peter Sasdy and starring Jack Palance, Keir Dullea and Samantha Eggar. The characters of the latter two wake up on a beach one day as part of a group of strangers. None of them can remember who they are or recognise where they are. Things don't become clearer to them as they run into two men who swiftly rape the woman and shoot one of the strangers. They are eventually rescued by sheriff Friendlander and escorted to a town that looks as if it had been built for a Hollywood western. But is Friendlander really their friend, and what reality do they now inhabit? Slowly, a grisly truth dawns on the new arrivals.

Welcome to Blood City is an unusual genre-mix that plays with elements of western, romance, thriller and science-fiction decades before The Matrix would premiere. However, the film was not a commercial or critical success, and Roy Budd's score remains the best thing about it. It is also the most unusual work in his oeuvre as already becomes clear during the opening credits with its abstract effects, a lone flute solo, and the use of the echoplex. Budd's score is more experimental and austere than any of his other compositions. Although Welcome to Blood City features jazz inflections and aggressive orchestral moments, it is neither a grand symphonic score nor a driving jazz composition for which the former child prodigy from Croydon, England, had become famous. In his score, Budd doesn't rely on themes and melodies but on motifs and moods instead. The lonesome, haunting flute solo at the beginning skilfully captures the deserted landscape and troubling alienation of the unwitting pawns while the echoplex (used famously in Patton by Jerry Goldsmith whom Budd admired and befriended) provides a sense of mystery and hints at the science fiction element of the story.

We are pleased to finally make Roy Budd's score for Welcome to Blood City available for the first time, thanks to the efforts of his wife Sylvia Budd. The score was long thought to be lost before we discovered it - among other tapes - in a small storage container outside a village in North Yorkshire, England, where it had been kept for a decade. As a bonus, we include the few pieces Budd wrote and recorded for the short-lived though well-reviewed British TV series The Sandbaggers, a political thriller about undercover operations.

The 49th CD-release of Caldera Records features a detailed booklet-text by Stephan Eicke and elegant artwork by Luis Miguel Rojas. The CD was mastered by Richard Moore and produced by Stephan Eicke and John Elborg.