90 STARBURST: How did you come to be playing these scores live? Alan Howarth: I was invited to speak at a convention as part of a panel, and I said, ‘Well, rather than talk about it, why don’t I play it?’ and they said, ‘You can do that?’ To which I said, ‘Of course: I’m a musician!’ So, sort of on my own, I put it together. I got a bunch of cues from Halloween together, and then I have my laptop computer, my MIDI keyboard, and my guitar. I play the cues from the movie, but I also play on top of it, so it’s like music minus one or music plus one; however you want to think about it. That’s where it started. Somebody put it up on YouTube, and so it got out there that ‘Alan can do this.’ From there, it came about that there was the Unsound Music Festival in Poland, and they were doing a theme around horror movie music, and a friend said, ‘Oh, you’ve got to get Alan to play,’ and then I was invited to Poland to do this. It was just a great community – a great time. When there, I was hooked up with a band called Zombie Zombie, which is a two-man group – and they’d done a tribute to John Carpenter record, so they knew all this stuff – so I literally sat in on their set, and we jammed. The theme was ‘The Pleasure of a Good Scare,’ and in addition to Zombie Zombie, I hooked up with a VJ – a lady by the name of Jade Boyd, who did video improvisation as I played my set. She’s now my buddy, and she’s on board. I have her do live performance whenever she can, behind my set, and if the timing and budget’s not there, she created a video for me that’s this abstract VJ version of the films. It’s very artsy – colour changes, runs backward, and all that. That’s my show now, and I’ve been doing this all over the world. I use Zombie Zombie when they’re available. We’ve done Paris; we did Geneva, St. Petersburg, obviously Poland. And on my own, I’ve done my sets with Jade in London, she was in Toronto with me and on my own, I still do New York and L.A., and now London again for Chills in the Chapel.
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INTERVIEW - ALAN HOWARTH Composer Alan Howarth has a lifetime of genre credits to entice even the most jaded of geeks. In addition to sound design for the first six Star Trek movies, Howarth has worked on Army of Darkness, Stargate, Class of 1999, and many more films, doing sound effects and and processing. Despite all that, however, the man is best known for his collaborations with John Carpenter, making music for that director’s films such as Escape from New York, They Live, and Prince of Darkness. Recently, Howarth began performing portions of those scores live as part of his appearances at various conventions. He brings that show to London’s Union Chapel at October’s end. He performs Escape from New York on the 30th, and a medley of the music of Halloween II-VI on the 31st. We spoke with Howarth about his career, performing live, and how creating sound effects and making music aren’t all that different.
With those visual components now added in, do you find that the response has changed? Yeah. It’s much more entertaining to have images, because otherwise it’s a guy sitting at a keyboard, playing. To have those movies that the music goes with to be part of the show, it’s almost like an old silent movie, right? Just soundtrack only. I like the fact that they’re abstract, because it’s not just the movie itself. It’s the essence of the movie and the score that goes with that scene, be it whatever - Halloween or Escape from New York or Prince of Darkness - that I did with John Carpenter, that’s been on revival. So, this whole world of electronic music and even horror movies has gone back to this synth score stuff that I did back then. When we did this back in the ‘80s, I never thought I’d still be doing it in 2015, but it’s fun and I enjoy it. In terms of improvisation, what are you vamping on? It is improv, but I’ve made selections