AMG Review of Get Carter [1971 British Score] [2010 Revised Edition]

William Ruhlmann
All Music Guide

Since its initial release in the U.K. on Pye Records in the early '70s, the soundtrack to the crime drama Get Carter, written and directed by Mike Hodges and starring Michael Caine, seems to have been passed around, resulting in a bevy of reissues. This "new revised edition" (as the press release puts it) released by Silva Screen Records in 2010 is notable for including a 20-page booklet featuring comments from Hodges, a bio of composer/keyboardist Roy Budd by veteran music journalist Roy Carr, and reminiscences by some of the other musicians. The annotations would be more notable if they weren't riddled with typos and misspellings, but they are still informative. The music cues are interspersed with dialogue excerpts from the film, making the album difficult to listen to more than once. But, really, the only track worth hearing is the third one, "Main Theme: Carter Takes a Train," a memorable jazzy theme played on harpsichord, acoustic bass, and tabla. The other cues make up an eclectic mixture that includes organ-dominated soul-jazz à la Jimmy Smith ("Something on My Mind"), piano-dominated pop-jazz à la Ramsey Lewis ("The Girl in the Car"), ambient music ("Manhunt"), and a Bach-like classical pastiche ("Goodbye Eric!"), plus some ‘60s-style pop tunes with vocals supplied by Mickey Gallagher and Johnny Turnbull, later of Ian Dury's Blockheads. The overall feel, in fact, is much more like the ‘60s than the early ‘70s. But the main theme is worthy of anthologizing.