Hang Those Gold Discs High: "The Good, The Bad And The Ugly" by Hugo Montenegró

 Clint Eastwood and Patrick McGoohan finally encountered each other in 1979's Escape From Alcatraz, but in 1968 they were two curiously similar loners; the Man With No Name and Number Six both wander through alien lands made all the more unreal by their aching closeness to normality. But whereas The Prisoner climaxed with the steamroller irony of "All You Need Is Love" on its soundtrack, the Sergio Leone Westerns relied on stretching to its breakable limit the axis of Hollywood "morality." Can anyone say, watching the climax of The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, as Eastwood, Wallach and van Cleef stand in a summer solstice triangle in the middle of a graveyard desert amidst an oasis of greenery, pistols all pointed at each other in the Mexican standoff pose, that any of these three memes of men are describable as "good"? What are the degrees of "bad" and "ugly" at play here - and "play" may be the key motif, for the homoeroticism of spaghetti Westerns could barely be less contained, or more strongly implied. The art of Leone is straddling the tightrope between low camp and high art - you cannot decide whether you are reminded more of Carry On Cowboy, or of the final gruelling scenes of von Stroheim's Greed, often at the same time. Perhaps that's why the female-driven parallel plot of Once Upon A Time In The West was necessary - Claudia Cardinale and Jason Robards playing it exactly like Hepburn and Bogart in The African Queen - as the film would otherwise be a sustained hard-on contest between Bronson and Fonda.

The "low camp" element was vital, of course, because that was where Ennio Morricone's music scores obtained both spark and spunk; often in Leone's horse operas, Morricone's soundtrack rubbishes the protagonists' silly ideals, openly laughs at them at times - what is that "cry" in his main theme to The Good, The Bad And The Ugly but a cackle, as a response to the come-on of the (wolf?) whistler? That original theme actually begins with a tom-tom beat spookily similar to the intro to the Shadows' "Apache," but then Morricone, using both his Romantic sentimentality and rationalist experience in Rome's improvised music scene of the sixties, expands and distorts his source material, such that every element of the tune seems to lurk in a different dark corner, popping out like plastic bats in a fairground Haunted Tunnel ride. Even the traditional swelling strings and chorus seem pushed into a corner by the tonguing/tongues-out trumpet duel (which sounds like two Don Cherrys). Everything is suggested, rather than implied - a pre-postmodern conceit of fifties and sixties elements from Tex Ritter to Richard Maxfield spat out and disordered; no wonder Morricone loved John Zorn's The Big Gundown project so much - he knew a spiritual heir when he heard and saw him.

In Montenegró's pop version - these days, if he were stiil alive, he would probably have settled for a dance remix; according to Tommy Morgan, who played harmonica on the record, it took next to no time to put together, literally having been recorded in one Saturday afternoon, and Montenegró was as surprised by the record's huge success as anybody else - the elements are necessarily made a little more two-dimensional, but he doesn't otherwise do much with the source material apart from stick a backbeat under it and magnify the Hugo Ball Dadaist chants of random Italian syllables (cf. Talking Heads' "I Zimbra") as starker contrast with the whistling (Montenegró himself provided the grunting, while whistling duties were taken care of by the wonderfully-named Munny Marcellino). Curiously this helps to establish the cheapo sixties Pop(ist) Art elements underlying Morricone's original arrangement - it turns the tune into a kind of anti-"Wonderful Land" (or a Wonderful Land which doesn't look nearly as inviting close up) which Merseybeat might have evolved into had they not bothered with singing; so it was rather fitting that the record became the first instrumental (more or less) number one since the Shadows' "Foot Tapper” (and the recurrent howl, or leitmotif, as played on the record by Art Smith – or at least its first half – is pop’s best use of the ocarina since “Wild Thing”).

Date Record Made Number Two: 1 June 1968
Number Of Weeks At Number Two: 1
Record At Number One: "Mrs Robinson" by Simon and Garfunkel
UK Chart Position: 1