1968 Hugo Montenegro And His Orchestra: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

I think the first album that ever caught my eye (I loved the cover and I pestered my parents to buy it for me) was 'Big Terror Movie Themes' by Geoff Love and his Orchestra. Love was a British easy listening bandleader who put out a slew of themed albums in the seventies linked around a genre of film and all given the Geoff Love makeover. Thus, 'Big Terror' collected various horror/thriller film music, 'Big War Movie Themes', 'Big Bond Movie Themes' and Big Love Movie Themes' were self explanatory, as was the inevitable 'Big Western Movie Themes' which contained his version of 'The Good, The Bad And The Ugly'. Which is where I first heard it. Happy days.*

It was only later that I found out that Love wasn't the first to plough this particular furrow and that his attempt at this piece was at least more than one step removed from the original; Hugo Montenegro was an American bandleader who, in the sixties, produced a similar run of movie theme albums as Love was to (though Montenegro also composed original music for films himself) which led to this surprise 1968 hit based on the theme to the eponymous 1966 spaghetti western. As written by Ennio Morricone, 'The Good, The Bad And The Ugly' is a twitchy affair of whistles, flutes and gorilla grunts all separated by spaces and silences, tightly wrapping the tune in a dread of tension that forever threatens to explode into a violence ill suited to easy listening.

And just as Hollywood is forever accused of remaking and 'dumbing down' successful foreign films for a Western audience, Montenegro's take on it polyfills the dangerous cracks and rubs them smooth with a Tex Mex acoustic guitar fill that lightens the mood considerably. Easier on the ear certainly, but it's a move akin to cutting up and re-arranging a Picasso so that the eyes and mouth are all in the 'right' place to appease those who have no truck with Cubism. Morricone wasn't aiming for a pop audience when he wrote it, and whenever I hear his original score I see a shimmering desert landscape with a heat warped figure on a horse transversing the horizon. When I hear Montenegro, I see Colin from accounts in a fancy dress cowboy outfit carrying a cap gun. Vive le difference.


* As for Love, his version is a cover of Montenegro's arrangement, only weaker still. I've also come to appreciate that 'Big Terror's version of the 'Jaws' theme sounds like a fat man farting in an underfilled bath tub too. Ah well.