ALL OF US STRANGERS — Andrew Haigh believes in the Power of Love

0:00 Heads up, this episode includes adult language, erotic themes, and something you might not be into... spoilers. If you're a regular listener to the show, you know that back in the mid 1980s, I was a teenager in the city of Pittsburgh, and the big commercial radio station played what you probably imagined they'd play in what was then a fading steel town.

0:24 A lot of Springsteen, a lot of Zeppelin. There were also some country stations, oldies, soul. But then this one station changed its tune. WYDD-FM rebranded itself as the channel for Metro Music. <i>WYDD, cruise with me Cruisin the Metro</i> <i>Metro music</i> Synthy, modern, a lot of new wave or dance hits.

0:56 And in May '86 there was this one single their DJs always spun... a throbbing dance pop number that kicks off with what might have been the first rap I ever heard. <i>Sometimes you're better off dead</i> <i>There's a gun in your hand and it's pointing at your head</i> <i>You think you're mad...</i> The first hit by the Pet Shop Boys.

1:15 <i>West End girls.</i> <i>In a West End town, a dead end world</i> <i>The East End boys and West End girls</i> <i>West End Girls</i> topped the charts that year

1:25so it was everywhere on YDD in the car while I was learning to drive, playing at boutiques, at the mall, or on a date with my girlfriend at Spinning Wheels Roller Rink. And that's how I thought of that song. A Euro cool background tune. Surely not as deep or political as the punk and indie rock I was starting to get into.

1:41so it was everywhere Metro music. <i>Faces on posters, too many choices</i> <i>If, when, why, what</i> <i>How much have you got?</i> But a few thousand miles and an ocean away in Croydon, about a 50 minute drive south of the City of London, lived another teen named Andrew Haigh, who had a way different relationship to this band.

2:02so it was everywhere I've always loved them when I was like, when their album, I think Please came out in '85, '84, '85, and I just listened to that LP over and over and over and over again. And that first album, which <i>West End Girls</i> is on, it's got this like feeling. If you listen to it now, it's all about late night, London, '80s, desire, longing, needing to find somebody, and for the little sort of gay boy in me that was starting to come to terms with who he was, I was like, this feels like it's telling me a secret.

2:35so it was everywhere This is telling me to come to London. This is telling me that I can live this life, even if I didn't know all that kind of stuff consciously at the time. 38 years later, Haigh took the Pet Shop Boys and other glossy sounding music I used to skate to and used it to score one of the most beautiful and heartbreaking movies of the decade.

3:05so it was everywhere I'm Rico Gagliano, welcome back to the MUBI Podcast. MUBI's, the global film company that champions great cinema. On this show, we tell you the stories behind great cinema. This is Season 11, we're calling it

3:16Needle On The Record Side Two. By popular demand, this is the sequel to our season a while back all about needle drops. Those moments when filmmakers take a tune, drop it in their movie and magic happens. We're focused this time out on UK music of the '80s and '90s, and I can't think of a movie that uses that stuff in a more moving way than Andrew Haigh's <i>All of Us Strangers,</i> a hit drama that won or got nominated for just about every film award in Britain when it came out in 2023.

3:44Needle On The Record It's about a gay man literally confronting his past, and it's as wrenching to watch as it was for Haigh and his star, Andrew Scott, to shoot. It was like me and Andrew were doing some weird therapy session with a film crew watching us. One way it gets the tears flowing for me is its use of '80s pop and dance tunes, because in Haigh's hands, it's clear this music was a light in some dark times.

4:06Needle On The Record You know, '82, '83, '84, AIDS was starting to happen. I think it's written as a sort of, an answer to that as like, love can get us through this. You're gonna hear Haigh tell me all about the genesis and making of the movie. And then in the second act, we just geek out on all the music in it. Because since my teens, I have wised up, and now some of my favorite songs can actually be found on the soundtrack.

4:28Needle On The Record So get ready for tears and laughs as we drop the needle on <i>All of Us Strangers</i>. So a lot of people first saw Andrew Haigh's work on the HBO series, <i>Looking.</i> That was a comedy drama he executive produced and co-wrote. It's about a group of gay guys stumbling through jobs and relationships in modern day San Francisco.

4:56Needle On The Record But six years later, circa 2020, he was wrapping up work on a very different kind of series on location in the Arctic Circle. I'd been doing a show called <i>The North Water,</i> which was for the BBC, which we shot up in Svalbard, which was a crazy experience, shooting up on the ice. It's a sort of 19th century whaling story.

5:18Needle On The Record And so I was editing that and then the pandemic hit. And so of course, no one was doing anything. We were all just stuck in our houses. So I spent, I don't know, a year and a half essentially in my apartment in LA. And that's when I started working more on the script. The script to a feature he'd been struggling with, an adaptation of a Japanese novel by Taichi Yamada called <i>Strangers,</i> with a plot that sounds exactly like what a screenwriter trapped in an apartment would work on.

5:52Needle On The Record A Japanese television writer splits up from his wife and child and is living alone in Tokyo, lonely, meets someone in the same apartment building. They start a relationship. And then during the course of that relationship, he's drawn back to his childhood home. And in the story, his parents have died and he goes back and he finds them again, as they were before they died.

6:16Needle On The Record That's when the novel turns into almost a ghost story, the woman he meets in his building turns out to be an evil spirit. Now, the supernatural is not really Haigh's kind of thing, but... I think the most important thing for me was this idea, which is that there are things in our past that we want to return to, but are unable to return to, because obviously the past is gone.

6:38Needle On The Record I found that a really interesting conceit, being able to go back to that sort of period of time with your parents and be joyous at being reconnected with them, but then realizing that they don't know you at all. So Haigh took Yamada's story and that theme and made it his own. Changing the setting, the characters sexual orientations, and the things that haunt them.

7:03Needle On The Record <i>Meanwhile, work goes on for the Brits who've</i> <i>relocated to the Costa.</i> <i>All of Us Strangers</i> opens on Adam, played by Andrew Scott, a lonely, middle aged yes screenwriter, procrastinating, loafing around his flat in an eerily empty apartment building in east London until one night, after a fire drill, he gets a visit from the only other tenant in the place, a younger guy played by Paul Mescal.

7:27Needle On The Record <i>- Hello. - Hello.</i> <i>I saw you looking at me from the street.</i> <i>I'm Harry.</i> Harry's drunk. And let's say solicitous. <i>Okay, how about I come in anyway?</i> <i>If not for a drink, then for whatever else you might want.</i> And Adam's tempted, but declines. Still, the next day, something about that encounter inspires Adam to take a train to his hometown, where his parents, played by Jamie Bell and Claire Foy, welcome him into his childhood house.

8:03Needle On The Record <i>Guess who I found loitering in the park?</i> <i>Is it him?</i> <i>Yes, it is you.</i> Which is amazing because they both died in the '80s when he was a kid. <i>Hi.</i> <i>- Do you live by yourself? - Do you own your own place?</i> <i>Yeah.</i> <i>- It's just a just a flat. - What did I tell you?</i> <i>What did I tell you?</i> <i>I told you he'd be doing well for himself, didn't I?</i> Are they ghosts?

8:28Needle On The Record Are they in his head? Either way, Adam keeps paying visits to tell them everything he never got to tell them about his life. Like that he's come out as gay and that he survived both being bullied and the AIDS era. <i>Oh God, and what about this awful, ghastly disease?</i> <i>I've seen the adverts on the news and with the gravestones.</i> <i>Should I be worried about that?</i> <i>No. Jesus.

8:49Needle On The Record Everything is different now.</i> <i>Everything's different.</i> Except talking to them, he starts to realize maybe not everything is different. He still carries scars from it all, which he decides to share with Harry. Who can relate. He's got scars too. <i>I'm really sorry.</i> <i>No, thanks. It was a long time ago.</i> <i>I don't think that matters.</i> Adam finally lets go of his parents and the past.

9:18Needle On The Record He and Harry fall in love. And even when their relationship takes a heartbreaking turn towards the end, Haigh leaves us with this gorgeous last shot of the two of them lying in bed, dissolving into pure light while on the soundtrack, a tune plays by the '80s pop kings Frankie Goes to Hollywood called <i>The Power of Love.</i> I tell you, just writing that synopsis put a lump in my throat, and when Haigh and I got to talking about the process of making this movie, it was clear he felt the same way for like, the entire shoot.

9:52Needle On The Record I mean, it's not the same story as mine. My parents did not die in a car accident when I was nine years old, but my parents got divorced when I was nine years old, and I lived with my dad and didn't live with my mom. So there was still a fracture within the family environment. And also, I made things slightly more complicated for myself by filming it in the house I actually grew up in, in real life, which I hadn't been to for 40 years.

10:13Needle On The Record Yeah, tell me about that. How was it complicated? Well, I think it's just it was a very strange environment to be shooting in. You know, there's a scene, for example, in, the parents bed when he's lying in bed with his mom. And that is the bedroom that I lay in bed with my mum and dad when I was seven years old.

10:28Needle On The Record I haven't got particularly happy memories of being in that place. I was having a very hard time at school. I was being bullied at school like the character was being bullied in school in the story. And of course, it's the first time that I was starting, even at 9 or 10, to come to terms with my own sexuality and work out who I was.

10:43Needle On The Record And that was the reason I was being picked on at school and all those kind of things. So even though the story is very different, it still was allowing me to go back to a past version of myself as Andrew Scott's character was going back to a past version of himself. Now, Andrew Scott, he's only a little younger than you, born in '76, so he would have gone through the same era, the '80s era.

11:05Needle On The Record - Yeah. - A bleak time for gay men. And there are so many scenes where he's moved to tears. Tell me about shooting those scenes. I mean, I feel like both me and Andrew felt them very deeply. I mean, you could tell that they were working on set, that people were feeling them on set. But me and Andrew are the only gay people on set.

11:24Needle On The Record - Really? - Yeah. My script supervisor was, he was, but there were very few people who were, which is just always the nature of being on film sets. Usually, pretty much, they are straight. So, you know, they were-- I knew that they were gonna be emotional and they were emotional. I remember just like every time Andrew would do it, we would talk about it and he would be like, I'm probably not going to cry.

11:45Needle On The Record Like, let's just get this thing done. I don't think necessarily the character would cry in this moment of the scene. And I was like, okay, let's just see how it goes. And then each and every time the emotion would bubble up in Andrew and he would, you know, get upset. And he just, I think he just couldn't help it because the scene was bringing up so much, you know, stuff that of course he's experienced.

12:04Needle On The Record And I was feeling the same thing in those moments. So they were very kind of special. It was like me and Andrew were doing some weird therapy session with a film crew watching us. And it makes sense. The movie is kind of about processing trauma. Something I was feeling intensely while I was watching this.

12:20Needle On The Record I'm around the same age as you, by the way. I remembered the AIDS crisis, which as a straight guy, I only periodically think about anymore. Usually when I'm watching a movie about or set in the AIDS crisis. And it's crazy. There was a point in time where a whole population of the country was just regularly dying for living their lives.

12:40Needle On The Record And now we don't think about it anymore. And it's like the impact that that leaves is never going to go away. To what extent was that foremost in your mind? No, I think it was really, really important. It was definitely, you know, in my mind, I think, you know, I'm of that generation that's-- I think it's called the middle generation.

12:56Needle On The Record So it's not the generation of gay men that actually were destroyed by AIDS. It's that slightly strange generation afterwards that grew into their understanding of their sexuality, but associating it so closely with death. You grew into it thinking, wait, if I'm going to be gay, does that mean I'm going to die?

13:14Needle On The Record And I think it's very hard for people to actually realize what that felt like. You thought, well, I've got no future. There is no future in my life. If I want to be what I want to be, I'm probably going to die. And at that point, people were not surviving - even into the early '90s. - Yeah. And I think it's left a really heavy scar on a whole generation of gay men that is often forgotten.

13:34Needle On The Record And then the new generation of gay people that come up who don't worry about it as much. They're sort of like, what are you? Why are you so scarred by that? And you want to sort of just go, well, you know what? Just try living in that. And I think that's very much a part of, what the character goes through is sort of that kind of re bubbling up in him again, almost that fear coming back to the surface again and him trying to sort of get past that, which I think he does sort of get past it.

14:01Needle On The Record And in the movie, you can tell, something that holds off Adam's fear and always has, is music. Like whenever we see him at his typewriter trying to write about his family, there's always an '80s record spinning in the background. Or there's a scene where he walks through a drenching rain to his parents house.

14:18Needle On The Record <i>- Sweetheart, you came back. - Of course I came back.</i> And then while his mom dries his clothes, he literally takes refuge from the storm in his old room, which is papered with band posters of Frankie Goes to Hollywood and the Pet Shop Boys. Smiling, he thumbs through an old issue of <i>Smash Hits</i> music magazine and softly touches his copy of Frankie's LP Welcome to the Pleasuredome.

14:43Needle On The Record Like it's something precious. So let's finally talk about the music. Is the main character's love of music so much present in the book? No. I don't think there's anything about music in the book. Not particularly. So how did music become such a huge part of this movie? I mean, it's present right from the beginning.

15:05Needle On The Record I think for me, especially when I was a teenager, music was everything to me. Like, I just was obsessed by listening to music, you know, from like 1980 onwards when I realized I could save up my pocket money and buy a record. And I think especially there's a certain breed of kind of British music in the '80s that was really queer when the rest of the world wasn't queer, and it was sort of being quite radical just within the remit of pop music.

15:33Needle On The Record It was political and it was queer. It was all of these things that I think has forged who I am today as a person was from those from some of those records I listened to when I was young. And I also just think, like now as an adult, when I go back to those songs, it drags me back to the feeling that I felt at that time.

15:53Needle On The Record I don't think anything can do it-- Music is the best way to bring you back to a memory, to bring you back to the past. And I can remember listening to the first Pet Shop Boys album or like a Madonna album or Erasure, or The Smiths or whoever these bands were that I loved, especially when I was, you know, nine, ten, 11, 12, that really weird formative period.

16:13Needle On The Record And then obviously onwards into my later teens, it was so important to me and I knew that that was so important in the film. And in a weird way, as he starts listening to music, like when he's working on his script at home. - The very early scenes. - Yeah, early scenes. He's listening to, you know, a Fine Young Cannibals song and it starts to bring him back emotionally to a state of mind that he remembers when he was younger, which sort of opens up an element of him that allows him to start this journey to go back home.

16:39Needle On The Record It's also literally called <i>Johnny Come Home.</i> Yeah. It's, get back here. You know, you belong here. <i>Johnny</i> <i>We're sorry Won't you come on home?</i> So I really used music as a way to time travel, I suppose. Okay, we're getting to the part with the smiles. Andrew Haigh takes me on a tour through his movie's '80s playlist.

17:04Needle On The Record From this track, to the time Frankie Goes to Hollywood brought perversion to the people. You open their album and there was a sleeve inside which was selling leather underwear with like, zips on. That's coming up in just a minute. Stay with us. Alright everybody, MUBI is the global film company that champions great cinema, bringing it to you wherever you are, in as many ways as we possibly can.

17:32Needle On The Record We stream movies, we produce them, we distribute them in cinemas. Movies from any country, from legendary auteurs to brilliant first timers. We've always got something new to discover. And hey, if <i>All of Us Strangers</i> is your bag, here's another beautiful heartbreaker of a movie you're going to want to see on MUBI if you haven't already, it's called <i>Aftersun.</i> This is the incredibly assured sleeper hit debut feature from Scotland's Charlotte Wells.

17:55Needle On The Record It also stars Paul Mescal in an Oscar nominated role. He plays a father who takes his tween daughter on a holiday in Turkey, and the two of them find themselves grappling with his depression, which neither of them really fully understand. This was one of the surprise indie hits of 2022. I remember none other than Barack Obama put it on his annual list of the best movies of the year.

18:18Needle On The Record Also, since we're talking about music today, you should go back and listen to my MUBI Podcast interview with Wells about it, where we did kind of what you're about to hear me do with Andrew Haigh. We went through a bunch of the tracks and her thoughts about them, especially her now iconic deployment of the classic <i>Under Pressure.</i> Anytime I hear that song now, I think of that movie.

18:37Needle On The Record Anyway, if you're in the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, and many other countries, you can stream <i>Aftersun.</i> And if you're in the US and Canada, may I suggest another movie, <i>The History of Sound.</i> This is yet another Paul Mescal movie. That guy is in too many amazing films. I hope he takes a vacation soon.

18:55Needle On The Record He stars in it along with Josh O'Connor, and they play two music obsessives who travel and fall in love while making field recordings in Maine, post World War l. It's a great movie. It's gorgeous to look at. Subscribe to MUBI at mubi.com and enjoy. We have got details and links to all this stuff in the show notes of this episode.

19:14Needle On The Record Speaking of which, let's get back to the episode. So if you listen close to the soundtrack of <i>All of Us Strangers,</i> thematically, the songs don't have much to do with each other. A minute ago, you heard a snippet of Fine Young Cannibals, <i>Johnny Come Home.</i> That's a melodramatic shout out to some kind of runaway.

19:36Needle On The Record There's a cover of a Willie Nelson love song and a tune about the evils of urban sprawl. But they do have a few things in common. Like, for instance... I just loved those songs when I was young, so I just went back and I was like, what songs did I love when I was a teenager? Oh my God, I love that song.

19:53Needle On The Record I remember listening to this. I love that song. And there's something about all of them that's sort of, I don't know. I would call it melancholic pop, you know, I think the Brits did melancholic pop better than anybody else. And The Fine Young Cannibals was one version of that. I just loved Roland Gift's voice.

20:11Needle On The Record There was something sort of masculine and feminine about it that I just adored, and sort of felt like it was a good first song for him to be listening to. Yeah in the movie, it's the first song Adam plays. And not only is the chorus literally kind of telling him to come on home. There's also this lyric, "What is wrong in my life "that I must get drunk every night."

20:29Needle On The Record Which kind of foreshadows the Harry character's problems. I mean, as you were deciding on songs, were you ever like, oh my God, it's like, this has been sitting here for 40 years waiting to be put in my movie. Yeah and the wonderful thing about music is you can be on the nose. Like you can be pretty obvious.

20:44Needle On The Record Song lyrics are designed to be obvious, sometimes. They're like, we're just gonna say this quite blatant thing. Like, you know, we're worried, will you come on home. And I can put it in a film where-- And it sort of works because I know that if I'm in a certain mood and I want to be given some type of message, I might choose a record, to put it on, to give me that message.

21:04Needle On The Record And I sort of love that that he chose to put that record on. That was his choice to put it on. Of course, it would be <i>Johnny Come Home.</i> Yeah, it's not some random choice. He's struggling to write about some story he wants to write about. I'm going to put on the Fine Young Cannibals, <i>Johnny Come home.</i> I kind of love that in this very ambivalent movie, where a lot of times I'm not even sure what's real.

21:22Needle On The Record You just let a song straight up tell us what's going on. Exactly, exactly. But now let's talk about a moment where you do, it's kind of the opposite, where you use a song with lyrics that really have nothing to do with what the characters are feeling. A song called <i>Build</i> by the Housemartins, who honestly, by the way, are one of my favorite bands.

21:40Needle On The Record And when I was going back through the movie before this interview, I was so excited because I was like, oh yeah, I'm going to be able to play the Housemartins on this episode. So this is playing in Adam's apartment in a scene where he's looking out his window at Harry outside, and he decides to invite him in after rejecting him at first.

22:07Needle On The Record <i>- Let's build - Let's build a house</i> <i>- where we can stay - Ba ba ba ba build</i> <i>Add a new bit everyday</i> <i>Ba ba ba ba build</i> But the song is actually not-- It's like a lot of Housemartins tunes, it sounds like maybe it's a hopeful love song, but it's actually this ironic poison pill of a lyric.

22:27Needle On The Record Absolutely. Totally brutal. And it's not even about relationships, really. It's about this, I think, policy in '80s England to just pave over poor neighborhoods and erect new housing. <i>Slow, slow and quick, quick, quick</i> <i>It's wall to wall and brick to brick</i> <i>They work so fast it makes you sick</i> <i>It's build</i> <i>Let's build</i> It's a very sarcastic political song.

22:57Needle On The Record But you're ignoring that and taking it as the literal, oh, we're going to build something now. A relationship or something. Why do that? Look, again, I adore the Housemartins. I'm pretty convinced that my politics has come from listening to the Housemartins. I think I hate the royal family from listening to <i>Flag Day</i> endlessly, by the Housemartins and I think they were geniuses.

23:19Needle On The Record And I think <i>Build</i> is an amazing song. There's something amazing at the end that Paul does with his voice that I just think is incre--- Is unbelievable, and it feels like all of the emotion in you is bubbling up. <i>It's build</i> <i>It's build</i> So for me, what's happening in that moment, I use, I, you know, when I was writing the script, I would listen to that song and it always makes me cry, that song, if I listen to it in my headphones.

23:55Needle On The Record But it's that weird version of tears that is not sadness, I don't know what it is. It's some magic that a voice and a sentiment can do. And I sort of like there's lots of things going on. He's sort of writing this story about home, which is making him melancholy, and <i>Build</i> is quite a melancholy song.

24:12Needle On The Record It is about like, the past getting paved over, in a way. Yeah, absolutely. And we're destroying the past to make way for buildings that are disgusting and awful. And he's living in one of those buildings, that the Housemartins were complaining about, that people are building. And then at the same time, this person appears, and there's something about all of those things happening at the same time.

24:31Needle On The Record It just creates sort of different levels of meaning because he's reaching out, but he's also wanting to go back. And there's a lot going on. And I just, yeah, we put it down on the track and I think we tried-- It was one of the points we tried, Erasure's <i>The Circus</i> as well, which is another great song again, which just has politics at its core, even though it feels like it's about something else.

24:52Needle On The Record But <i>Build</i> was, you know, felt like the perfect song. For, say, American audiences who might know the Housemartins from, <i>Happy Hour.</i> That was like their big hit. How big a deal were they at that time in England? They were a really big deal. And I've actually used them before in things, which always makes me chuckle.

25:08Needle On The Record I did this TV show called <i>Looking</i> on HBO, and it was like a final wrap up movie. This is set in San Francisco in the modern day, when we made it. And I ended with, <i>I'll Be Your Shelter,</i> I think it's called, by the Housemartins. And everyone was like, why are you using this weird British song from the '80s?

25:25Needle On The Record I'm like, I'm using this song. I love this song. It's going on. But you know, they were big. They were big. And then they went on to be the Beautiful South. And then obviously Norman Cook, who was in the Housemartins, went on to be Fatboy Slim. So they've still been part of like British musical heritage ever since they started.

25:41Needle On The Record Alright, let's go to, the two big ones to me, first, Pet Shop Boys who appear often in this movie, <i>You Were Always on My Mind.</i> It practically becomes Adam's mother's monologue to him. Take us through that scene for somebody who either hasn't seen the movie or hasn't seen it in a while. He wakes up and he finds himself back in his bedroom, in his childhood bed, and he's wearing his childhood pajamas, which don't fit anymore, and they're too small.

26:10Needle On The Record And he hears music playing downstairs, which is <i>Top of the Pops,</i> which is a big music show in the UK, especially in the '80s. He comes down the stairs, we realize it's Christmas, he comes into the room. The Pet Shop Boys are actually on the television and his parents are decorating the Christmas tree, and he helps them decorate the Christmas tree.

26:31Needle On The Record And then as the song is playing, the mother starts to sort of sing along with the song... <i>If I made you feel second best</i> <i>I'm so sorry I was blind</i> <i>You were always on my mind</i> And then the father joins in. All the while, Adam's wearing his childhood pajamas. <i>Tell me</i> <i>Tell me that your sweet love hasn't died</i> When did the idea come to choose that song for that moment?

27:02Needle On The Record It was in the script. Like, lots of these are actually scripted. This was definitely in the script, this one. And that song is so interesting to me because it's a love song essentially. It's a man singing about a woman, and I love just turning that completely on its head. And when I read the lyrics, I'm like, oh my God, it's absolutely perfect for the mother to sing to her son.

27:23Needle On The Record It's the lyrics, literally, that if she could write a song to say how she felt about her son, this would be the lyrics that she would sing. And it makes perfect sense because it was Christmas number one in 1986, or whenever it was when he's gone back to this Christmas at home. And also it speaks of something else that I was interested about.

27:41Needle On The Record To me, like, I think that we learn our understandings of what we need in romantic love through what we understood about parental love. And so I love this idea that a love song that could be from a man to a woman or a woman to a man or a man to a man, can also become from a parent to a child. It worked perfectly for that.

28:00Needle On The Record Again, very emotional scene. Tell me about shooting it. I mean, the scene is so ridiculous in concept. When I was writing, I'm like, oh my God, this could be an absolute disaster. How on earth is this going to work? He looks stupid in his pajamas. They're singing along to a pop song. It could easily just be like everyone literally laughing at the screen.

28:21Needle On The Record But for some reason I felt like it would work. I felt like there's something sort of so magical about that idea, and I find it deeply emotional when I-- When I watch it. Yeah. And then as a sort of strange aside to this, which actually goes back to my dad, which is really fascinating. After my dad died, we were trying to work out what songs to play at his funeral, and I asked my stepmom what his favorite song was because I didn't really know what it was.

28:45Needle On The Record And she said it was Elvis Presley's <i>Always on My Mind.</i> - What? - I was like, oh my God. So we played it at his funeral, was the Elvis Presley version. And then not only that, this is even weirder, I didn't even know-- This makes-- This is almost impossible that it's real: I found out that my dad had died while I was on the jury at the Venice Film Festival, so that was complicated, as you can imagine itself.

29:11Needle On The Record I was in the final deliberations of the Venice jury, and I got a text to find out that my dad had died. So I left that day, and I was in the airport in duty free, in Venice, and the Pet Shop Boys, <i>Always on My Mind</i> came on the radio, - came on the music system. - Wow. And I was like, what the motherfuck is happening here?

29:31Needle On The Record How is this happening? Like, why is the Pet Shop Boys playing in Italy in the duty free? And why is it <i>Always on My Mind,</i> why is it that song? And then I got back and found out it was also my dad's favorite song. So there's something weird about that song that has sort of had a life of its own.

29:47Needle On The Record So yes, it ended up the song was played at my dad's funeral, but the Elvis Presley version of it. I mean, they really have played a huge part in your life. You also directed one of their recent videos. And then I've just always, as they've sort of gone in and out of fashion and back in again, I've always loved them.

30:00Needle On The Record And we went to, I went to a concert recently, which was in London, which was all their B sides and their obscure songs and I'm in this room, and there were just so many middle aged gay people in this room, sort of crying and knowing all the words and singing along. And I was like, yeah, this is why the Pet Shop Boys mean so much to so many people.

30:21Needle On The Record Yeah, a lot of these songs, to be honest, when I think of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, which we'll talk about now, I think of their single <i>Relax,</i> and I think of it as like big, sexy, cheeky, campy, and realizing that all of this music has deep emotional resonance and was probably geared to have deep emotional resonance was like very surprising to me.

30:45Needle On The Record I mean, do you find that, that like straights are kind of like, don't get it? Totally. Like if you, you can see it online somewhere, there's the original music video they did for <i>Relax.</i> And it's basically Holly Johnson and Paul Rutherford in a weird sex club with like, there's a huge big man in leather, which looks like he's essentially urinating over an audience.

31:05Needle On The Record It's the most obscene video in the world, and the song <i>Relax</i> is basically about not ejaculating when you're having sex. - It's about edging. - It's about edging. And so the fact that that was number one for like six weeks in whatever it was, 1983, is so insane to me. It's essentially two gay people have written a song about gay edging, and it has become a worldwide hit.

31:30Needle On The Record And they're not-- They're unapologetic about it. They're wearing leather on stage. You open their album and there was a sleeve inside which was selling like leather underwear with like zips on. And you're like, what is happening? And I remember looking at that as a kid being like, this might be the sexiest thing I have ever seen in my life.

31:48Needle On The Record And then and that album is a great album. Have you ever listened to the whole album again? It's a double album. Welcome to the Pleasuredome. It's Trevor Horn produced it. Genius Trevor Horn, who produced so much great music and what I loved about <i>The Power of Love.</i> It's still big and it's booming and it's operatic, and it's slightly ridiculous, but also very emotional at the same time.

32:11Needle On The Record Yeah, I mean, it closes the whole movie. <i>Will you put a record on?</i> <i>- What would you like? - You choose.</i> The last line is Andrew reciting a lyric from it to Harry. <i>"I'll protect you from the hooded claw</i> <i>"Keep the vampires from your door"</i> And I sort of felt like it was the perfect-- Again, it's saying exactly what I wanted to say.

32:37Needle On The Record The power of love and the importance of it. But I think for Holly writing that song, it was about the power of love in the face of AIDS. That's why they wrote it. AIDS was starting to happen. I think it's written as a sort of an answer to that.

32:53As like love can get us through this. <i>Dreams are like angels</i> <i>They keep bad at bay, bad at bay</i> <i>Love is the light</i> <i>Scaring darkness away, yeah</i> And so I love the idea that at the end, there was this kind of weird song that maybe people play at weddings because they think it's cute or whatever it is, but it's got these deeper connotations towards queer love and queer transcendence through love.

33:28As like <i>The power of love</i> <i>A force from above</i> <i>Cleaning my soul</i> And you know, again, everyone was like, I'm not sure you can end with this, like, really? You're gonna end with Frankie Goes to Hollywood and they're gonna go up and you're gonna go up into the stars. Have you gone crazy? And most of the time I thought, oh my God, have I gone crazy?

33:51As like This is like some, this is some, some choice. But I felt like I've been quite restrained in a lot of my work, and this is still, in many respects still quite restrained. But I wanted to end the film on basically a bombastic, emotional note. I didn't want to be afraid of sentimentality, of emotion or whatever it was.

34:14As like I'm like, just go for it. Let those big banging drums that come in, let them come in, let them louder, pump them up. Like, let's really embrace the bigness of that song. <i>I'll be around</i> <i>With my undying, death-defying love for you</i> The video for that song, I don't know if you have, remember it?

34:37As like It's religious. It's-- - They make it about Jesus. - The birth of Jesus. Love it. And look, you know, I don't believe you know, I'm not a religious person, but, you know, Jesus, like, love through suffering, I guess. - Yeah. - There is something. And there's so many of those images of people dying of AIDS.

34:52As like And there's a sort of sense of looking like Jesus - on the cross in some of them. - Yeah. Oh, yeah. So I think there is, there's a choice to make that video. And they wanted a Christmas number one, which I kind of love the subversive "fuck you" of that. It's like, no, no, no, we want to be number one at Christmas, so we're gonna make a Christmas song.

35:08As like - Was it? - It was. It was number one in the UK at Christmas. Yeah. Talking about that video, the majority of comments on that, the official video are, "I came to this from <i>All of Us Strangers</i>." I love that, I love that they brought-- That that might bring more people to that song. I think that's fantastic, to me.

35:26As like There's been a very strange thing with this movie. Like these are songs that I loved when I was 12 years old, living in, you know, a little suburban house, never thinking that I would, certainly not be a filmmaker, certainly not thinking I could ever be a gay person, but just loving this music. And then now I'm in my like 50s, early 50s, and I'm like, oh wow, I've both become a director.

35:52As like And these songs I've loved, I'm now, can put in my movie and be like, these things are important. And I sort of love that. And that's the MUBI Podcast this week. I'm proud to say Andrew Haigh is working on his next film called <i>A Long Winter</i> for MUBI. Look for that coming soon. Meanwhile, follow us to hear more of our season about great movies with great music.

36:21As like Next week we take a mid-season break, but the following week, join us on a trip back to 1998, when director Hype Williams took an '80s UK club hit, bathed it in black light and came up with an iconic moment in hip hop history. In terms of like the most perfect musical soundbed for a scene that is top five, dead or alive.

36:42As like The story of the movie <i>Belly</i> and the classic track <i>Back to Life</i> by Soul ll Soul, featuring the tune's co-writer Simon Law and many more. Follow us so you don't miss it. If you love the show, please do hit pause and leave a five star review wherever you're listening, won't you? I would appreciate that.

36:56As like Also, you can find me on Threads or Instagram at Rico Gagliano that is Rico G-A-G-L-I-A-N-O. I will nerd out on '80s music with you all day on those platforms and now let's roll credits. This episode was written, hosted and edited by me, Rico Gagliano. Ciara McEniff is our producer along with assistant producer Kat Kowalczyk.

37:16As like Jackson Musker is our tireless booking producer. Mastering by Stephen Colon. Martin Austwick composed our original music. Thanks this week to David Harper for taping Andrew and to Peter, Therese and Karina Lesser. This show is executive produced by me along with Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman, and Michael Tacca.

37:33As like And as always, to watch the best in cinema, subscribe to mubi at mubi.com Thanks for listening, go watch the movies and RIP Spinning Wheels.