A Clockwork Orange in popular music and culture

Music forms a key component of A Clockwork Orange, both as novel and film. Anthony Burgess was a classical music enthusiast (and a prolific composer), who disdained youth culture and the popular music of the later sixties, as being “based on so little knowledge of tradition” that “it often elevates ignorance into a virtue.” When not terrorising citizens, the central character Alex praises “lovely Mozart, the Jupiter” and proudly boasts “J. S. Bach I had, the Brandenburg Concerto just for middle and lower strings”; he and his fellow teenage hoodlums cause mayhem to the strains of Beethoven. This is contrasted with an intense dislike of pop music, which Burgess regarded as an ephemeral, juvenile art form; he conveys his low regard for the genre via the artists invented for the book – Stash Kroh, The Mixers, Johnny Zhivago, Ike Yard – and “their pathetic pop-discs”.

Despite the author’s vehemently expressed contempt, popular culture enthusiastically embraced the imagery and themes of A Clockwork Orange – especially once Stanley Kubrick turned it into a notorious film in 1972. The distinctive language of the book, which had earlier captivated Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, found favour with David Bowie at the height of his popularity. He used the term ‘droogie’ in ‘Suffragette City’, a song from his 1972 Ziggy Stardust album, while opening concerts with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, as used in the film’s soundtrack. Bowie was also among the first to appropriate the look of Kubrick’s version, which inspired his stage costumes of the era. Later in the 1970s, the Korova record label took its name from the novel’s ‘milk-plus mesto’ bar; names taken directly from A Clockwork Orange include those of Sheffield-based bands Heaven 17 (the film has The Heaven Seventeen at number 4 in the charts with ‘Inside’) and, later, Moloko – one of the words Burgess transliterated from Russian, where it means milk. He also referenced the Soviet state record label, Melodia, through Alex, as a record shop: “the disc-bootick I favoured... a real horrorshow mesto and skorry, most times, at getting the new recordings.”

The official soundtrack gave another twist to Burgess’s vision – Kubrick gave it the same prominence and single-minded attention to detail as he had the film’s overall design. He was contacted by electronic music pioneer Walter (later Wendy) Carlos, who he then commissioned to interpret the score on Moog synthesiser. For the main theme, ‘March from A Clockwork Orange’, Carlos and collaborator/producer Rachel Elkind used the choral movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with the vocal part featuring the first known recording of a vocoder. This appeared alongside other electronic re-workings of Beethoven, Elgar and Rossini, which built on the success of Carlos’s earlier ground-breaking experiment in applying modern technology to classical standards, 1968’s celebrated album Switched-on Bach. The original songs on the soundtrack included ‘Timesteps,’ described by Carlos as an “autonomous composition with an uncanny affinity for Clockwork” and which is “still considered one of the landmarks of electronic music.” Not entirely satisfied with the official album which accompanied the film, as it excluded much of what they had recorded, Carlos and Elkind shortly released their own score for A Clockwork Orange, which “brought together all the music that Wendy suggested, arranged and / or composed for this remarkable film.”

Wendy Carlos in her New York studio

Alex and his marauding droogs have since been portrayed as dangerous and even glamorous anti-heroes; a lengthy list of the most unlikely artists have adopted the film’s visual references for their performances and videos, from U2 to Kylie Minogue, Blur to Guns ‘n’ Roses. No doubt Burgess, who protested that “youth is so conformist, so little concerned with maverick values, so proud of being rather than making, so bloody sure that it and it alone knows”, would be exasperated by the reduction of his novel’s complex themes to a crude shorthand for non-conformity. The ongoing appropriation of A Clockwork Orange – both book and film continue to generate homage and parody in pop culture – demonstrates that there is still no better way to sell products than with a whiff of youthful rebellion, however inauthentic.

The Simpsons, among other representations of A Clockwork Orange

Science Fiction-Music Interconnections: A Brief Survey of the Seventies

I. Following on from the 1960s, with its space race themes and craze for all that was cosmic and mind-expanding, both David Bowie and Pink Floyd carried their pioneering work into the next decade, to great acclaim. The 1970s also saw the totalitarian state-surveillance vision of George Orwell’s 1949 novel of the nightmare near future, Nineteen Eighty-Four, provide a topical musical theme for a number of artists.

In any discussion of science fiction-related popular music of the 1970s, David Bowie looms large; on the fringes of the ‘Sixties Scene’, it was 1969’s ‘Space Oddity’ which first brought him widespread attention. That song proved to be the first of several successful forays into the field of science fiction – notably Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, as an album and concept (but not a Concept Album) – encompassing themes which run through the decade. Prime examples include his 1970 album The Man Who Sold the World, an acting role in The Man Who Fell to Earth, his incarnation as Aladdin Sane and the dystopian Diamond Dogs album. The latter grew from Bowie’s original intention to produce a theatrical version of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was stymied when the author’s estate refused to grant permission; the songs ‘1984’ and ‘Big Brother’ were incorporated as part of the album. Whilst his musical and thematic content evolved over the decade, echoes of this interest in science fiction surfaced in the later, experimental albums Low (whose cover is a still of Bowie as The Man Who Fell to Earth and which contains material originally composed for the film’s soundtrack) and 1978’s ‘Heroes’ – specifically in lyrics to songs such as ‘Sons of the Silent Age.’ Bowie even revisited ‘Space Oddity’ and the saga of Major Tom at the dawn of the 1980s, in ‘Ashes to Ashes,’ complete with its ground-breaking promotional video.


Pink Floyd had emerged as a major attraction of London’s UFO Club with their live performances in the late 1960s and, as befitted the times, their early albums showcased a cosmic preoccupation in titles such as ‘Interstellar Overdrive,’ A Saucerful of Secrets and ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,’ alongside the fairy-tale whimsy of wayward song-writer Syd Barrett. After Barrett’s untimely departure from the group, their albums became arguably more serious, and indeed better-selling, tracing a trajectory to perhaps their signature work, 1973’s The Dark Side of the Moon, credited with transforming Pink Floyd “from ambitious art-house hipsters to international superstars, while influencing virtually every rock band of the past forty years.” Differing theories have been attached to the iconic prism cover art, and the various poster and sticker inserts contained within the album’s gatefold sleeve; however its designer Storm Thorgerson stated simply that “it related mostly to a light show. They hadn’t really celebrated their light show.”


UFO Club Poster featuring Pink Floyd, 1967; The Dark Side of the Moon album cover, 1973

Before and after Bowie’s abortive stage musical, Nineteen Eighty-Four has proved to exert a persistent influence on musicians. The omnipresent “plexi-plastic eyeballs of your special friends” in the California-based band Spirit’s somewhat hazy 1970 homage to Orwell, ‘1984’ crudely conveys the notion of police-state surveillance with the ominous reminder that “you’re never out of their sight.” It was a fruitful theme for well-established artists in the following years; Stevie Wonder included ‘Big Brother’ on his 1972 album Talking Book, which opens “your name is Big Brother; you say that you're watching me on the telly.” Himself being watched by the FBI, John Lennon’s 1973 song ‘Only People’ features the line “we don’t want no Big Brother scene...” The Jam and the Dead Kennedys both incorporated allusions to Nineteen Eighty-Four into their own ‘protest songs’ of the later 1970s. The references have only proliferated in the decades since; despite the passing of the date itself, bands have continued to draw musical inspiration from the novel.

Science Fiction-Music Interconnections: 2001 and other Space Oddities

The English author Arthur C. Clarke, one of the delegates to the world’s first science fiction convention, speculated in his short story ‘The Sentinel’ (submitted for a BBC competition in 1948) about the existence of a mysterious pyramid on the Moon. This edifice was apparently to be activated as a transmitter to project signals across the Galaxy in the event of its discovery; the implication being that both Earth and Moon had received ‘visitors’ in the distant past. The story formed the basis of one of the most celebrated science fiction films of the 1960s – released even before Neil Armstrong’s famous first steps on the moon – and, simultaneously, inspired a less celebrated song.

American band the Byrds had already shown an interest in science fiction themes in songs such as ‘Mr Spaceman’ and ‘CTA-102’; their principal songwriter Roger McGuinn was one of the first musicians to invest in the newly-available Moog modular synthesiser, which he purchased at the 1967 Monterey International Pop Festival. McGuinn had previously been known as Jim, but after a flirtation with the Subud spiritual movement, its founder Bapak advised him to change his name on the basis that it would better “vibrate with the universe.” Bapak sent Jim the letter ‘R’ and asked him to send back ten names starting with that letter; as McGuinn relates, “I was into science fiction so I picked Rocket and Retro and React... Roger was the only proper name in the whole bunch of words I chose and the guru thought I was mad.” In 1968, the newly-renamed McGuinn then adapted Clarke’s ‘The Sentinel’ as ‘Space Odyssey’, with co-writer Robert J. Hippard, the lyrics relating how “in nineteen and ninety-six we ventured to the moon... here we saw the pyramid, it looked so very strange”, to the accompaniment of a futuristic sound-scape generated by the Moog synthesiser.

  

Meanwhile, American Director Stanley Kubrick, having also been inspired by ‘The Sentinel’, was filming a version which eventually bore the title 2001: A Space Odyssey on its release in 1968. Clarke was involved in the screenplay, incorporating elements of several of his other short stories, and re-wrote his original concept into a novelisation to accompany the film; in both, the pyramid had now become an enigmatic monolith. The project even incorporated designs and drawings first used in the Soviet propaganda sci-fi film Nebo Zovyot [The Sky Calls]. While 2001 was widely acclaimed for its ambitious scope, special effects and striking imagery, Kubrick rejected the score commissioned and composed by Alex North in favour of stirring classical music, notably the ‘Blue Danube Waltz’ by Johann Strauss and Richard Strauss’s ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’.

After the 1969 moon landing, before the Space Age gradually faded from the wider public consciousness, there was another spate of space-themed hit singles (alongside numerous failed attempts to cash in on the space-craze), including the apocalyptic imagery of Zager and Evans’ American number 1 ‘In the Year 2525.’ The most successful, critically and commercially, of these opportunistic efforts was undoubtedly David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’. The tale of Major Tom’s doomed excursion to the stars, released only days before the Apollo landing, accompanied by exotic mellotron and stylophone instrumentation, remains perhaps the pinnacle of space-themed popular music, coinciding perfectly with man’s last ‘giant leap.’