HOT AIR HANGS LIKE A DEAD MAN: THE MUSIC OF FROM DUSK TILL DAWN

From Dusk Till Dawn, Quentin Tarantino's visceral hicky on the neck of the Vampire genre, blurped onto the big screen nearly twenty years ago in 1996. I was 35 back then and I loved it.

The film itself was a confident gush of bravura blood-letting scabbed over with Tarantino's signature love affair with trash cinema and cult music.

Just as Pulp Fiction had shocked Surf Rock back to life two years earlier with the famous Travolta-Thurman bat-dance, From Dusk Till Dawn catapulted a type of lawless desert rock into the musical mainstream. The sound was a mixture of psychobilly, punk and raw blues shot through with the poison-sting of a Tequila-soaked wasteland.

This uniquely dark garage sound of twanging guitars and gunslinger lyrics was typified in the film by two bands in particular: The Blasters and Tito and Tarantula.

The Blasters opened the movie with their seminal slice of Americana called Dark Night, which begins with the film-defining line "Hot air hangs like a dead man."

The Blasters have been around for years - since 1979 - and you can hear them playing Dark Night at various points in their career on You Tube. The version I've chosen is from their 2011 gig in a bar in Pittsburgh because it captures brilliantly the raw grinning energy of their dead man's blues:

Even more than the Blasters hang-noose rock, Tito and Tarantula came to be THE defining sound of Dusk Till Dawn. A boilermaker of bandits' hooch, biker grease and bat bile, the two T's Mexican punk is unforgettable.

From the opening bars of Angry Cockroaches in the sleaze Titty Twister, we know we are in for a treat. Here's the T's doing it a few years later:

But if Angry Cockroaches sets up the slammers, it's After Dark that knocks 'em back. The central piece of the movie, like the Pulp Fiction bat tango, After Dark is the slow thwanging backdrop to a screen-eating turn from Salma Hayek as she dances with pythons on the stage of the Titty Twister.

Here's a later version of the snake-bite rock that is After Dark:

For me certain movies in certain genres are welded to their scores and Horror is no exception. Like American Werewolf in London before it, From Dusk Till Dawn brought an old desperate sound to a hungry new Nineties audience. Me included. 

If Bela Lugosi joined Link Wray on stage with Black Sabbath you would get somewhere close to the mad hispanic jangle of this brilliant film.

What do you think readers?