Shatter – Original Soundtrack Selections

Shatter, Hammer’s long-lost attempt at fusing post-The Big Boss martial arts mania and post-Get Carter gritty gangland thrillers as part of their spectacularly ambitiously misfiring attempts at finding a new direction as the seventies loomed and their traditional style began to seem very much behind the times indeed – and recently released on Bluray, as you can find out much more about here – is not exactly a movie that manages to land many of its punches successfully, no matter how many traditional hardman villains and Wing Chun experts might be exchanging blows on screen at any given moment. A large part of the reason why Shatter stands up as a movie of deeply flawed flashes of genius rather than a disposable exercise in tedium, however, is David Lindup’s soundtrack, commissioned almost literally at the last minute to replace an earlier score that everyone at Hammer felt would further undermine an already severely self-undermined movie, and singled out as a standout and a highlight in virtually every single one of the few and far between reviews of Shatter from 1974 right up to the present. Part KPM Music Library, part Across 110th Street, part Quincy Jones and part the session musicians from an episode of The Goodies let entirely off the leash, it is the sort of soundtrack that would have found itself hugely in demand at the height of the mid-nineties ‘Loungecore’ boom, if it wasn’t for the fact that nothing of the Shatter soundtrack ever found any kind of a commercial release. Considering that Shatter only barely scraped a cinema release in the first place and Hammer soundtrack albums were as rare as The Creatures That Time Forgot, perhaps this should not be altogether surprising, but it was nonetheless unfortunate to miss out on the same sort of Britpop-era rediscovery enjoyed by the likes of Roy Budd, Harry Roche and of course David Lindup himself, courtesy of his 1970 library track The Zodiac which was a huge hit in the major ‘Loungecore’ clubs and eventually found its way onto the soundtrack of The Full Monty.

Hopefully Shatter himself won’t have to go to the lengths he went to on screen to secure his due payment for it, but the Shatter soundtrack – mastered from the original tapes directly from Hammer’s vaults and presented without all of the boat hook wallops and Pepsi crate rattles slapped over the top of it – is now available at long last on limited edition coloured vinyl. As well as thirty minutes of little-heard belting post-Shaft funk-fuelled cues densely crammed with wah-wah guitar, electric piano and ARP Odyssey grooves, you also get a sleevenote from me looking at the unexpectedly complicated history of the Shatter soundtrack, along with another sleevenote from David Lindup’s son Mike, perhaps better known as Level 42’s founder and keyboard player. Even if you aren’t necessarily that interested in Shatter itself – although frankly it’s a much more interesting and enjoyable effort than it ever seems to get credit for – the soundtrack is a remarkable piece of archival musical archaeology and genuinely deserves to be more widely heard. Get your hands on it before Hans Leber does!

You can find more about the Shatter soundtrack at Hammer’s website here, or on their Instagram feed – which is well worth following anyway – here.