Beat Girl

aka

Wild for Kicks

1959
LP: Columbia 33SX 1225
CD: Play it Again PLAY 001
  1. Main Title
  2. The Off Beat
  3. I Did What You Told Me [vocal by Adam Faith]
  4. London Home Rock
  5. Time Out
  6. The Sharks
  7. The Beat Girl Song [vocal by Adam Faith]
  8. The City 2000 AD
  9. The Stripper
  10. The Cave/Beat Girl/Kids Stuff
  11. Made You [vocal by Adam Faith]
  12. Car Chase/Night Chase
  13. Chicken
  14. Blues for Beatniks
  15. It's Legal [vocal by Shirley Anne Field]
  16. The Immediate Pleasure
  17. Blondie's Strip
  18. End Shot/Slaughter in Soho/Main Title

The Movie

This is from the Internet Movie Database, written by Ed Sutton:

Paul, a divorced architect, marries Nichole, a woman from Paris. His teen daughter Jenny has fallen in with the English beatnik scene and likes to hang out in cave-like clubs to listen to jazz and rudimentary rock'n'roll. Jenny takes an immediate dislike to her mother-in-law, who is not that much older than she, and goes out of her way to make life miserable for Nichole. When Jenny discovers that Nichole is a friend of one of the strippers from the dance hall across the street, she investigates and uses Nichole's sordid past to embarrass her father. Meanwhile Jenny attracts the lecherous eye of Kenny, the owner of the dance hall.

Thank God for the IMDB. Now I don't have to sit throught this thing.

The Music

This was John Barry's first gig as a film composer. At the time, Barry and "The John Barry Seven" were a popular pop-rock band in England; so when the film-makers wanted contemporary songs and music, they asked Barry to do it.

This is the kind of song-anthology soundtrack that is really just a collection of pop songs that appeared in the movie. For fans of early British pop or Barry's music from that time, this soundtrack will be fun. But for anyone who wants to hear the kind of incidental music Barry scored in his later films, the earliest incidence (that I know of) would be From Russia With Love.

Release Notes

The original soundtrack was released on LP at the time, and released on CD in the 1990s through Geoff Leonard's Play It Again label. The CD is currently out of print but should not be too difficult to obtain on the used market.

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