The Virgin Suicides

This singing chewing gum was pure Hollywood know how. The quintessence of teenage years summed up in a cute creature. It came from the mind of Roman Coppola, brother to Sofia, who directed the music video for Air’s song “Playground Love.” He was also able to shoot fake scenes from his sister’s film with the same cast members, Josh Hartnett and Kirsten Dunst.

In the late 1990s, I was A&R at Source, an imprint of Virgin Records. Nicolas Godin was a high school friend and I'd brought Air onto the label. They'd just put out their first album, Moon Safari, an absolute hit record.

Unbeknownst to us, Moon Safari had been in Sofia Coppola's ears as she was writing the script to her own (feature) debut, The Virgin Suicides, adapted from Jeffrey Eugenides’s book (also a debut). She'd picked up a copy of the record after one of the store clerks at Rough Trade London recommended it. Air became her favorite band at the time and, through Mike Mills, the visionary creator of the art for Moon Safari, she proposed the band create a score.

She commissioned it the old fashioned way, giving them a true carte blanche with only the scenes to work from. Air received video cassette tapes from Sofia by Fed-Ex that they would illustrate, scene-by-scene, and send back to the US. Alone in their studio in the woods in the Western suburbs of Paris, they conceived it as a sort of “dark side” of Moon Safari, influenced by the morbid vibe of the book that they both had read.

For "Playground Love," the most famous track off the record, they enlisted a singer, Gordon Tracks – also known as Thomas Mars – the future lead in Phoenix. Phoenix had no music out yet. They were freshly signed to Source, and became a backing band for Air, which allowed them to see the real deal of the music game. (This soundtrack was also how Mars would meet his future wife, Coppola at shows in LA and Park City for which he appeared wearing only one black glove.)

Putting out the material itself generated a new enterprise. In artist contracts with labels, soundtracks don't count as albums, so the score didn't work within Virgin, which Air were signed to. So we started our own label, Record Makers, both Air members, Stephane Elfassi & myself, a childhood dream come true!

Fun fact: the soundtrack (reference REC01) came out before the film, so for several months cinephiles could only ‘see’ the record, there was no movie. In this way the music had a first life (and expectations for the film growed). When the film finally came out, a second life started for the record. The band had created a made to measure score and Sofia had reworked things her way afterwards. Looking back, most good soundtracks are made this way. A way to have exceptional music, inside and outside of the movie.