Remember When: Tangerine Dream Became Hot Film Composers with ‘Risky Business’ Score

The film scoring landscape of the 1980s brought about major changes. While there were still plenty of grand orchestral scores being used for everything from intense action pictures to kooky comedies, large technological strides in the world of synthesizers and keyboards allowed many composers to flesh out soundtracks in their own private studios. The sounds were very different, something fresh and new, and helped define many of the films of that decade.

Perhaps the most iconic artists to work in the synth-driven film world were German electronic music pioneers Tangerine Dream. Formed in 1967 by band leader and perennial member Edgar Froese, their music spanned a wide range of sounds early on, from krautrock to the ambient, neoclassical album Zeit in 1972, which Porcupine Tree’s Steven Wilson declared is his favorite album of all time. Tangerine Dream were part of the influential ‘70s electronic music movement that also included Jean-Michel Jarre, Brian Eno, early TD member Klaus Schulze, Vangelis, and Synergy.

“Paul Liked What He Heard”

While they had done a handful of soundtracks prior to 1983—notably William Friedkin’s Sorcerer in 1977 and Michael Mann’s Thief in 1981—Tangerine Dream turned into somewhat of a household name with Tom Cruise’s breakthrough movie Risky Business in 1983.

Their connection to the movie happened purely through happenstance.

In a 2014 feature for CineMontage, Risky Business editor Richard Chew recalled how this came about. No music had been specified in the script other than Jeff Beck’s “The Pump.” During the editing process, director Paul Brickman overheard second assistant editor Albert Coleman playing Tangerine Dream in the editing room.

“Paul liked what he heard and replaced the temp music cues with Tangerine Dream cuts,” Chew recalled. “The more we tested them behind our cut scenes, the more Paul and [producer] Jon [Avnet] became convinced that Tangerine Dream should compose our score.” And they convinced them to do it. In the spring of 1983, Brickman, Avnet, and music editor Curt Sobel journeyed to Germany to recorded the film’s score in their studio.

The German group’s music included both scene-specific cues and transitional pieces that could be sprinkled throughout the film. Beyond getting a great score, the filmmakers became influenced by the music to alter the construction of certain scenes, particularly the opening. As Chew recalled, “We thought of using the discarded traveling night shots of the Chicago skyline intended for the blue screen background of the erotic train scene. We would now use them as background for the titles. I made multiple frames of those moving shots to create a slow-motion effect that would evoke Joel’s emerging sexual desire and foreshadow the train scene later on. Coupled with sound effects and music, they became an erotic dramatic device.” That sexy train scene with Tom Cruise and Rebecca De Mornay featured the now iconic track “Love on a Real Train.”

Hollywood Calling Card

Although Tangerine Dream also scored the sci-fi film Wavelength and Michael Mann’s eerie The Keep in 1983, the higher profile Risky Business became Tangerine Dream’s Hollywood calling card. Over the next six years, the group worked on over 15 different movie soundtracks, including Ridley Scott’s dark fantasy Legend, Kathryn Bigelow’s vampire movie Near Dark, and Steve DeJarnatt’s highly underrated apocalyptic thriller Miracle Mile. With sounds spanning lush ambiences to perky, percolating sequencing, Tangerine Dream scores were highly identifiable. There were times that the group took their own themes, such as the famously smoldering “Love on a Real Train” composition, and reworked it. In that case, it was reborn as “Running Out of Time” in Miracle Mile, although one could argue that the latter was an improvement.

The late ‘80s version of Tangerine Dream (1987-1990) saw some changes. Froese collaborated mainly with Paul Haslinger on both soundtracks and studio releases, and the music had more of a rock energy to it on well-received albums like Lily at the Beach and Optical Race, which were released on Private Music, the indie label of former TD member Peter Baumann.

After 1989, Tangerine Dream’s soundtrack era ended and their credits between 1993 and 2013 pretty much ran dry. But that was on purpose. Froese’s widow, Bianca Froese-Acquaye, told El Garage De Frank in 2019, “Edgar always told me if he didn’t become a musician he would have become a cameraman and film director—like my father was, by the way. … He loved cinema.

“ … On the one hand, these scores were a great challenge for the band to deliver music upon a given script,” she continued. “On the other hand, Edgar knew and felt very well that he would lose his creative freedom and independence when staying too long in the scoring business. That’s why he decided to concentrate much more on the band’s albums and live performances then.”

Dream Lives On

From 1990 on, Froese kept the Dream machine going with his son Jerome as the other constant member. After his father’s death in January 2015, Jerome Froese continued the legacy of the group’s work, which reportedly includes over 70 studio albums and more than 150 additional soundtracks, EPs, live albums, rerecordings of previous works, and compilations. Licensed Tangerine Dream music has surfaced in dozens of films and TV episodes since the ‘70s, many of them in the 2000s including the TV series Stranger Things. The group got another major boost in 2013 by composing the score for the video game Grand Theft Auto V in collaboration with Woody Jackson, The Alchemist, Oh No, and DJ Shadow. Five of those compositions occupy the group’s top 10 tracks on Spotify. They recorded over 35 hours of music stems for the game.

Many people are likely familiar with the music of Tangerine Dream without actually knowing much about them or who they are. But suffice to say there is an impressive, voluminous catalog that will endure for years to come. They revolutionized electronic music and movie soundtracks and left us with a lot of great music in the process.

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Photo by Marc Broussely/Redferns