An awesome eighties movie soundtrack

Movies have played a big part in our lives over the last few years. When we were posted to Canada just after we got married we discovered our military quarter had an enormous basement which was just crying out to be turned into a cinema room. So shortly after we arrived we purchased a leather sofa, a projector and a surround sound system so powerful that it used to make the walls of the house vibrate. In the midst of the Albertan winter whilst snowdrifts piled up at our windows we would head to our basement and escape to another world. Whether it was the soundtrack of a tropical rainforest or the thundering vibrations of a helicopter flying overhead, safely entombed in our cinema room the sounds and sights of the movies took us to another location.

When we moved from Canada two years later, region and voltage incompatibility meant we had to be parted from our cinema set-up and our home movie nights with a TV and only one speaker have never been quite the same since.

So when Currys recently invited us to to name our favourite movie soundtrack, it got us thinking about all those great films we used to watch. The comedies, the war films, the classics and the romances and after a heated debate we finally settled on one film whose soundtrack we both loved... The Lost Boys.

The Lost Boys was a vampire movie made before vampire movies were cool. With leather jackets, motorbikes and big 1980s hair it was accompanied by a diverse soundtrack of songs from INXS, Echo and The Bunnymen, Run DMC and Elton John with a few relative unknowns thrown into the mix.

One of my personal favourites is performed by Tim Capello a saxophonist who wears impossibly tight trousers and performs bare chested at a beach concert in the film. The scene is one bristling with sexual tension as lead character Michael catches a glimpse of "good" vampire Star for the first time. As their eyes meet across the crowd it sets into motion a chain of events which will lead to the film's climax.

In complete contrast fifteen year-old Corey Haim takes his turn in the spotlight similarly under-dressed, but this time performing in the bath, complete with bubble bath mohican singing the brilliantly quirky Aint Got A Home. Happy and care-free he is blissfully unaware that his vampire brother is outside the bathroom feeling thirsty (but don't worry the dog saves him) Corey's singing in this scene made teenage girls everywhere swoon and fall in love with him!

The film's title track, Cry Little Sister, is performed by Gerard McMann. It's a track laced with tension, a bass line that sounds like a heartbeat, a church organ and a choir in the background singing "Thou Shalt Not Kill." Even listen to it now after all these years it still sends shivers down my spine!

And then there's Lou Gramm, lead vocalist of Foreigner and a man with hair bigger than all of the characters in this movie combined. His rock ballad Lost In The Shadows is a tribute to  those who "must hide when the sun gets higher" although confusingly they also "go to bed with the light on" which perhaps isn't quite as sexy!

Listening to the soundtrack of Lost Boys brought back so many great memories we decided to recreate the iconic movie poster for ourselves. The original plan had been to get Theo to pose for the part of Michael, but despite relentless coercion, bribery and badgering he absolutely refused to put the wig on (it was a "luxury wig" from Poundland) so my sister stepped in to the role at the last minute.

We had a lot of fun putting it together and great difficulty keeping straight faces for the picture!

This blog post is an entry to the #CurrysMovieNight competition. You can find out more about the competition here.