The Mind Your Head mini-festival came to an end with Pere Ubu's live score for a 3D screening of It Came From Outer Space (1953), giving the Festival Hall the spirit of a students union theme night. As Pere Ubu synchronised their throb to the kitsch production design of Jack Arnold's sci-fi flick, the audience wallowed in two layers of nostalgia.
The movie, based on a story by Ray Bradbury, looks like a pilot for the Twilight Zone TV series, with the added gimmick of 3D when viewed through green/red shades. Some scenes attempt to wow the audience with the technology: a flickering fire in the foreground; rocks hurled at the camera. The scene where the hero rotates his enormous telescope provokes a ripple of laughter.
A South Bank employee introduces the show - "for those of a psychedelic persuasion" - with the disclaimer that Universal were not happy with the quality of the print. The promoters, however, thought it was fine. Did he mean that a stoned audience will put up with any old rubbish? (It may explain the Electric Prunes, second on the bill.)
The print is poor, with bad resolution, and the soundtrack goes in and out of sync, but that's not what most people have come for. The main event is the live underscore, which dubs 1950s cold war paranoia with the dark vision of Pere Ubu's David Thomas.
The score is based on a handful of modules: pumping bass guitar with toms; repetitive and melodic guitar-led vamps; sampled atmospherics; screaming theremin for moments of maximum terror. Thomas adds poetic spoken asides and punches the buttons of a sample box. At times the music swells to drown the dialogue.
Guitarist Keith Moliné gives everything an art-rock patina, with Derek Bailey-like punky scratchings at crucial moments. At the kit is Chris Cutler, whose style is so compelling you can find yourself ignoring everything but the drums.
Cutler is rock-solid in an idiosyncratic way; his sound has a cinematic, widescreen quality the movie lacks. But if you're looking for genuine 3D thrills, go and see the Imax documentary Space Station 3D: science fact that will really blow your mind.
