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DAVID BOWIE & TREVOR JONES: LABYRINTH (OST)

David Bowie

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David Bowie David Bowie & Trevor Jones: Labyrinth  (OST) album cover
2.23 | 97 ratings | 6 reviews | 7% 5 stars

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Studio Album, released in 1986

Songs / Tracks Listing

1. Opening Titles (including Underground) (3.18)
2. Into the Labyrinth (2.10)
3. Magic Dance (5.11)
4. Sarah (3.10)
5. Chilly Down (3.44)
6. Hallucination (3.00)
7. As the World Falls Down (4.49)
8. The Goblin Rattle (3.29)
9. Within You (3.29)
10. Thirteen O'Clock (3.06)
11. Home at Last (1.46)
12. Underground (5.57)

Total Time 43:09

Line-up / Musicians

- Trevor Jones / composer, orchestrations & conducting (1,2,4,6,8,10,11)
- David Bowie / lead & backing vocals (1,3,5,7,9,12), composer (3,5,7,9,12), co-producer

With:
- Ray Russell / guitar (1,6,8,10)
- Brian Gascoigne / keyboards (1,2,4,6,8,10,11)
- David Lawson / keyboards (1,2,4,6,8,10,11)
- Simon Lloyd / Synclavier (1,2,4,6,8,10,11)
- Robbie Buchanan / keyboards, synth & programming (3,7,9,12), arrangements (3,7,12)
- Paul Westwood / bass (1,6,8,10)
- Will Lee / bass (3,7,9), backing vocals (3)
- Steve Ferrone / drums (3,7,9,12)
- Harold Fisher / drums (1)
- Dan Huff / guitar (3)
- Diva Gray / backing vocals (3)
- Fonzi Thornton / backing vocals (3)
- Kevin Armstrong / guitar (5)
- Nick Plytas / keyboards (5)
- Matthew Seligman / bass (5)
- Neil Conti / drums (5)
? Charles Augins / vocals (5)
- Danny John-Jules / vocals (5)
- Kevin Clash / vocals (5)
- Richard Bodkin / vocals (5)
- Ray Warleigh / sax (6)
- Jeff Mironov / guitar (7)
- Nicky Moroch / guitar (7,12)
- Robin Beck / backing vocals (7)
- Maurice Murphy / trumpet (10,11)
- Michael Lewin / guitar & lute (11)
- Albert Collins / guitar (12)
- Andy Thomas / programming (12)
- Richard Tee / piano, Hammond B3 (12)
- Bob Gay / alto sax (12)
- Arif Mardin / arrangements (9,12), co-producer
- Radio Choir of the New Hope Baptist Church / chorus vocals
- Chaka Khan / chorus vocals (12)
- Luther Vandross / chorus vocals (12)
- Marcus Miller / chorus vocals (12)
- Cissy Houston / chorus vocals (12)

Releases information

Music from the original soundtrack of the Jim Henson 1986 film Labyrinth featuring David Bowie and original score by Trevor Jones

LP EMI America ‎- AML 3104 (1986, UK)

CD EMI America ‎- CDP 7463122 (1986, Europe)

Thanks to eddietrooper for the addition
and to Quinino for the last updates
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Buy DAVID BOWIE David Bowie & Trevor Jones: Labyrinth (OST) Music



DAVID BOWIE David Bowie & Trevor Jones: Labyrinth (OST) ratings distribution


2.23
(97 ratings)
Essential: a masterpiece of rock music(7%)
7%
Excellent addition to any rock music collection(6%)
6%
Good, but non-essential (30%)
30%
Collectors/fans only (38%)
38%
Poor. Only for completionists (19%)
19%

DAVID BOWIE David Bowie & Trevor Jones: Labyrinth (OST) reviews


Showing all collaborators reviews and last reviews preview | Show all reviews/ratings

Collaborators/Experts Reviews

Review by ZowieZiggy
PROG REVIEWER
2 stars This soundtrack holds some good tracks as the opener ("Opening Titles Including Underground") even if the disco beat is not the one that I praise exaggerately; but most of them belong to the worse of Bowie like "Magic Dance". It is an awful dance song which is hard to believe and impossible for me to bear. A great example of a press next song.

This work has to be taken for what it is: a second zone record which won't appeal traditional fans, and won't gather many new ones. David was quite inactive in terms of new albums in those days. Labyrinth was composed by David for the majority of the tracks and by Trevor Jones (who is a professional film music composer). I have to admit that the songs from the latter are the ones that I usually don't like (the sole exception being the opener, but it was co-written by David).

"Chilly Down" is not the best from Bowie either. It starts as an industrial tune and ends up in some sort of a "10CC" pastiche. I haven't seen the movie (which was a complete commercial failure by the way) but even if I can't relate the music with the picture , I can tell whether a track is good or not.

I far much prefer the ambient "Hallucination" and the more traditional "As The World Falls Down". At least it allows David to perform a fine vocal part and the melody is quite catchy. One of the few good songs featured on this album.

The favourable mood is of short length, unfortunately. We are brought back into the nightmare with "The Goblin Battle". At this time, the bombastic and melodic "Within You" is more than welcome and pushes the listener to go further on in his discovery.

Let's be honest: this isn't a great nor even good album. Jones's parts are too many here, and "Thirteen O' Clock" is another weak part. But there aren't many good ones. The closing Underground and its electro beat combined with some negro-spiritual parts is pretty much dispensable. But don't press next at this time since it is the last song from this very average album.

Thanks to some good songs, this album escapes the minimum rating. But two stars are more than sufficient.

Review by memowakeman
SPECIAL COLLABORATOR Honorary Collaborator
2 stars Dance Magic Dance!

Honestly i am reviewing this album because i know the movie too well, i remember when i watched it for the first time several years ago, i didn't know Bowie was also an actor and that was funny, the movie Labyrinth has besides Bowie a young Jennifer Connelly as the main charachter, the other ones are puppets and the movie is directed by Jim Henson.

So this is not the typical David Bowie album, this is a soundtrack for a maybe kids and young audience, so the music has to be kind of easy listening and enjoyable. This time i am not reviewing song by song, first of all because i see no point of doing that since this is a progressive rock site, and this album has no prog songs, basically the music here is merely pop with some electronic things and danceable tunes, the lyrics has obviously to do with the movie scenes so if you want to understand this soundtrack is better to watch the movie.

Here, besides the music and lyrics by Bowie, the other person who paticipates is Trevor Jones who is the composer of the instrumental tracks, all those tracks have to be in the mood of the scene and the arrangements are very well done actually, the music for me is not bad at all, but of course not the best either, the vocal performance of Bowie is pretty average, my personal fav songs here are the silly Magic Dance, the beautiful As The World Falls Down and ther first and last song which are kind of the same, but it has it's terrible moments, like that song called Chilly Down, which is honestly awful, but it suits in the movie actually so that was the point i believe.

I personally love the movie, so i sympathize a lot with it's music and content, i like this soundtrack but that doesn't mean i have to give it a higher rating, not at all, in my opinion this deserves 2 stars, it is not prog rock first of all, secondly, it is not the best Bowie could offer to the listener, so thta means this album is not essential, i would probably suggest it only for those who like the movie and those die-hard Bowie fans.

2 stars!

However, enjoy it, and enjoy the film!

Review by tarkus1980
PROG REVIEWER
1 stars I actually kinda like the movie from which this soundtrack comes. I never watched it until I was 23, so I don't have any childhood nostalgia towards it, but it strikes me as a halfway decent collection of weirdly interesting and atmospheric scenes that may not necessarily gell together perfectly but nonetheless makes for an amusing couple of hours. I even don't necessarily mind the soundtrack in the context of the film: the non-Bowie parts sound like standard 80's soundtrack fare (heavily based in big dramatic synthesizers), and the Bowie tracks are presented in such bizarre contexts that I'm able to have a good semi-ironic laugh at them. I can totally see why it would have bombed so badly upon release, but I'm glad it mustered a cult following in ensuing decades.

While the music of the film works decently enough within context, though, I find it unbearable as music I would consider just sitting down and listening to. And please don't tell me that it's unfair to judge a movie soundtrack involving a rock artist using the same standards I would use to judge a "regular album." The following albums from my collection are either movie soundtracks (in part or full) or were initially conceived as soundtracks, and all of them are albums I freely enjoy (there may be others in my collection, but these come to mind):

The Beatles: A Hard Day's Night

The Beatles: Help!

The Beatles: Magical Mystery Tour

Can: Soundtracks

Bob Dylan: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid

Brian Eno: Music for Films (granted, it's for movies that were never made)

Brian Eno: Apollo: Atmospheres And Soundtracks

Peter Gabriel: Birdy

Peter Gabriel: Passion

Peter Gabriel: Long Walk Home

The Kinks: Arthur

Pink Floyd: More

Pink Floyd: Obscured by Clouds

Pink Floyd: The Wall (maybe not technically, but yeah, it is)

Prince: Purple Rain

Frank Zappa: Uncle Meat

Heck, even Bowie had had a soundtrack made of recent material just a few years earlier: 1982 saw the release of a soundtrack to a movie called Christiane F., where the soundtrack entirely consisted of tracks from Station to Station and the Berlin Trilogy. And don't forget that parts of Station to Station and Low were originally intended for the soundtrack to The Man Who Fell to Earth. The point is, there was absolutely no reason that Bowie couldn't have had his cake and eaten it too, by taking part in a soundtrack that would hold up fine as an album. This did not happen, and my feelings towards it follow accordingly.

The Trevor Jones half of the album may have been par for the course for movie soundtracks in the mid-80's (or maybe it wasn't!), but it's unlistenable today. It almost kinda reminds me of Frank Zappa's synclavier experiments in the 80's and early 90's, which don't really thrill me, but at least Frank was trying to write genuniely challenging late 20th-century classical and just didn't want to bother with real orchestras and their unions anymore. When these sounds try to create big dramatic tension, or big dramatic beauty, it sounds laughable. And oh me, oh my, there are some baaaaad synth horn sounds in here.

In the Bowie half, only the opening collaboration between Bowie and Jones, mixing the main title sequence with a brief snippet of "Underground," fills me with any halfway warm feelings, and that's largely because it's only 3:21 and neither Bowie nor Jones overstays his welcome. The full version of "Underground," which closes the soundtrack, makes for an excruciating six minutes: hearing pompous faux-gospel in such a ridiculous context doesn't make me happy. The most famous track, "Magic Dance," is mildly amusing for about as long as it takes to finish the initial exchange ("You remind me of the babe" "What babe?" etc): making this into a full-fledged five minutes when it just recycles a small set of mediocre ideas over and over was a terrible idea. "As the World Falls Down" and "Within You" probably could have been remade into something better in another era, at least if he'd taken the best ideas from each of them and combined them into a single track lasting three minutes: here they're just gloppy and boring. Plus, returning to their context in the film, the idea of David Bowie in a codpiece trying to seduce a young girl 20 years his junior makes this more than a little disturbing.

There's one more track (the irritating "Chilly Down"), but it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things. Ultimately, there's no reason for anybody to own this album. There are some fragments of goodness here and there, but nothing comes together well enough to make me want to listen to this ever again.

Review by Warthur
PROG REVIEWER
2 stars Most people coming to this soundtrack album will only be interested in the Bowie tracks, and of these your response will likely hinge on whether Labyrinth was an eye-opening part of your childhood or just an odd fantasy movie that kind of came and went at some point back in the 1980s. For the former, reviewing this is almost pointless - Magic Dance will bring a smile to your face even if you're fully aware of the pop artifice involved. For the latter... well, if you want a complete picture of what Bowie was doing in the 1980s, this will be a likely stop on your journey, but the bits you want are extracted on the Re:Call 4 compilation from the Loving the Alien box, which you may find a better deal given how stuffed to the gills it is.

Latest members reviews

3 stars Writing a review on this marvellous soundtrack is a special occasion to me for two reasons. First of all, because from David Bowie's ouevre it is undeservedly underrated however, containing some of his best music ever written. Secondly, because of the film, naturally, which is still one of my favou ... (read more)

Report this review (#296234) | Posted by Lynx33 | Thursday, August 26, 2010 | Review Permanlink

3 stars [Review 3] David Bowie – Labyrinth soundtrack Hahaha, oh man. I'll just get my bias out of the way: I grew up watching the movie Labyrinth on an almost daily basis. I absolutely loved this movie with its muppets, characters, landscapes and of course: David Bowie as Jareth, the ... (read more)

Report this review (#176097) | Posted by Kestrel | Friday, July 4, 2008 | Review Permanlink

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