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Beautiful Kate Soundtrack
A haunting and fragile elegy to a family’s repressed past, Tex Perkins’ score for the upcoming feature film Beautiful Kate is a far cry from his most well known gig as frontman of Australian rock outfit The Cruel Sea. Written, performed and recorded with Dark Horses co-member Murray Paterson, Beautiful Kate is Perkins’ first film soundtrack.
Set in the forbidding landscape of South Australia’s Flinders Ranges, Beautiful Kate is the story of Ned Kendall (Ben Mendelsohn), his relationship with this twin sister Kate (Sophie Lowe) and the emotional aftermath of a series of tragic events that unfold when he is sixteen. Beautiful Kate is also actress Rachel Ward’s directorial debut. It was the strength of Ward’s vision, and the stellar Australian cast, including Bryan Brown, Rachel Griffiths and Maeve Dermody, which attracted Perkins to the role.
“I absolutely love this film,” says Perkins. “It was challenging because, one, this is the first time we’ve done a sound track and two, because Rachel was quite specific about what she wanted.”
Recorded in a converted general store in Booyong NSW, the soundtrack arose organically between Perkins, Paterson and sound engineer Russell Dunlop (to whom the soundtrack is dedicated, after he died suddenly in May 2009). But it was the intense tone of the script and Ward’s directorial vision that guided Perkins and Paterson’s creative process.
“When Tex first mentioned the ideas to me we knew what we didn’t want to do,” Paterson explains. “For example, we knew that there was a guy walking through the landscape and we wanted to avoid certain ubiquitous or clichéd themes that surround that, so we sat down in a room with a couple of guitars and started strumming.”
For Perkins, the biggest challenge lay in piecing together the required smaller compositions, while still maintaining a unified sound. “We wanted to keep it as organic and natural sounding as possible, so there’s guitars, there’s bass and there’s a cello… We wanted to have a certain consistency, so that even though there’s about 15 different pieces they all have a connecting tone and a similar aesthetic,’ he says.
Melbourne based singer songwriter Megan Washington also joins forces with Perkins to record the poignant and beautiful ‘This Little Bird,' originally released in 1962 by John Loudermilk.
The Beautiful Kate soundtrack will be released nationally on August 14 by Level Two Music, and distributed via Shock.
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