Nicholas Langley – Cinéma Du Look

Spun Out Of Control pays tribute to 80s/90s French cinema with the release of Nicholas Langley’s incredible album ‘Cinéma Du Look’

Femme Fatales with big guns, coolly efficient assassins, highly sexed and impossibly beautiful kleptomaniacs, Paris Métro signs, wet cobbled streets – and neon, always lots of neon; the visual aesthetics of the Cinéma Du Look movement of the mid 1980s to early 1990s were as important as the characters in the films themselves.

Now from musician Nicholas Langley and label Spun Out Of Control comes the album Cinéma Du Look, influenced by both the films and their evocative soundtracks by the likes of Éric Serra, Gabriel Yared and Vladimir Cosma.

Langley’s previous release for the label was the cassette-only Max Max / post-apocalyptic movie inspired Rebel Convoy.

The new album, catalogue number SOOC LP11, is fittingly released as on limited edition, hand numbered ‘Dijon Mustard’ colour vinyl, reflecting the exclusively commissioned artwork by regular label designer Eric Adrian Lee.

Identified by Revue du Cinéma critic Raphaël Bassan in its May 1989 issue, ‘Cinéma Du Look’ principally revolved around the cinematic output of three French film directors: Jean-Jacques Beineix (Diva, Betty Blue), Luc Besson (Subway, Nikita) and Leos Carax (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf).

Weathering the inevitable criticism that these movies were as much about style as substance, the influence of Cinéma Du Look’s visuals and its identifiably 1980s soundtracks can still be felt today in the films of Nicholas Winding Refn (Drive, The Neon Demon). This album winds the clock back to those heady and inspiring days of renting contemporary French movies on VHS – to very cool effect.