The Top Gun Anthem Edition
On soundtracks, textures, and happy accidents.
Over the festive period, we’re re-running some favorite, years-old WITIs you may have missed. Have a wonderful break.
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Colin here. I re-watched Top Gun on a recent flight with some pretty good headphones. For the first time, I paid close attention to the anthemic theme song that kicks off the credits and then quickly blasts into another track (Danger Zone), once the catapult propels the F-14 Tomcat off of the flight deck. It was fun to listen to the composition intently: it’s an interesting piece of music; there’s some dubby echos on the TR-808 drum track, dark synth bells (Yamaha DX7 synth presets!) and a moody buildup. The song soundtracks the beginning of the film, with slow movements of airplanes and the complicated choreography of getting planes aloft on the open sea.
The Top Gun Anthem is so synonymous with the film. It has been embedded into every American brain from the time of first exposure, and reinforced recently with the second film, Maverick, where it was also used.
Why is this interesting?
Turns out the track wasn’t originally composed for Top Gun. Let that sink in. After watching on the plane, I went down a rabbit hole to find out that the track was original composed for a dream sequence in, wait for it, the Chevy Chase movie Fletch.
According to Music Radar:
Speaking to the Red Bull Music Academy in 2014, the acclaimed German synth-pop supremo admitted that the Anthem’s iconic melody - recently resurrected in the trailer for Top Gun: Maverick - was originally intended for a dream sequence in 1985 neo-noir comedy Fletch, in which the eponymous hero, played by Chevy Chase, imagines that he’s starring for the LA Lakers basketball team.
However, the story goes that, while Faltermeyer was working on the theme, it was overheard by Billy Idol, who was recording in the studio next door. “That’s great - you should use it for Top Gun,” Idol exclaimed.
“I thought about it more and more and the more I thought the more I knew ‘this is the theme for Top Gun’,” Faltermeyer recalled, confirming that “Billy Idol was somehow the initiator of that theme for Top Gun”.
His other contribution to the Top Gun soundtrack, which incidentally, was the first CD I ever bought as a kid, was a track called Memories which sets up the vibe shift when played in the film after Goose’s death.
“Top Gun Anthem” won a 1987 Grammy for Best Pop Instrumental Performance, but it also is firmly lodged into pop culture and cinema history: not a small feat for an accident. Thanks Billy Idol! (CJN).
Crazy musical accident