Dario Argento asked Pink Floyd first. They said no. He was besotted with Tubular Bells and it is unclear whether he ever approached Mike Oldfield about it. He worked out that having Emerson, Lake and Palmer play the score would cost too much. He hired the jazz pianist Giorgio Gaslini, who had scored two of his previous projects and had already started work with an orchestra. And then his record label mentioned that there were four men in their twenties recording an album down the corridor. That is how the most famous horror score ever made got made.

The short version

Profondo Rosso is the first Goblin album, released on Cinevox in 1975 as the soundtrack to Argento’s fifth film. Claudio Simonetti plays keyboards and piano; Massimo Morante plays guitar; Fabio Pignatelli plays bass; Walter Martino plays drums, having replaced Carlo Bordini. Gaslini’s orchestra appears on some tracks, fairly discreetly. Simonetti is the son of Enrico Simonetti and studied at the Santa Cecilia conservatory in Rome. The band were called Oliver when they walked in; they renamed themselves Goblin for the occasion, which is to say the name exists because of this record.

How they got there

They were in the studio making an LP that later came out under the name Cherry Five when Carlo Bixio, who ran Cinevox, put them in front of Argento. The original plan was modest: the band would arrange and perform Gaslini’s music. But Argento wanted something more modern and more rock than what the orchestra was producing, there were discussions, and Gaslini left the film. Argento then asked these four to compose the main pieces themselves — a promotion from interpreters to authors that happened mid-project. Argento and Daria Nicolodi had already heard their demos and been startled: one intro was used in a provisional trailer, in place of Gaslini’s music, before anything was agreed.

The sound

Keyboards as a threat rather than an ornament. What Argento wanted and could not get from an orchestra was rock, and what these four gave him was a progressive band’s vocabulary — riffs, ostinatos, tempo changes, electric texture — pointed at picture. The result became the emblem of horror film music, full stop, and the template that everyone from John Carpenter onwards worked against. The title theme remains the band’s best-known piece of music by a distance. Fifty years on, the nursery-rhyme melody over that bass figure is still doing exactly what it was built to do, which is why it has never stopped being borrowed.

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The songs

The record is split down the middle by authorship, and knowing this changes how you hear it. Side A is the Goblin side, all three pieces theirs: Profondo Rosso, Death Dies, Mad Puppet. Side B is Gaslini’s — Wild Session, Deep Shadows, School at Night, Gianna — with one asterisk, because the introduction to Wild Session is entirely the band’s work, lifted straight from one of their demos. So the album you know is the first half, and the second half is a jazz composer’s film music with a rock band playing it, which is precisely the record Argento originally commissioned and decided against.

Reception and legacy

A million copies in the first year. Fifty-two weeks on the charts, sixteen of them at number one, for both the single and the album. A gold disc, a year in the Italian top ten, and cult status as far away as Japan — for a debut, by a band who had existed under that name for a matter of months. Set that against the thirty thousand copies of Bagarozzo three years later and you have the whole shape of this group’s career in two numbers. There is a small joke on the sleeve: the back cover photograph, taken in Morante’s family living room, includes Tartarini, who does not play on the record.

The verdict

Essential, obviously, and more interesting than its fame suggests. Play side A as an album: Profondo Rosso, Death Dies, Mad Puppet, twenty minutes, and notice how much of it is a prog band being let off the leash rather than a composer serving a director. Then play side B and hear the other film, the one that was nearly made. Then go to Bagarozzo for what they did with the freedom this bought them. Four men in their twenties, in the wrong studio at the right moment, who got the job because Pink Floyd were busy.

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