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Even eleven years after its release in 1986, this Hubbard meisterwerk is
still in my opinion the finest Commodore 64 tune ever. Why? Simple really, the
introduction is immensely gratifying, the pounding bass and drum lines draw you in, and
the main synth lines that remnate throughout are completely awesome. The clever use of
instrumentation also means you could seemingly hear four tunes rather than three, and to
top it all, it had a quite surreal ending to it (although normally on a C64, you would
have had to stop the tape whilst loading or hack the music out!). It was top of the Zzap!
64 music charts for months and months on end, and eventually due to its popularity Hubbard
got together with a friend, who had recently bought a Yamaha sequencer and Akai sampler,
and did a re-recorded audio version for Zzap! 64's first ever covermount cassette.
Warren Pilkington
... which set the standard for the CD version of this classic theme. Rob's covermount cassette version found itself unable to duplicate the same sounds as the C64 one, because, oddly, MIDI sequencers and equipment at the time were not quite up to the weird ringmod and sounds Rob squeezed from the SID. His version was therefore cleaner and lighter than the original SID. This CD version returns to basics, using large amounts of the actual SID in the track itself in an admission that some things can't be done better than SID. Rob's surreal breaks in the music, akin to Guitar solos, were a case in point.
The title theme, of course, was a good cover of a piece from Prokofiev's
"Romeo and Juliet."
Chris Abbott
Argh! Two views! One for each braincell!
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