Forgotten Movie Songs #2: "Something in the Air" from THE MAGIC CHRISTIAN

SIR GUY GRAND (over an image of a 10-pound note): Ladies and gentlemen, this is what is commonly known as money. It comes in all sizes, colours, and denominations - like people. We'll be using quite a bit of it in the next two hours... luckily I have enough for ALL of us.

First off, you have to love a movie that gathers the talents of so many far-flung geniuses. Even if it seems too 1960s for you, 1969's The Magic Christian, written by the era's idiosyncratic Terry Southern, still amalgamates Peter Sellers (as the richest man in the world, Sir Guy Grand), a late-Beatles-era Ringo Starr (as his once-homeless adopted son), and a plethora of choice cameos including Richard Attenborough, Christopher Lee, Raquel Welch, John Cleese, Lawrence Harvey, Leonard Frey, Wilfred Hyde-White, Dennis Price, and a unexpectedly lovely cross-dressing cabaret singer played by Yul Brenner, toying at first with Roman Polanski while singing "Mad About The Boy" (a song of which star Peter Sellers did a flawless cover once):



The absolute batshit crazy tempo of Joseph McGrath's The Magic Christian--as it tells the story of the restless Sir Guy Grand's successful attempts to humiliate his fellow wealth-holders--is a superb conduit for the now-iconic, pot-stirring song "Something in the Air," written by and sung by John Steele, who was acting as the frontman for a Who-inspired offshoot group called Thunderclap Newman. The group only recorded one album, called Hollywood Dream, with Who guitarist/songwriter Pete Townshend as their producer. Knowing that, it's obvious that Townshend liked Keene's voice because it sounded very much like his own, and both in that way and in how the single is instrumentally arranged, it becomes kind of a shadowed Who song. Anyway, it's a lovely piece of work, and a perfect second entry for my new series of posts. It appears in the movie as the closing credits song (after a bunch of money-mad dandys have masked their noses while dunking into vats of urine, crap, and blood to gather up free-floating money; this makes the song funnier, by the way). The fact that the song's been used in commercials during the last few years definitely dilutes its original power, of course. But I don't watch much TV, so I guess this doesn't offend me horribly.

As always, the lyrics--by John Steele, as is the music--are printed below the song, which is here performed "live" via some long-lost British pop music boob-tube cavalcade.



Call out the instigators
Because there's something in the air
We've got to get together sooner or later
Because the revolution's here, and you know it's right
And you know that it's right

We have got to get it together
We have got to get it together now

Lock up the streets and houses
Because there's something in the air
We've got to get together sooner or later
Because the revolution's here, and you know it's right
And you know that it's right

We have got to get it together
We have got to get it together now

Hand out the arms and ammo
We're going to blast our way through here
We've got to get together sooner or later
Because the revolution's here, and you know it's right
And you know that it's right

We have got to get it together
We have got to get it together
Now