The Wild World of WONDERWALL's Music
Sometime in the summer of 1993, ex-Beatle George Harrison drove to the recording studio in West Los Angeles where he was to record a brief cameo for The Simpsons. He would appear as himself in "Homer's Barbershop Quartet," an episode-long parody of his old band, and he was assured the session would be brief and discreet. His cover was quickly blown and the studio was swarmed with The Simpsons' writing staff, all professed Beatle fans, overwhelming him with more questions about the old band. Harrison glumly obliged until the show's creator, Matt Groening mentioned Wonderwall Music: a soundtrack album he'd released in 1968, and the first he'd released under his own name. Harrison perked up and started gushing. That album, he told Groening, was the most fun he'd ever had making a record--and almost no one, in twenty-five years, had ever asked him about it.
No one had asked him likely because almost no one had seen the movie. Even today, Joe Massot's Wonderwall is largely unknown, except as an artifact of Swinging Sixties psychedelia. In it reclusive, middle-aged microbiologist Oscar Collins (Jack MacGowran) becomes obsessed with the beautiful Vogue model next door (Jane Birkin) and her freewheeling world that he spies through a small hole in the wall of his cluttered bedsit. The majority of the film is an impressionistic look at Collins' transformation as he goes deeper into a bright, unhindered, paisley world (and drills more holes in the wall).
By: Tom Fritsche
Source: Huffington Post
