Top image: Still, ‘Stranger than Paradise’ 1984 dir. Jim Jarmusch

As an ardent music fan and musician, Jim Jarmusch has always placed great importance on the soundtracks of his films. In fact, many of his scores have transcended their accompanying visuals and become iconic works in their own right.

From John Lurie’s jarring no wave mumbles in Stranger than Paradise, to the groove of Tom Waits’s Jockey Full of Bourbon in the opening sequence of  Down by Law, through Neil Young’s impeccable score for Dead Man, some of Jarmusch’s most iconic cinematic moments have come from his musical selections. He even has a habit of casting musicians instead of actors in many of his films: Joe Strummer, Tom Waits, John Lurie, Iggy Pop. Working with long-time collaborator, The Lounge Lizards’ John Lurie,

Celebrating Jarmusch’s unique sonic sensibilities, London’s Barbican have pulled together an impressive team of musicians, including Kirin J Callinan, Mulatu Astatke, Camille O’Sullivan, Alex Kapranos, who have all been influenced by the filmmaker’s oeuvre. For a special two-night performance, these names will join forces to revisit and recreate musical highlights from the director’s incredible body of work.

Here, several of these musicians tell us about how they first discovered Jarmusch’s work and how his creative output has influenced their own.

“I admire Jarmusch’s ability to engage with cultural heavyweights in a manner that honours the true contribution of these figures. Who can handle Iggy Pop, Screaming Jay Hawkins, Waits, Blake, the Wu-Tang Clan as elemental powers within one’s statement? 

Jarmusch isn’t mired in fawning celebrity-worship, nor does he feel the need to knock anyone off a pedestal. He’s able to place these powerhouses within his movies in meaningful ways, inviting us to some fulcrum point within the collective consciousness. It takes a lot of substance and inner power to keep hold of one’s own artistic vision when working with the giants.”

“For as long as I can remember I have always been drawn to the maverick outsider in Art. I have been a great admirer of the films of Jim Jarmusch since encountering his work in the mid 1980s just as I was starting out in my own career as a young musician-about-town in London. I have never had any direct personal contact with Jim Jarmusch but our worlds have had strange connection points over the years. I played and toured for several years with The Pogues and in my early days with them the great and much missed Joe Strummer was filling in for Shane. Alex Cox had made a film called Straight To Hell in 1986 and The Pogues, Joe and a host of other musicians I know were in the cast. As was Jarmusch, who played a character called Amos Dade. So many people I knew at the time sang his praises. 

I have long wanted to find a way of thanking Jim Jarmusch for making these beautiful works and for his exquisite musical taste which has led me and numerous others to explore and discover a whole world of music both familiar and completely strange at the same time. I love his boldness and the way in which he has consistently inverted the norm, daring to fly in the face of what are commonly accepted as cinematic norms and to create an incredibly personal and singular language. His films are almost impossible to describe but they are also unmistakably his.”

” love his boldness and the way in which he has consistently inverted the norm, daring to fly in the face of what are commonly accepted as cinematic norms and to create an incredibly personal and singular language.” – David Coulter

“In my late teens I was round at a friend’s house, and we had Down by Law on VHS – I’d never really seen anything that looked like it, that moved like it, that sounded like it. I think it was that film that introduced me to the music of Tom Waits too. It had this alien quality about it that was very seductive – to me it’s America at its most alien and most appealing. It is like a fantastical version of America, but one that I’m particularly drawn too. There’s no slick editing, which allows the performance to breathe and feel natural and raw, and to indulge in awkwardness, and that’s something that I think you see across Jim Jarmusch films generally.

Jarmusch is like one of those long-term friends you have with good taste, who you can rely upon to introduce you to something new that you’re going to love – I think it was through Broken Flowers that I came to the music of Mulatu Astatke and the music of Ethiopia from that particular time – that had a huge impact on me.”

“Seeing Tom Waits perform in the black and white film Cigarettes and Coffee was startling – I’d never seen a film like it, and I’d never seen Tom Waits perform like that. You got to see an essence of who he was as a person, that you don’t get to see in his own work. Just the look of the film – so stylised. I must have been a teenager when I saw it but I remember it reminded me in some small way of David Lynch. He bought something out of the musicians that I’d never seen before. Jarmusch created his own world, not naturalistic, but timeless.

If you get the right music in a film, it can be the making of it, and can bring it up to an iconic level. Using music that’s left-of-centre, that a lot of people haven’t heard of – that’s what I’m a fan of. It’s interesting when you look at Jim Jarmusch, his music is like a private diary. He has an eclectic taste, and listening to his soundtrack you get a sense of what he’s about. He’s influenced a lot of people.”

Jim Jarmusch revisited takes place on 20th and 21st September at Barbican. Tickets are available here.