Captain Beefheart

Indie Soundtrack Master Cliff Martinez Talks Scoring The Neon Demon

The longtime movie maestro’s third collaboration with the director Nicolas Winding Refn opens Friday.

An important ingredient in my artistic upbringing is punk rock. Shortly after moving to L.A., I was rehearsing in South Central L.A. with a top-40 band that was doing George Benson cover songs. In an adjacent room, I heard an offensive racket that turned out to be L.A.’s first (or second) punk rock band, The Screamers. At first I was repulsed. My next response was, “This is interesting,” and by the end of the song, I was hooked. Shortly thereafter I joined The Weirdos. We played at the Whisky A Go Go and when I saw three people do swan dives off the balcony, I thought to myself, “That beats applause any day.”

Read the full interview at Vanity Fair by Spike Carter

An Evening With The Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Cliff Martinez

This is an exclusive interview with Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Cliff Martinez. Cliff is best known as a former drummer for the Red Hot Chili Peppers. He’s also played with The Dickies, Lydia Lunch, Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band, and has composed the scores for numerous award-winning films. During the show he discussed his time with RHCP, composing music for Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, and the influence Captain Beefheart had on his life – See more at: http://thefivecount.com/interviews/an-evening-with-the-red-hot-chili-peppers-cliff-martinez/#sthash.CirHLYQf.dpuf

To hear the entire show visit The Five Count.

VICE : NOISY : An Interview With Composer Cliff Martinez

Cliff Martinez is probably most known through his collaboration with filmmakers Steven Soderbergh and Nicolas Refn. The composer of Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Drive, Solaris, and Only God Forgives, Martinez has had the chance to set the mood for some of the best movies of the last few decades. In fact, a cursory glance through Martinez’s filmography will reveal a nearly flawless tract record. It isn’t just through his composing, however, that Martinez has received recognition. Beginning his musical career in the late 70s/early 80s punk scene, Martinez has had a career as diverse as they come; including putting in time with bands like the Dickies, Captain Beefheart, and Red Hot Chili Peppers, which awarded him a spot in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Following the release of his latest work, the score for the HBO film Normal Heart, we caught up with Cliff to ask him about his transition from an LA punk to Grammy-nominated film composer. – Joseph Yanick, Jul 15 2014

Read the full interview at NOISY, Music by Vice

The accompanist: Cliff Martinez on scoring for Soderbergh, Winding Refn

Cliff Martinez at the Neuchatel Fantastic Film Festival

Meet the man who links Captain Beefheart, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Pee-Wee Herman, Only God Forgives and the films of Steven Soderbergh.

Cliff Martinez is a movie composer with a difference. He is self-taught and comes from a rock background (he played drums for both the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Captain Beefheart). Since his first feature film score, for Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies and videotape in 1989, he has written music around 30 features, including several collaborations with Soderbergh (most recently 2011’s Contagion).
Alongside his Hollywood credits – Traffic, The Lincoln Lawyer, Arbitrage, Spring Breakers – Martinez has also worked with European directors. He was one of the guests at the recent Neuchatel International Fantastic Film Festival where he spoke in detail about his work with Nicolas Winding Refn and reflected on a career which has taken him from the Los Angeles punk scene of the late 1970s to composing for films of every shape and size. He is currently working on Fred Cavayé’s new action-thriller Mea Culpa. – Geoffrey Macnab

Read the full interview at BFI Film Forever

Cinematic Orchestrator:
Cliff Martinez recaps over two decades of film scoring

Cliff Martinez playing his Baschet Cristal

With Only God Forgives about to hit DVD, composer, former Chili Pepper and Captain Beefheart collaborator Cliff Martinez looks back on more than twenty years of soundtrack composition. It was his minimalist electronic score for Nicolas Winding-Refn’s Drive which brought Martinez to widespread recognition – his pulsing, understated compositions were absolutely vital to the film’s slick appeal, and with a deluxe vinyl edition released in the UK by Geoff Barrow’s Invada imprint, suddenly Martinez’s name was on the lips of every hipster and film fanatic … – by Bram E. Gieben

Continue reading at THE SKINNY

Interviewly – Cliff Martinez on Reddit AMA – July 2013

REDDIT: Is it true that Beefheart pushed a guy down the stairs after he didn’t understand how to ”play a strawberry” on the drums?

CLIFF: The stairs story appears in Drumbo’s book but I don’t recall the line about “play a strawberry”. That’s very Beefheart though. I was asked to play “giant blue babies levitating over the mountain….you know, like Fred Asparagus dangling through the teacup”. I must have played it correctly because he didn’t throw me down the stairs.

Read the entire interview at Interviewly

DRONING MAN – L.A.Weekly

After he’d worn out the carpet in front of the slot machine for another three years, speeding along with persistent punkers the Dickies and scoring an episode of Pee-wee’s Playhouse among other activities, Martinez lined up his lemons and broke the bank in 1988. He’d been making sound collages — “body noises, pots and pans, sound effects, played rhythmically. I was working the cracks between music and sound effects.” Mark Mangini, a sound designer who’d been asked while working on the film Alien Nation for “some sound effects that were kind of like music,” had heard Martinez’s stuff and asked him to give it a whack on spec. “They never used any of what I did, because the music was really pretty nutty,” says Martinez. Anyway, while Martinez and Mangini were listening to it, Mangini’s roommate butted in and started making suggestions. “We hit it off great. I could tell he was not a musician but had a great instinct about how to use music in films. He said, ‘This stuff would be perfect for my next film, sex, lies, and videotape. Would you like to score it?’” The roommate was Steven Soderbergh, then an unknown. You are correct: Martinez did not decline.

– Greg Burk

Great article from 2003, not to be missed. Read the full text at L.A.Weekly