Edgar Froese, Chris Franke, Johannes Schmoelling, Jon Anderson
Producer(s)
Edgar Froese, Chris Franke, Johannes Schmoelling
Notes
The last TD production with Johannes Schmoelling was the soundtrack for Ridley Scott's movie Legend, starring Tom Cruise, Mia Sara, Tim Currie and David Bennent. Jerry Goldsmith was the original composer of the music for Legend, but Universal Studios decided they wanted a more modern sounding music and contracted with TD, Jon Anderson (singer of Yes) and Bryan Ferry (formerly with Roxy Music) to supply new music. The TD score was used for the North American version of the film only, thus the TD soundtrack was released 1986 in USA and Canada only. All other world-wide releases used the Goldsmith film score.
In an interview Ridley Scott remembered: "I made a terrible mistake with the score. Jerry Goldsmith's original score was by far the most relevant. But after some really not very good previews I decided that maybe the film was too sweet. So I tried to adjust that for America. And I went to Tangerine Dream, God bless them, who wrote a score in three-and-a-half weeks in Berlin. For the rest of the world I kept the Goldsmith score."
While the initial cut of the film ran over two hour long, the European version was cut to 94 minutes, and the American version was even less complex and had a length of only 89 minutes.
Scott in another interview: "I got totally paranoid, I started to hack away at the movie. ... I figured that maybe we'd been too adventurous with our expectations of a full-blown fairy story, and therefore, maybe the combination of the score and the visual was actually too sweet. So, with only three weeks to redo a score, I went to Berlin and did the score with Tangerine Dream. In three weeks they did an incredible job, but it was completely different. It was a driving, more modern way to go, and given what they did in the time, I thought they did a fantastic job."
The song Is Your Love Strong Enough?, played over the end credits of the movie, was composed and performed by Bryan Ferry with guitar by David Gilmour (of Pink Floyd) and bass by Guy Pratt. It is a former outtake of the recording sessions for Avalon, the eighth and last Roxy Music album. Ferry finished it off in a six week period when he was commisioned to do something for the soundtrack. Thus, Tangerine Dream were not involved in this recording at all.
The composition Loved By The Sun on this album features vocals by Jon Anderson, who had written the lyrics as well. The vocals were overdubbed after TD had recorded the music, which in fact is an extended version of the composition Unicorn Theme. This vocal version was created without cooperation of Tangerine Dream, who instead had provided a different (and shorter) version with vocals sung by Susanne Pawlitzki. Interestingly enough, that version (which was rejected by the studio in favor the the Anderson version) had lyrics adapted from the poem 'The Angel' by William Blakes; hence this composition was an early attempt to transform Blake's works into music. This approach finally led to the album Tyger (1987).
Re-Releases
Fans had to wait nearly ten years before the TD version was finally available on CD, because copyright problems made a re-release of the original vinyl LP impossible for years. In late 1994 a bootleg release was taken back by the producers in last minute, because one track was missing on the CD, and most copies have been destroyed. But at last in 1995 Legend was officially released on CD, including the track Is Your Love Strong Enough by Bryan Ferry which had caused the copyright trouble in former years.
