“Making music for a movie, you’re always trying to drive the audience’s emotion,” he says. “We tried to do that while avoiding the usual stereotypes – the idea of having long, dissonant notes in a horror movie soundtrack, for instance, just seemed far too obvious for us. We found, at the time, that it was possible to make music that was a lot scarier by avoiding those traditional horror stereotypes.”
The band are arguably known for crafting the soundtrack for Argento’s 1977 film Suspiria, a bloody and deeply twisted tale of a coven of witches who torment young women in a dance academy. “My personal experience with Dario was mainly through working on this film,” Guarini tells me. “He has a very strong idea of what he wants to achieve, so he exercises a measure of control over the band, but he always trusts the musicians.” The Suspiria soundtrack proved a unique undertaking for the band. “We did the music before the actual movie was shot,” Guarini explains. “Dario wanted to listen to the music while shooting. That was a totally different approach from most movies. No matter what we did, we always tried to make music that would scare us – we thought that if we could scare ourselves, then we could definitely scare an audience. That was our approach when working on Suspiria, and that’s the philosophy that drives us.”
Goblin have been through numerous lineup changes through the decades, with the current lineup consisting of Guarini alongside Massimo Morante on guitars, Fabio Pignatelli on bass and Agostino Marangolo on drums. From the mid-‘70s, there was a period of more than 30 years when the band simply did not play live at all, a streak that lasted until just three years ago, when, to the delight of fans, they emerged from the studio and took to the stage once again. I ask Guarini why the band decided to start playing live once again, and he tells me that it was largely his doing. “A few years ago, Massimo called us and asked if we wanted to get together again,” he explains. “We released an album a few years later and talked about playing live, but the others in the band were very reluctant to do this. I was very determined to go out on the road again, and so I kept trying to convince them, and finally, several years later, they gave in,” he says with a laugh.
Devotees of the band will have the rare chance to see them in action later this month, when they come to town as part of Melbourne Music Week. They are set to play a special, one-off show at Melbourne Town Hall, and, even more excitingly, will be performing classics from their back catalogue on the Grand Organ. It’s an intimidating beast of an instrument, with 10,000 pipes and a façade that weighs in at 20 tonnes. Its sheer size even has a horror veteran like Guarini a little spooked. “The Grand Organ is such a huge instrument that there can be a delay in the sound,” he says. “The scale of it is so large that it can be difficult to play in sync with the rest of the band. I’ve been ensured by various people that it’s not too difficult and there won’t be too much of a delay,” he says with a nervous laugh. “It’s certainly very exciting to do something like this. It will be the first time we’ve ever tried.”
Goblin have a tremendous back catalogue of music to draw upon, although their set will focus primarily on the legendary 1976 album Roller. The organ sounds on this album will undoubtedly sound magnificent in the setting of the Melbourne Town Hall, but more so than that, Roller is a special album for Guarini and the rest of the band. “We will be playing almost all the songs from that record,” he explains. “That’s the album people ask for, so that’s the one we play the most, but the songs are also very important to us. We all like Roller, because it was one of our most spontaneous recordings. It wasn’t created as a soundtrack, so we were not thinking about making music for anyone else. We were just trying to play by instinct, and even after a few decades, the music still means a lot to us. We love coming back to those songs.”
Goblin’s influence has been felt strongly throughout the decades – French electro upstarts Justice sampled Tenebrae for their own track, Phantom – and the band feel humbled to see many generations of fan at their shows. “It was a surprise to us at first,” Guarini says.
“When we play live, we play to sold-out crowds, and it’s a huge mix of people, ranging from 65-year-olds to 20-year-olds. It puts us in a scary position, because we didn’t really intend to be guiding a younger generation, but we are certainly very happy to be providing inspiration.”
BY ALASDAIR DUNCAN
