The sword of time will pierce our skins

After doing yesterday's entry, it struck me that I'd inadvertently created a little run of themed songs about war: a fictional nuclear war, WW1 and Vietnam. So I thought I'd carry on the theme today, and Splodgenessabounds will just have to wait a little longer!

Act: The Mash
Title: Theme From M*A*S*H (Suicide Is Painless)
Year: 1980
Chart peak: 1

Richard Hooker's novel about the staff of a US field hospital during the Korean war provided the source material for one of 1970's more surprising hit movies. The black comedy M*A*S*H (with asterisks originally added purely to grab people's attention on the movie poster) not only made a star of its director Robert Altman, but also spawned a long-running TV series, a hit on both sides of the Atlantic.

The series was at the height of its popularity when Radio 1 DJ Noel Edmonds started playing the original movie theme song. The version used on the TV series was an instrumental remake and as most viewers had never seen the original film, the melodramatic lyric (written by Robert Altman's son Mike, just 14 at the time) made quite an impression. The resulting public demand swiftly led to the song's (re-)release as a single. As the track was recorded by a group of session musicians, it was credited simply to The MASH.



Musically, it's quite a clever song - it's obviously in the tradition of folky protest songs (which were pretty big at the time) but it also has a bit of an easy-listening vibe (dig those finger bells!) that makes the morbid lyric all the more startling. All in all, the ideal soundtrack to a film full of black humour, which used the Korean War to make a not-so-oblique point about Vietnam (in fact, Robert Altman deliberately didn't have the setting stated in the film, so as to blur the boundaries even more).

The song, incidentally, refers to a character in the film known as "Painless Pole" (he's a really good dentist) who attempts to commit suicide, but his bid fails because the pills he obtains for the purpose are actually placebos. The character never appeared in the TV series.

The song returned to the charts in 1992 when a beefed-up but otherwise quite faithful version by Welsh angst-rockers Manic Street Preachers became their first top ten hit. It's also been covered by Marilyn Manson.