This is brilliant, just absolutely bloody brilliant.

Equus – Original Soundtrack

Music by Richard Rodney Bennett/Conducted by Angela Morley.

Equus has always been one of my favourite films, and not just because Jenny Agutter gets her kit off in it and literally rolls around in the hay. She did get her kit off a lot, didn’t she, Walkabout – that naked swimming scene, Equus – frisky in the stable, An American Werewolf In London – the saucy shower scene, she even got her knickers off in The Railway Children, well, bloomers, but it still counts.

But I digress, back to the record. I picked this up on ebay about four years ago for a few dollars. This is a really fucking brilliant soundtrack, full of sweeping violins and cellos (which remind me of the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes, in a fleeting, hard-to-pin-down kind of way).

Along with the main themes of the film it has six Richard Burton monologues in which he says things like . . .

“Afterwards, he says, they always embrace. The animal digs his sweaty brow into his cheek and they stand in the dark for an hour, like some necking couple. And of all nonsensical things, I keep thinking about the horse, not the boy, the horse, and what it might be trying to do.”

and . . .

“Then, with a surgical skill that amazes even me, I fit in the knife and slice elegantly down to the navel, just like a seamstress following a pattern. I part the flaps, sever the inner tubes, yank them out and throw them, hot and steaming, on the floor. The other two then study the patterns, as if they’re reading hieroglyphics. It’s obvious to me that I’m tops as chief priest.”

Burton + monologues = Fuck me that’s fantastic!

Don’t think it’s out on cd, but well worth tracking down on the old vinyl.