Les Claypool has turned the soundtrack to ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’ into a Primus album.
Claypool was seven years old when he first saw the ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’ movie. For his New Year’s Eve show going into 2014 he decided he would perform the soundtrack from start to finish. “It felt good. It felt like we needed to be doing this,” Claypool said in a statement.
Since that show Claypool has been including the Wonka signature song ‘The Candyman’ in his Primus set. Then came time to start working on a new record. “Larry Lalonde and I were discussing the next project for the band and one thought I had was to take on some kind of sacred cow and twist it into something of our own. Being that the whole Wonka thing was a massive part of my childhood,” Claypool explains, “It just seemed like the perfect thing for us to sink our teeth into, in part because those tunes are all so strong.”
The Primus reinvention of ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’ is more an interpretation of the soundtrack, not a cover of it. “The recording is about my early perception of the original ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’ film,” says Claypool. “The notion wasn’t so much to go in and redo the soundtrack note for note as much as it was to utilise the classic elements of the music yet try to reflect some of the darker undertones of the Roald Dahl books, because when you read those books, there is an eerie and somewhat menacing aspect implied.”
Primus and the Chocolate Factory will be released in Australia through Liberation on October 24, 2014.
