VARIOUS ARTISTS: “In The Name Of The Father” (A&M)

SOUNDTRACKS ARE usually and correctly disdained as the runt of the recording litter. Who’s going to invest in a record from a genre that habitually consists of some padded-out instrumentals, opportunistically repackaged oldies, already in any sensible person’s record collection and a theme song that’s usually and notoriously yet another numbingly uplifting tie-in of a ballad.

In The Name Of The Father doesn’t entirely escape the drawbacks of the genre. The Hot Spot, it ain’t but with three tracks that offer a unique collaboration between Bono, Gavin Friday and Sinead O’Connor, it drops some tantalising clues about where they, and, by extension Irish music, might be headed in the near future.

Since he and Tim Simenon produce all three, it’s mostly Gavin Friday’s baby albeit The Man Seezer acts as an indispensable midwife. As to the progeny, it’s the result of an intense affair between dance and Irish music, bedded down between Arab sheets and flecked with the influences of Hall Willner and Sinead’s chums in Jah Wobble’s Invaders Of The Heart.

The title track starts with innocently tribal drums as Bono’s vocals and an Irish traditional sample bookends Friday’s rap before the drums recur, now menacing, militarist and Lambeg-like. Ominous, of course yet there’s also a splash in the Seventies’ pool, into which the Guildford 4 dived as Friday invokes the names of George Best and LSD beside that of the father.

Next. ‘Billy Boola’ revisits the Trammps and the Philly Sound is an atmospherically perfect pastiche, built over Jah Wobble’s insidious and evocative bass. Hear it and you realise why Gerry Conlon escaped Belfast to skive off to London. Hear it and the four well-chosen retreads, Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Chile’, The Kinks’ ‘Dedicated Follower Of Fashion’, Lizzy’s ‘Whiskey In The Jar’ and Marley’s ‘Is This Love’ and you’re back to the decade when flares and a lump of dope were the unemployed dandy’s only necessary accessories. Trevor Jones’ three sequences interpret the unendurable tension and tragedy of the case before Sinead O’Connor appears for the closing ‘You Made Me The Thief Of Your Heart’. Invaders Wobble and John Reynolds reappear, Maire Breathnach’s fiddle butzes away and there’s also some plush horns as her keening leans to the East.

In short, buyers may still retain an excusable prejudice against soundtracks but there’s definitely three tracks on In The Name Of The Father that don’t deserve to moulder in the limbo of the soundtrack’s lost and found.

• Bill Graham