One Track Mind

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The ending of The Breakfast Club has always been unsatisfying, largely due to the fact that Ally Sheedy’s proto-Goth Allison was given a full-scale beauty makeover in order to land jock Andrew, who scarcely noticed her until she was made more conventionally presentable. It was a jarringly wrong note, not just because Allison just plain looked better as the basketcase but because she was the character most comfortable with who she was throughout the movie. She was just there because she thought it would be a hoot. It would have been much better had Allison politely shrugged off Claire’s well-intentioned but conformist makeover, mussed her hair back up, re-donned on her black garb and stalked off across the parking lot alone, comfortable in her own skin.

The Toronto-by-way-of-the-Netherlands duo Bishop Morocco have crafted the perfect song for the closing credits of that alternative Breakfast Club. Joy Division never lasted long enough to witness the cinematic ascent of John Hughes, but “Last Year’s Disco Guitars” allows a glimpse at what the dour Mancunians might have sounded like with the full Hughes soundtrack treatment.

“Last Year’s Disco Guitars” is swathed in the mid-1980s ambience of Hughes soundtrack classics like Simple Minds’ “Don’t You Forget About Me” and OMD’s “If You Leave,” but shot through with the melancholy air of Joy Division. It’s definitely more upbeat than anything Ian Curtis would have ever managed, but the guitar line is straight out of the Bernard Sumner playbook. Bishop Morocco manage to deftly walk a tightrope between gloom and glory, never quite tipping into dark or light. It manages to be combine the downcast nature of much of British post-punk with the optimism of Hughes’ cinematic outlook.

Take a listen to “Last Year’s Disco Guitars” and see if you can’t picture the end of The Breakfast Club as it should have been–Allison Reynolds walking off on her own, an outcast of her own volition and triumphantly so. Let the princess, the criminal, the jock, and the brain worry if anyone is going to forget them. The basketcase never should’ve cared if they did or not.