The Killing Moon
by Echo & The Bunnymen
- 123
- BPM
- G major
- Key
- 9B
- Camelot
- 53
- Danceability
- 14
- Acousticness
"The Killing Moon" turned up in film long after it left the charts. It was on the soundtrack of the 2001 science fiction film Donnie Darko and in the 1998 film Gia, starring Angelina Jolie. Korova had released it on January 20, 1984 as the lead single from Echo & the Bunnymen's fourth album, Ocean Rain, and it reached number nine in the UK.
Ian McCulloch said he woke one morning and sat bolt upright with the line "Fate up against your will" in his head. He credited the lyric half to God. Nothing like it had happened to him before or since. He put the space imagery down to a childhood interest in the cosmos.
The chords were based on David Bowie's "Space Oddity" played backwards. Les Pattinson and Will Sergeant had heard balalaika music in Russia, and it partly inspired the arrangement. Sergeant recorded the guitar solo separately while tuning up, and producer David Lord suggested putting it in the song. The strings were a mix of Adam Peters' cello and keyboards played by Lord. McCulloch said that when he sings it, no band in the world has a song anywhere near it.
The Killing Moon runs at 123 BPM, the tempo of house, disco and most club dance music. In classical terms it sits in allegro territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.95 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 488 ms. It is in G major, Camelot 9B, which shares its notes with E minor and mixes cleanly with C major and D major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.