From Film Competition to Global Recognition

I never expected Sad Disco to go anywhere. It began as a submission to the “Pusher II Soundtrack Hunt” — a competition Nicolas Winding Refn organised alongside GAFFA and Mymusic, looking for diegetic music to use inside his film. I entered on something of a whim. To my surprise, Refn and his music director liked it enough to place it in the actual film, Pusher II. One review from CineVue described it as “a haunting, hypnotic backdrop to the film’s darker themes.” I was relieved. It had done its job.

That should have been the end of the story.

Years later, I received an email from a Hotmail address that looked, frankly, suspicious. It claimed to be from Mark Lanegan, asking whether he could cover Sad Disco. I assumed it was a hoax — why would someone like Lanegan reach out to me out of nowhere? Then he sent a draft mix of his version. That’s when I understood it was real.

What he’d made was extraordinary. He took the original and rebuilt it from the inside — extending it, layering in a heaviness that only he could conjure, renaming it Ode to Sad Disco. It ended up on his 2012 album Blues Funeral, and in his own notes on the record he wrote that the entire Pusher trilogy had been the direct stimulus for the piece — that its music was drawn in part from the Pusher II soundtrack. A song I’d made for a competition had, in some sense, become the seed of something on one of his most celebrated albums. The Guardian called his version “a brooding masterpiece.” I don’t disagree.

I was deeply saddened when Mark Lanegan died in 2022. He was an extraordinary musician — a voice like no other, dark and raw and full of soul. Collaborating with him, even in this sideways, indirect way, was an honour I didn’t see coming and still find hard to fully take in.

The track kept moving. In 2018, director Jean-Bernard Marlin chose the original Sad Disco as the title melody for his debut feature Shéhérazade — a gritty, street-level love story set in Marseille that went on to win three César Awards. Hearing the track in that context felt surreal. The film needed something to hold the emotional weight of its world, and apparently Sad Disco fit. A critic described it as “a minimal electronic pulse that mirrors the film’s stark, urban reality.” From a Copenhagen crime film to the back streets of Marseille — I hadn’t mapped that journey in advance.

The song has also had a quieter second life at home, in my own hands. Years after the original, I returned to it with an Atari ST and rebuilt it as a chiptune version — stripping it back to the bare circuitry, letting the machine have its say. It’s a different kind of haunting.

Since then, streaming has kept both versions circulating in ways I couldn’t have predicted. You can find the original on SoundCloud alongside Lanegan’s version and the remixes that have found their own audiences. People discover it, add it to playlists, pass it along. A track written for a competition keeps finding rooms to haunt.

That’s the thing about music. You release it and lose control of where it goes. Sad Disco has travelled further than I have — and I’m just glad it kept finding its way.