Five great pop b-sides

1. Pet Shop Boys - After the event (/Did you see me coming?, 2009)

I've written about this track before: it's one of the best things Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe have ever recorded. One of many great moments for a group rightly lauded for their b-sides.

2. New Order - 1963 (/True Faith, 1987)

To a lovely the tune, the lyrics are said to posit a scenario in which John F Kennedy arranges for a hitman to kill his wife Jackie so he can continue his affair with Marilyn Monroe. The assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, famously takes out the wrong target, provoking a further spiral of violence. Splendid, if bonkers.

3. Erasure - La La La (/Love to Hate You, 1991)

The peak of the British synth duo's art came with two consecutive albums in 1989 and 1991: Wild! and Chorus respectively. This song captures all the joy of the former with the analogue sounds of the latter - huge fun, it opens with a sample of what sounds like Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares.

4. Depeche Mode - Dangerous (/Personal Jesus, 1989)

The first single from the Basildon's foursome's best album had a suitably slinky companion - you can hear why it didn't fit into Violator's running order but it's great stuff nonetheless. Other b-sides from the album's singles veered towards the apocalyptic with portentous instrumentals Memphisto (/Enjoy the Silence) and Kaleid (/Policy of Truth).

5. The Divine Comedy - My Lovely Horse (/Gin Soaked Boy, 1999)

Neil Hannon had always given the impression this spoof Eurovision track written for Channel 4's hit comedy series Father Ted - to which The Divine Comedy contributed the theme tune - would never be released but, presumably when things got a bit desperate career-wise, out it came. Try delivering these lines with a straight face: 'My lovely horse, you're a pony no more/ Running around with a man on your back, like a train in the night'. Do also check out the band's splendid Michael Nyman covers on the back of singles Generation Sex and The Certainty of Chance (both 1998).

Related: the five best electropop albums ever

Failing to score

Though I've mentioned film soundtracks in passing on this blog, I'm surprised I haven't posted directly on the subject. This may be because the quality of musicianship in cinema seems to have tailed off markedly in recent years.

There are any number of reasons for this: I suspect the main is budgetary; there is continued reliance on found, usually pop, songs; a lot of the work is formulaic; some - art-house - films often don't have any score at all, or I may not be going to the right movies. For instance, though I'm a fan of composer Max Richter, I haven't seen the last film to which he contributed a soundtrack, Sarah's Key, despite his faintly terrifying contribution to Waltz with Bashir (2008).

It can't be coincidence that one of the greatest of all directors, Alfred Hitchcock, worked with some of the greatest composers in the genre: Dimitri Tiomkin, Franz Waxman, Miklos Rosza, Bernard Herrmann... One soundtrack I would highlight in the last few years is that for Tom Ford's Christopher Isherwood adaptation A Single Man (2009), which not only includes vintage hits but also mixes work by two composers: Shigeru Umebayashi and Abel Korzeniowski (plus a touch of Herrmann).

Composer Michael Nyman, notable for his work on such Peter Greenaway films as Drowning by Numbers (1988; pictured) and The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), as well as Jane Campion's The Piano (1993), is especially scathing on the state of scoring in cinema, citing derivative work and general condescension. At the root of his argument seems to be a lack of respect for the art of a composer to which, I would add in what seems to have become an increasingly (visually) stylised medium, the role of a great soundtrack.

For the record, one of Nyman's favourite bits of his own work occurs, perhaps surprisingly, in Michael Winterbottom's determinedly contemporary London movie, Wonderland (1999). He told a Time Out screening earlier this year, of the scene in which Gina McKee takes the N171 home late at night, with all that entails: 'The bus sequence is the best combination of music and image I've ever been involved in.'

UPDATE The same day I posted this, the wonderful Letters of Note site featured a letter from Audrey Hepburn, thanking Henry Mancini for his score for Breakfast at Tiffany's. It includes this succinct appraisal of a good film soundtrack: 'A movie without music is a little bit like an aeroplane without fuel. However beautifully the job is done, we are still on the ground and in a world of reality. Your music has lifted us all up and sent us soaring.'