Duncan Shiekh's music for American Psycho - the new musical, in which Matt Smith plays, brilliantly, the lethally charismatic Patrick Bateman - is a straight-up triumph. He's nailed an idiom that takes in The Human League and Phil Collins, but comes up with his own razor-sharp satires of 80s yuppyism, label-worship, and holidays in the Hamptons.
I saw it last night at London's Almeida theatre, and the only problem I found with the score was that it was actually too enjoyable. Shiekh's score is too sympathetic, and at the end of the show, almost too moving in Bateman's admittedly anti-redemptive closing hymn to the schisms of late capitalism.
Reading on mobile? Click here to watch
In the film, Bateman's paeans to Whitney Houston and especially Phil Collins reveal a precise if ironic correlative between the murderous vacuity of the music and the breathtaking cynicism of Bateman's killings to which they are the soundtrack. But in the show, Shiekh's music makes us care about Bateman and his business-card-cut-out characters - even if Rupert Goold's production keeps the Huey Lewis Hip to be Square slaying pretty well as it is in the film.
Watching the show also made me realise what's so un-stomachable about Phil Collins, and why The Pet Shops Boys of the same era were such geniuses by comparison. Sussudio brings me out in a cold sweat; the production, the drum machine, the inane sincerity of the lyrics; there's no colder or more superficial sound in popular music, precisely because it takes itself so seriously. Whereas the PSB - or even the Human League, whose music is also used here - turn that celebration of technology on its head, reflecting and distorting that superficiality back to us, and showing up the hollowness of the age for what it is - which is why Actually endures where No Jacket Required is unlistenable to today.