Bernard Herrmann died 50 years ago this month. He only just lived long enough to complete the suite of instrumental jazz that’s now regarded as not only his finest work across many decades as a movie composer, but one of the greatest celluloid soundtracks of all time.

There are very few movies which you can honestly state simply wouldn’t have got out of the traps were it not for the soundtrack. Taxi Driver is one of them. There’s more than enough available film critic geekery about Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro’s finest hour to plough through already. But the curious afterlife of the Taxi Driver soundtrack was something I had no idea about until a recent Spotify sleuthing session.

You’ve heard the main siren call theme of the movie. It’s an unforgettably sonorous and hypnotic lament to a dying city – as the Big Apple most certainly was in 1975. Manhattan, as any recent visitor will know, has long since been thoroughly sanitised and cleaned up for our pleasure. So what astonishes me about Herrmann’s 50-year-old masterpiece today is that it’s not just beloved by old-timers like me who still cherish memories of cigarette smoke, dive bars and diesel exhaust fumes.

Look online and you’ll find dozens of playlists........

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