The latest diamond to be unearthed by Trunk Records is a previously unreleased score by Basil Kirchin.

It’s the soundtrack to Primitive London, Arnold L. Miller’s legendary 1965 documentary-cum-exploitation flick exploring the British capital’s seedy underbelly through footage of, and interviews with, strippers, mods, beatniks, swingers and countless other characters hustling, preening or simply testing the limits of the so-called “permissive society”. The film was recently issued on DVD and Blu-Ray by the BFI.

Though he languished in obscurity for much of his life, Basil Kirchin (1927-2005) is now widely regarded as one of the most uniquely experimental British composer-musicians of the 20th century, with artists like Brian Eno, Nurse With Wound and Broadcast expressing their admiration for his work. This is largely due to the efforts of Trunk Records impresario Jonny Trunk, who has issued a number of Kirchin library music collections and concept albums, notably Abstractions Of The Industrial North and World Within Worlds, and taken every opportunity to eulogise both the man and his art. Primitive Londonis Trunk’s latest Kirchin find, and we’ll let him tell you more about its origins:

“This unreleased 1965 score by the legendary Basil Kirchin marks his first foray into the world of film music. It pre-dates his library music compositions, but his distinctive sonic signatures were very much already in place; the insistent rhythms, complex melodies, slightly curious arrangement and a certain oddness are all here. It’s all too perfect that Basil Kirchin, a true musical maverick, was employed as a composer for one of the strangest movies ever to be made here in the UK. Why and how he was given the job will always remain a mystery, but his accompaniments to death, birth, beatniks and wife-swapping are here to enjoy for the very first time. There is no tracklisting, the cues are just numbered as they were when they came from the original quarter inch reel.”

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It used to be thought, back in the 1960s, that there was something noble about cities; living in them, experiencing the squalor (as a non-inhaler, a detached reporter), bearing witness to the end of empire, the acne-encrusted barbarians at the gates. Scars of war were still visible. Overgrown railway tracks like third-world gall-bladder removals. Streets were monochrome, as was human flesh: heavy, powdered, sagging. Complexions of suet made from recycled newsprint. Men lost their heads in clouds of pipe smoke and women protected themselves behind shellac helmets of hair, eyelashes like fly traps. Life was indoors, segregated, peculiar. If you had to travel, you walked fast, seeing nothing: clipclopping like a stripper between engagements. Or one of those City bankers, black as pints of stout, in their school-extension uniforms, photographed by Robert Frank. Beetling between the cracks of sooty buildings. Holding back the terror. One day it will all come down.

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Reporters don't come more detached than that salaried sleepwalker, Marcello Mastroianni, in La Dolce Vita. Fellini's 1960 portrait of Rome - loving tribute masquerading as exposé - was unpunctuated, informal. But the melancholy Italian matinee idol didn't translate into London, looking - when brought to Notting Hill for John Boorman's Leo the Last in 1969 - jet-lagged, traumatised. Absent. Like the shabby stucco of the alien territory he was visiting. A performance phoned in from another country.

Rome was old, queeny, a museum insulted by traffic. The Paris of Jean-Luc Godard was a newsreel, with accidental poetry, captured by that dynamic camera-sniper, the Indo-China veteran Raoul Coutard. Los Angeles showed its underbelly, its toxic spread, in a mix of documentary and polemic fiction known as The Savage Eye, shot by Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers and Joseph Strick in 1959.

But film in London was always a difficulty. The gap between the accepted version, the stiff-necked industrial product of those great suburban factories, and the gamey trash of the ghetto, was a chasm. Camp theatricals and rigid technicians, remaking literary classics, scorned the lowlife with their huckster quickies. A defining image comes in the Soho viewing theatre where a group of men squeeze up to watch the rushes of a city-shocker made by a wealthy director who would be dead by the age of 25. The Sorcerers was the first proper feature by Michael Reeves. You have Reeves, posh establishment, and a quorum of barbered faces, money men, hustlers. Tony Tenser, publicist for Miracle Films and the man who invented the "sex kitten" tag for Brigitte Bardot. Tenser was the former partner of Michael Klinger, a club-owner with dubious connections. Together they produced two films by Roman Polanski. Patrick Curtis, an American, was keen to get into the business and was married, at that time, to Raquel Welch. The party was completed by the film's director of photography, Stanley A Long, and his chum, the line producer Arnold L Miller - those unnecessary initials signalling a rather desperate bid for respectability by an odd couple who surfaced in 1965 as the makers of an uncelebrated exploitation flick called Primitive London

In the cramped viewing theatre you have the classic London package: class, crime (a blood-soaked, serial-killer movie with Boris Karloff), property speculation, pornography, transatlantic schmoozing, aspirations towards critical acceptance by way of cultural cannibalism. The tender eroticism of the deal. That, according to the writer Derek Raymond, a Soho habitué, was the point of any exchange between insider and civilian: "To work the gelt out of the pocket." Nobody ever lost money operating on the Xerox principle: discover an energy source, copy it, copy it again and keep going.

Primitive London was a Xerox, by way of those jaunty "Look at Life" programme fillers, of Gualtiero Jacopetti's 1961 hit, Mondo Cane. Jacopetti travelled the world in quest of savage sexual rites to capture and expose. The world paid its respects at the box office. Klinger and Tenser, cinema owners, skin-flick promoters, spotted a trend. They signed on as executive producers of this daring new hybrid: part tit-show, part satire, part tabloid editorial. Primitive London never strayed far from its Soho roots - keeping the emphasis on that "prim". Miller produced, wrote and directed. Long (future director of Adventures of a Plumber's Mate, On the Game and Naughty) operated the camera. Ian Ogilvy, star of The Sorcerers, didn't think much of Stan's craft: "Very B or C team, frankly." But Long had been around for years, producing, directing, facilitating: 8mm nudies, exotic postcards - and even, it is claimed, taking over, seamlessly, from the respected cinematographer Gilbert Taylor, to complete the last third of Roman Polanski's Repulsion. He wasn't expensive and he had his own equipment.