FAKE BANDS: THE WOMBLES

It is becoming clear to me that there is a Roxy Music connection to all fake bands. Or at least the ones I am choosing. See if you can guess what it is with this band, who despite being made of felt, foam and cloth, sustained a number of hits through the 1970s, and a brief comeback in the late 90's, from which time the above clip is from.

At the time, of course, I thought it all tawdry nonsense, coming latterly, only now, to a sort of grudging respect. OK, the lyric will never win a Nobel prize and the tune, well, the less said the better. To this day, the writer and musical arranger, Mike Batt, has had to live with the derision this work has brought him, despite a long and illustrious career with songs and artists you will know. And some that will surprise. Did you know, for instance, that he signed grizzled blues-rockers The Groundhogs, producing also their first LP?

With skills mainly in the arrangements, of brass and strings, added to embellish more simplistic fare, he became an in demand name by the shrewd move of writing the theme tune to the TV series based about the mythical litter cleaning Wombles, who lived underground at Wimbledon Common, based upon the childrens books of Elizabeth Beresford. Instead of a flat fee, he asked instead for the musical rights to the characters, with the subsequent ker-ching of 8 hit singles and four gold albums.

Producing venerable folk-rockers Steeleye Span came next, arguably making their name with his retexturing of their sound, a move which appalled their die-hard fans, yet gave a huge boost to their finances, with a top ten hit record. I still loathe it, the arrangement seemingly one and the same as used for the Wombles.

As I write I realise upon quite how shaky the ground my 'respect' for Batt might be, but a soft spot does remain for his next project, the Art Garfunkel sung 'Bright Eyes', from the original animated version of 'Watership Down'. Thank goodness this wasn't ruined by tacky ching-kaching guitar riffing, but I bet there is somewhere a version in the vaults.....

Space (hooray) forbids me a further blow by blow, of how he discovered Katie Melua, how he orchestrated Justin Hayward, how he wrote innumerable projects with and for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and so on. But it is to space I return, as, astonishingly, last year saw a most unexpected coupling, an album and tour with Hawkwind, as they orchestrated their back catalogue to celebrate 50 years of their being space-rock gypsies of the counter-culture.

So, were the Wombles his serial high point or his low water mark? Arguably both. Or neither. But, far more important, what's the Roxy link? Right then, scroll back up to the top clip, the Wombles,  wombling free on Top of the Pops. See the one, Wellington, that is, with the flying V guitar? That's Chris Spedding, guitar for hire and session man extraordinaire, a latter day guitarist with the 2001 reformed version of Roxy Music, staying on to be the current guitar foil for Bryan Ferry. And still with the same guitar.

Remember you're a Womble!

Getting There: Nine Million Bicycles

Katie Melua: Nine Million Bicycles

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Katie Melua's sweet 2005 single Nine Million Bicycles uses Beijing doubly, as a musical setting and as a cultural touchstone for population mass, in order to frame a sweet, gentle song of love in scale; indeed, a close read of the song reveals that its effect is driven, in part, by quite deliberate production parallels, in which the use of relatively authentic traditional Asian instrumentation and rhythmic flourishes fade in and out as the city is mentioned, only to dissipate into soft folk pop (which then, predictably, expands at the mention of outer space).

But the song is of cultural interest, too, for the way in which notable naysayer Simon Singh - a well-respected science writer for the Guardian - suggested that the Georgian-born, UK-based star was engaging in "pop sci politics", by noting at the beginning of her second verse that "we are 12 billion light years from the edge", a measurement which doesn't really match most agreed-upon measurements of the size of the universe. In response to this accusation that her song was a thinly-veiled attack on the accuracy of cosmologists, Melua appeared on a BCC program with Singh, and performed a version of the song which changed the lyrics to Singh's specs as follows:

We are 13.7 billion light-years from the edge of the observable universe, That's a good estimate with well-defined error bars, And with the available information, I predict that I will always be with you.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find a copy of the entire BBC recording, but here's an audio clip of the performance of Melua's new and totally hilarious verse replacement as compared with the original, embedded in a TED talk found over at YouTube:





And just for fun - because it's brand new, and because our rules allow for recent covers of songs as long as the original song being covered dates back far enough - I've included Arap Strap frontman Aidan John Moffat's tiny 2012 cover of the song, from his all-covers solo album Stolen Songs. Because I love the way it trades the bridge and final chorus away, leaving us with just 1:45 of weary, stripped-down glory. And because the song is quite different, in the end, without all the orchestral majesty and "ethnic flutes" credited on the original.

Aidan John Moffat: 9,000,000 Bicycles

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