The DNA of Frozen Orange Juice

 

As someone who writes songs as a hobby, I’ve always been interested in what one might call the DNA of pop music: what it is that makes certain songs appealing, others annoying. Perhaps the best exponent of this type of pop song analysis is record producer and YouTuber Rick Beato, whose videos explain, in musical terms, exactly why songs by artists like the Beatles sound the way they do. Songwriting will almost certainly never be reduced to an exact science, and it will be a black day for the music industry if it ever is. Artificial Intelligence thinks it can write songs, but all it really does is act as a kind of food processor, mixing ingredients from other sources and ending up with a kind of generic slop. Songwriters rely on instinct and inspiration, two qualities which AI will never achieve if it lasts a thousand years.

With a little musical knowledge and insight, it is, nevertheless, possible to isolate elements in specific songs that add to their character and appeal, and I’ve just recently done this with Peter Sarstedt’s 1969 chart hit ‘Frozen Orange Juice’. Why that particular song? Well, a track I was working on put me in mind of it. It was a song I’d written a long time ago and had only just got round to recording. I’d never noticed any similarity between this song and ‘Frozen Orange Juice’, but when I was listening to the playback I was reminded of it. Was it the melody, the chords? This all set me to thinking about the musical components of ‘Frozen Orange Juice’, and wondering exactly what it was about the song that made it special.

‘Frozen Orange Juice’ has a very simple structure: there is no verse/chorus as such, just two 8-bar sections. The first eight bars state the main melody, in the home key of F major: ‘I’ll buy you one more frozen orange juice/ on this fantastic day’. The second eight bars modulate to B flat major: ‘And if you feel you wanna run down a ravine…’ This second section occurs again as the refrain ‘you rescue me, I’ll rescue you’. There are three verses, a la-la instrumental verse and three bridge sections. That’s all there is to it.

The arrangement adds interest and variety, with strings and woodwind restating the main theme, and a pedal steel guitar adding some soaring, sliding notes. The lyrics are happily optimistic, but there’s also a hint of sadness, of parting, as in the last verse the narrator states ‘I’ll be on my way’. It’s this subtle melancholy that is the key to the song’s appeal, and it all hinges on one specific note in the melody that occurs on the first syllable of ‘frozen’. It’s a fourth above the home key of F major, and fourths are a funny thing in music. AI (dare I admit it) says that the perfect fourth ‘evokes a sense of reaching or longing’, which is exactly what Sarstedt is aiming for in his composition. The narrator knows very well that ‘this fantastic day’ won’t last forever and that by tomorrow morning it will be simply a happy memory.

The main melody climbs to the fourth and then backs down again, just like the characters in the song walking ‘the sunny hills of Madrid’. Sarstedt only hits one higher note in the whole song, the high B flat of ‘if you wanna run’… and from this musical high point, the melody again does exactly what the lyrics describe, and runs downhill. If instead of stopping at the fourth, the melody had risen to the fifth note of the scale, or higher, the sense of longing would have been diminished. In the final verse, the melody hits the fourth again when the lyrics reach ‘on my way’, again reinforcing the underlying sadness.

It doesn’t really matter whether Sarstedt did all this by design or instinct (I suspect the latter). It’s that ‘yearning’ fourth that adds the sense of happy/sadness that I think he was aiming for. The song sounds joyously optimistic, but there’s also the tug of nostalgia for good times past. It’s interesting to note some of the comments posted on one of the YouTube uploads of the track: ‘a sound of sunshine, freedom and joy’; ‘smiles all round’; ‘reminds me of long hot summers’. For me, it has always evoked the brilliant blue sky of a summer day, seen from my parents’ back garden, and, simultaneously, the landscape described in the lyrics. It’s a song of bright blue and brilliant yellow, and the key of F major conveys the warmth of the sunny hills around Madrid.

‘Frozen Orange Juice’ spent nine weeks in the UK charts, entering at number 50 on 10 June 1969, and making its last appearance at number 30 on the week of 2 August. Its highest position was number 10, for one week on 7 July – perfect timing, for the release coincided with a spell of warm sunny weather which almost certainly helped it up the charts.

Curiously, though, it was quite unlike Sarstedt’s huge hit of earlier the same year, ‘Where Do You Go to (My Lovely)’, which had reached number one with its folk club sound, Parisian accordion and enigmatic lyrics. ‘Frozen Orange Juice’ by contrast, sounds more like a pop record, with its full band and orchestration. Production was by Ray Singer, with an arrangement by Ian Green. Singer had allegedly discovered Sarstedt busking in Paris, although this sounds like the kind of story that’s often invented for PR purposes – Sarstedt, lest we forget, came from a musical family and his brother had scored hits earlier in the decade as Eden Kane. Singer’s later production work included David Sylvian and Japan. Ian Green had also arranged the minimalist backing on ‘Where Do You Go To’ and his work was heard on singles from Edison Lighthouse (‘Love Grows’) and Thunderclap Newman (‘Something in the Air’), which is no mean track record and gives an indication of his versatility.

The real underlying sadness behind ‘Frozen Orange Juice’ is that it would be Peter Sarstedt’s chart swansong, and though he would continue to release singles until 1978, none would ever repeat the spectacular success of 1969. In a way, the song feels almost prophetic: as Sarstedt’s narrator realises, that ‘fantastic day’ in the sun simply couldn’t last.

I thought it was worth sharing this silly sleeve which makes an ice lolly out of Sarstedt

In the Footsteps of the Beatles

 

You know at once that you’ve come to the right place: there’s a surprising amount of people waiting to cross the road, while others are milling around on the pavement looking into the forecourt of the iconic building where history was made. The zebra crossing is iconic (and surprising to find it so close to a road junction). The building itself would go unnoticed if we didn't know its history. This, of course is Abbey Road Studios.

Walking past the crowds, I strolled in through the open gates unchallenged, and up the famous front steps. Unlike the tourists, I had a pass in my pocket, allowing me entry to the studio on a set date. And once inside, I was free to roam around at will. The reason for my visit was to attend a recording session by my brother’s jazz outfit, The Pete Cater Big Band, who were recording in Studio 2 – the room made famous by the Beatles.

Passing through the smart reception area, one enters an inner corridor. A stairway on the right, its walls lined with photographs of the many famous names who have recorded here, takes you down to the lower floor. Almost immediately opposite as you come down the stairs is the door to Studio One, which happened to be standing open. I had a look inside. The space is large and impressive, yet vaguely reminiscent of the assembly hall at my old grammar school: high ceilings, parquet floor, a nice art deco staircase, acoustic baffles on the walls. 

On the other side of the corridor, a short passage leads you to a set of double doors. There are further doors within, heavily soundproofed, which look to have been there a long time. Through these doors and you’re in Studio 2.

Studio 2 as seen from the stairs to the control room

Very little has changed in the sixty four years since the Beatles first stepped in here – the parquet floor is the same, and the acoustic screening, white panels covered in hundreds of tiny slits is still in place, still bolted into position using the same brackets that can be seen on countless historic photographs. It’s a large room, but the proportions aren’t intimidating: around 60 feet long by 38 feet wide, with a 24 foot high ceiling. By contrast, Studio One (the largest purpose built recording studio in the world) measures a whopping 94x58 feet at its maximum dimensions, with a 40 foot high ceiling.

Today, the studio has been set up for a large jazz group to record: one area has been turned into an isolation booth for a bass guitar player, using the same moveable acoustic screens that were once set up around Ringo’s drums during Beatle sessions. Smaller acoustic panels, with windows, separate the brass section from the area where the drums are set up. These look like more recent additions, but the padded wall hangings look very much like those that can be seen in shots of the Beatles at work back in 1963.

As you enter, the stairway up to the control room is on your immediate right. Up these same wooden steps the ‘boys’ would have clattered when invited by George Martin to hear a playback. As you ascend, you’re aware of an an antique, musty smell, redolent of wax floor polish, dust… and Beatle sweat?

The control room, is of course, completely modernised, save for the window looking down into the studio. A modern digital desk measuring around 12 feet across occupies one side of the room. It’s by no means brand new: the padded leather front is showing signs of age. Two flat screen monitors give a video feed of what’s happening downstairs, and a centre screen displays the virtual mixing desk of the Pro Tools music software that’s now used here. The walls are lined with bright red acoustic panels, and an array of speakers stand behind the desk.

Back down in the studio, I notice an old Steinway upright standing in a corner. Is this one of the pianos used by the Beatles? It certainly sounds like it: when I play a few chords, it gives out a very familiar tone, bright and percussive. It’s been set up as a tack piano or ‘jangle box’, with brass tacks (literally drawing pins) pressed into the hammers to produce a sharper sound when they strike the strings. Further down the room, there’s a large grand piano, and a more modern example has been set up for the band to use, alongside a vintage Rhodes electric piano (not an instrument with Beatle provenance – they used a humble Hohner Pianet).

I sit in the control room as the band runs through various numbers, repeating certain sections to be edited in later. This in itself is impressive, for these guys are pro musicians sight reading parts that they’ve maybe never played before. There’s discussion between the band and the guys in the control room: ‘we’ll go from bar 107’. And they hit it every time, note perfect.

During a break, we go out into the small garden where the Beatles posed with their instruments during the recording session for 'She Loves You' almost sixty three years ago to to day. I think twice about depositing a banana skin in the flower bed: this is hallowed ground. Fortunately, there's a bin provided.

We’re lucky that the studio still exists at all. In 2010, with then owners EMI facing increasing debts, there were rumours about the building being put up for sale and even redeveloped into luxury flats. Horrific though this prospect was, it would in fact have been a reversion to an earlier era, for the Georgian townhouse had previously been converted into flats prior to its acqusition by the Gramophone Company in 1929. Fortunately, the bulding was granted Grade II listed status in 2010, preserving it and preventing major alterations from taking place. The pedestrian crossing is simlarly Grade II listed. I was a little worried for its safety when I arrived, as a gang of workmen were tearing up the road just yards away...

Abbey Road Studios is, without a doubt, one of the most famous recording facilities in the world, and looks to be in rude health from what I could see. As we brought some of my brother’s drums back to his car, some sightseers on the other side of the railings asked ‘have you been recording in there?’ and were suitably impressed when they learned that this was indeed the case. Even as we were leaving, the pedestrian crossing was still heaving with tourists waiting their turn to re-create that famous album sleeve. But we’d gone further, as deep into the recorded history of the Fab Four as it is possible to go.

My thanks to Pete Cater and everyone at Abbey Road Studios who made this visit possible.

Ten Years in Old Money

14 June 2026, appropriately enough, is a Sunday. Because today marks the 10th anniversary of this blog. In that time, I’ve posted more than 250 different essays, all sharing a common theme of nostalgia and memory, and amassed 1.47Gb of material in the folder I’ve set aside for this project. My first post was subtitled ‘childhood encounters with popular culture, 1961-79’, but over the years, I’ve occasionally drifted away from that original intention. I began writing this blog for myself, preserving memories while they’re still accessible. In doing so, I discovered that the most potent form of nostalgia comes from contextualisation. Mention of an old comic, piece of music or television series in isolation is all well and good, but when it’s placed within the wider cultural landscape in which it emerged, one gets a much keener appreciation of how it felt to be around during those times.

Beginning with my own diaries, I’ve drawn on sources including TV listings, pop charts and even weather records in an effort to recapture specific moments in time. In doing so, I’ve unearthed memories that I’d actually forgotten, and this is where context becomes critical. Hearing an old record may give you a hit of nostalgia, but when you hear an entire chart from say fifty years ago you begin to sense other things – like where you were and what you were doing, even what the weather was like (which is why I so often refer back to Met Office records). Place that pop chart alongside the TV listings for the same week, and still more memories begin to emerge by association. It’s the nostalgia equivalent of placing two pieces of plutonium next to one another – a chain reaction of memory. Probably the bext example of this can be found in my entry from March 2017, “Daydream – a Time Detective Story” wherein I described how I’d taken a random memory and found a precise date for it. In the course of writing the item, I went from a vague memory of a random moment in time to a much clearer picture of an entire Saturday back in April 1970. If you didn’t read it at the time, you can find it here:

https://sundayinoldmoney.blogspot.com/2017/03/daydream-time-detective-story.html

There may come a time when my own memory begins to fade, so having all this written down is something I’m doing for my own benefit (I’m compiling a document of similar recollections which currently stands at nearly 50,000 words over 110 pages). By the same token, perhaps as memory begins to break down, these distant moments will come into sharper focus and clarity. Maybe that’s already happening. There’s no way of knowing. Sunday in Old Money is, in this respect, a kind of fall-out shelter of memory, a place where moments like this can be preserved. It will almost certainly outlast me, and if it serves any purpose at all outside of being a repository of my own personal recollections, then it might, in future, be the equivalent of a researcher stumbling across a vintage diary. Never mind those TV nostalgia programmes – this is how it really felt to be around in the 1960s and 70s.

I’ve never set out to be an ‘influencer’ (however one even achieves such a thing), but I did wonder a few months back whether this blog might have played a small part in the BBC’s resurrection of their Laurel and Hardy Omnibus documentary of 1974, which I’d mentioned in a posting at Christmas last year, drawing attention to the fact that it had remained unshown since 1976. Just a couple of months later, it turned up, to mark the 60 anniversary of Stan Laurel’s passing. Coincidence or not? It doesn’t matter, as long as items like this aren’t left to gather dust in the archives forever.

When I first set up the blog, I must have checked a box requiring moderation, ie. approval of any comments, purely as a means to weed out the bots and spammers that I’ve seen populating other blogs. Originally, blogger would send emails notifying me if anyone had posted a comment, but in recent years this has stopped happening, for reasons unknown. Recently, in response to a reader who’d been trying to post a comment without it appearing, I had a look at the dashboard and realised that there was a folder in the sidebar containing a collection of comments pending approval. Astonishingly, these went back as far as 2017. There weren’t many – perhaps less than twenty in all – but they were all useful, well-meant, appreciative and relevant: not a spammer amongst them. In several cases, I would like to have been able to reply at the time the comments appeared, and I apologise to anyone who has posted here in hope of a reply and felt they’d been ignored. This was certainly never the intention, and comments are always welcome.

Over the years, I’ve been aware of maybe a handful of regular readers, some of whom I know personally, but the blog’s dashboard tells a slightly different story. Most entries are read maybe twenty or thirty times, but that figure spikes noticeably wherever I’ve written about archive television of a certain stripe – namely, the action/adventure series of ITC and any kind of Gerry Anderson content. The post that attracted the most comments was ‘The Afterlife of ITC’, originally posted on Friday 2 July 2021, following the announcement of the death of The Champions star Stuart Damon. These, along with all the other comments in the ‘pending’ file, are now available to read. Looking at the global map that Blogger provides, I see a surprising amount of engagement from the far east, all of which I presume to be bots and other content scrapers. The next highest readership is from the USA, which is also suspect, as the content I write about is, for the most part, very British. Taking account of all this spurious engagement, I’d estimate the number of genuine readers to be around a hundred. A recent post (which was shared on a number of online forums) clocked up 73 views in its first few days online, while the blog itself supposedly was viewed 1000 times during the same period, with bots most likely accounting for the bulk of those. Even so, it’s reaching a few more people than I originally envisaged.

I started Sunday in Old Money essentially as an attempt to set down how it felt to have encountered some of the icons of popular culture before they’d acquired their iconic status, and the very first post looked back at ‘Bat-Year 1966’, a veritable annual mirabilis of pop culture that brought us the Batman TV series, a second crop of Thunderbirds, Action Man, and a lot more besides. My recollection of that year is as clear now as it was when I wrote the blog, but it’s staggering to realise that those memories have now receded another decade into history. I also hoped that the blog would reach readers of a similar age and demographic who would recognise or relate to some of the subject matter. I know that one or two readers have helped to promote Sunday in Old Money online – my thanks if you’re one of them, and either way, please feel at liberty to post links to any of my posts wherever you think they may find kindred spirits.

When I started this blog, I was writing it in my spare time between holding down a full-time job (albeit one in which I worked from home 100% of the time). You can see from the right hand column those years when I had more to do and less time to devote to blogging – 2019 and 2022 were, for whatever reason, particularly busy times. On the other hand, since my job came to an end, writing these entries has often been the only thing I’ve had to do on a given day, and their number has shot up (2024’s tally of 60 having been ‘artificially’ increased by a ‘twelve days of Christmas’ series). As long as I can find subjects to write about, I will continue to do so. If it provides interest or entertainment to anyone else, that’s a bonus. 

Thanks for reading!

Back Home

 

Even for someone with no interest in football, it could be hard to ignore the World Cup whenever it rolled around on its four year cycle. Somehow, I’d managed to avoid it in 1966. Our dad never followed football, so it was simply never talked about in our house. I’d started school that same year, but the final was played on 30 July, after we’d have broken up for the school holidays, so I couldn’t even pick up on the excitement of England’s win from playground chatter. I have only the dimmest recollections of the tournament: seeing the Blue Peter presenters adding the commemorative stamps to their album, and a few glimpses of England mascot ‘World Cup Willie’ who appeared on keyrings and other promotional items.

It was quite different in 1970. This time, with England as the reigning world champions, there was a palpable buzz in the media. By now, I was nine years old, and had been playing football at school (admittedly with no real enthusiasm) since the previous autumn. I’d chosen my blue jersey because it looked like the one worn by Mr. Spock in Star Trek, so you can see where I was coming from. My school friends thought the blue top meant I supported Everton, but I’d never heard of such a place...

In fact, it was my brother, two years younger than myself, who began to take an interest in soccer, and (he’ll probably correct me here) I’m sure that the 1970 World Cup had a lot to do with it. He had, in fact, been collecting stickers of UK team players issued by Panini the previous year, and now a new set appeared featuring all the teams in the international tournament. As collectable items, I took a passing interest in these, but was never quite won over. I was too busy trying to complete my set of Star Trek bubble gum cards…

Other collectables quickly began to appear. Esso petrol stations got in early with their set of commemorative coins. Around the size of a shilling piece, these featured portraits of the England squad, and a single coin (wrapped in paper) was given away with every four gallons of petrol. The promotion was already well advanced by early May, when press advertisements advised collectors that they still had time to complete their sets of coins. Coins could be mounted in a display card, which looked suitably impressive once completed. I’m fairly sure that my brother completed a full set of thirty coins, and with the average price of a gallon of petrol being around 32.5p, that meant spending in excess of £39 on 120 gallons of four star. With our dad’s Singer Gazelle averaging around 30mpg, the full set of Esso coins would have equated to around 3,600 miles of motoring – still more if you allow for the number of duplicate coins (Peter Bonetti was ubiquitous, as you can see below).

Also well ahead of the curve were the players themselves who, for the first time, were persuaded to record a celebratory pop record ahead of the World Cup. This, of course, turned out to be an act of the utmost hubris. The right time for a commemorative World Cup song was after the win in 1966. ‘Back Home’ was written by the Eurovision-winning team of Bill Martin and Phil Coulter, whose track record included ‘Puppet on a String’ and ‘Congratulations’. Who better to pen a song in anticipation of England emerging victorious once again? In fairness to the song, the lyrics don’t mention the possibility of winning – it’s a song of hope: ‘Back home, though they think we’re the greatest that’s what we’ve got to prove’. It was also extremely catchy, and tapping into the mood of the nation as the tournament approached, it did in the pop charts what the team were hoping for on the soccer pitch, making it all the way to number one, where it resided for three weeks from the 10th to the 30th of May. On the day that the World Cup kicked off, May 31st, the squad were deposed at the top of the charts by Christie’s ‘Yellow River’, which looks in retrospect like a bad omen. A win might well have propelled the song back to the top, but by the time the squad went out 3-2 to West Germany on 14th June, the song had dropped to number 9. It would linger around the lower reaches of the chart until the beginning of August.

‘Back Home’ is probably my clearest memory of that 1970 World Cup. You couldn’t turn on the radio or TV without hearing it, and my brother had the Pye records single (with its football centre label). The only match I can remember seeing was on 14th June where England went out to West Germany. Conspiracy theories weren’t really a thing back then, but there must have been many who wondered at the food poisoning that forced star goalkeeper Gordon Banks to miss the match. 

The evening’s game was broadcast on both BBC1 and ITV – I suspect we watched the latter, where comment and analysis were provided by ‘ITV’s soccer experts’ Pat Crerand, Derek Dougan and Malcolm Allison, presided over by Billies Wright and Bremner. Over on BBC1, David Coleman and Frank Bough did the honours in the Mexico and London studios.

England’s failure at the 1970 World Cup – especially after all the promotional build-up – probably helped to put me off football forever. If I was left in any doubt, the final coffin nails were supplied by a sadistic games teacher who started taking us for football practise in the autumn. By the time the tournament was over, my only enduring interest in the game lay in following the cartoon strip ‘Billy’s Boots’ drawn by Tom Kerr in the recently launched football comic ‘Scorcher’, which was being bought for my brother every week.

England didn’t even qualify for either of the next two World Cups, and 1978 brought yet another example of pop song hubris, this time from Scottish comedian Andy Cameron whose ‘Ally’s Tartan Army’ was even more gung ho than ‘Back Home’, promising that ‘we’ll really shake them up when we win the World Cup.’ It didn’t even have an original melody. If there’s anything guaranteed to ensure failure in a World Cup tournament, it’s celebrating your win prematurely in song…

Sunday in Old Macca

It’s rare for me to go out and buy a contemporary pop album. Rarer still to do so within days of its release. Granted, one can’t technically describe Paul McCartney as ‘contemporary’, but he’s still writing and recording, and outclassing artists a third of his age.

Last time, I described how his recent single ‘Home to Us’ had strayed inadvertently into melodic territory formerly explored by Clive Dunn. To me, this didn’t bode well for the upcoming album, and I wasn’t overly impressed by the street sign sleeve design (hardly an original idea). Then I saw a social media ‘reel’ where he demonstrated a perverse dischord that he’s used to open the album and thought 'Uh-oh...'

Then the reviews started coming in. Four and five star. I don’t usually take much notice of what rock critics think, but my interest was piqued. I played some snatches of the album on Amazon music and liked it enough that I went right out the next day and bought it – from a proper record shop, not an online retailer (take that, Bezos!) The following week, it was number one on the chart: and it's probably the very last time that I'll have this week's number one album in my possession...

I hadn’t bought a McCartney album for forty four years. 1982’s Tug of War was my last purchase, and was hailed at the time as a return to form: much the same reception that’s been accorded to The Boys of Dungeon Lane. So maybe it was time to cut the Mac some slack. Thirteen pounds and ninety nine pence of my savings are now winging their way to the coffers of MPL communications, less percentages of course. Was it money well spent?

The simple answer is yes. Macca may be 83 but he’s sounding as good as he’s done since the breakup of the Beatles. The voice is, of course, older and huskier, but it’s aged well. The production is solid – ‘classic’ without sounding contrived, contemporary without being embarrassing. There’s a wide range of textures and styles, and the sleeve credits McCartney himself with an impressive array of instrumentation, not just bass and guitars but more keyboards than Rick Wakeman can fit on a stage, and drums too. The man does everything – although he is assisted by a number of collaborators including a certain Richard Starkey esquire, who drums on ‘Home to Us’.

For me, what elevates this album above all of his post Band on the Run efforts is the sheer melodic quality of the material. There have been times over the decades when Macca has sounded like he was repeating himself, going over old ground, particularly when he tried to bring a Beatles sensibility to his work. Now, he sounds like he’s tapped into a new lode: there are some genuinely surprising melodic ideas here. Lyrically, many of the songs look back on his life before the Beatles, but not in a sentimental manner. He is, after all, most likely into his last decade. He’s entitled to reflect on his life and times. It would be surprising if he didn’t, and it’s a mark of artistic integrity that he has chosen to do so.

Dungeon Lane is his first album in six years, the first work of his eighth decade. There’s no reason to suspect it will be his last – but one never knows. Personally, I suspect that, however upbeat he may come across in his promotional work, Macca must realise that anything he releases from now on may end up as his epitaph, his final artistic statement, intentional or otherwise. Is that why it’s so good? Has he been saving some of his best work for his back pages?

McCartney was always the most pragmatic of the Beatles. If it had been suggested to him, at the height of their fame, that he would still be writing and releasing music in sixty years’ time, he’d most likely have laughed off the idea. Queried about his future plans back in 1963, he foresaw himself and John retreating into songwriting rather than performing. And yet here he is, still touring the world, and still making music that ranks alongside his best post-Beatle output. 

These days, old white men are an easy target for snide media commentators. They – we – are somehow responsible for most of what’s wrong with the world today, and with the likes of Trump and Farage in the news so much, it’s easy to see why. Paul McCartney should be hailed as an ambassador for the rest of us old geezers, living proof that, over sixty, not all white guys become demented, self-aggrandising delusional egomaniacs. Granted, we’re not all on a level with Macca, but neither are we all past it. Here’s the proof that it’s still possible to be cool, relevant and original well into your eighth decade.

The Grandad Trap

 

Novelty records seem to have been with us forever. The 60s and 70s were particularly prone to this form of chart entertainment, and produced a crop of singles from artists whose more usual stamping grounds were the worlds of comedy and light entertainment. In 1970, it was the turn of Clive Dunn, famous for the old buffer act he’d been doing since ITV’s Bootsie and Snudge in 1960, recently reinvented with a slew of catchphrases and mannerisms supplied by Jimmy Perry and David Croft, to delight audiences as Lance Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army. 

In 1970, at a showbiz party, Dunn chanced to meet musician Herbie Flowers, who would later provide the rock world with one of the best bass lines of all time, the intro to Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’. It was something rather less wild that Dunn had in mind: could Flowers write a pop song for him to deliver as his old man character? Flowers accepted the challenge, and after consulting an ‘easy primer book on composing’ was well under way. There was one stumbling block, though: he couldn’t find a hook for the tune. A quick call to his friend Kenny Pickett (late of psychedelic scenesters The Creation) provided the answer. When Pickett rang Flowers’ doorbell, the two-note chime gave them the simple melodic device they were looking for.

Everyone knows the sound of a typical two-note door chime: in musical terms, it’s a falling major third. The same two-note phrase is also the call of the cuckoo. It can be heard in songs like ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ (‘Some day I’ll wish upon a star’) and, most famously, in Laurel and Hardy’s iconic signature tune. Trite and obvious, it's hardly the rocket science end of songwriting. Flowers and Pickett’s composition ‘Grandad’ is full of it: the falling third occurs in the chorus (‘Grandad/Grandad’) and occurs again half a bar later on the word ‘lovely’. The verse swings along in pure rocking chair fashion, and again, it’s made up of three ‘cuckoo calls’, B flat to G, expressed as a dotted quaver and semiquaver, as can be seen in the sheet music. After a dotted minim on B flat, the melody peaks on a sixth, C, falling a fourth to G. Below this, the chords perform a minor fall from E flat major to C minor, getting there by way of G minor with a D in the bass.

You may well wonder where all this is going. Well, that ‘cuckoo call’ melody in ‘Grandad’ is a bear trap that all songwriters should beware if they don’t want to end up sounding like Clive Dunn. Major thirds occur all the time in popular songs, but they don’t always repeat incessantly like the melody in Flowers and Pickett’s composition, and, crucially, they don’t often jump to the sixth note in the scale over a descending chord sequence. Once you’ve got all those elements in place, you’re in the bear trap. You've accidentally re-written 'Grandad'.

If it hadn’t been set in stone as a cheesy kiddie’s classic, there would be nothing inherently wrong with that particular melodic progression, apart from its being rather annoying. There’s something about that two-note chime that demands attention, which is probably why it’s so commonly used for doorbells. It’s also a bit dumb, as composer Marvin Hatley realised when he wrote the Laurel and Hardy theme. Songwriters go there at their peril. ‘Cuckoo’ was once a common term of derision to describe someone not quite in possession of a full deck.

It’s ironic that Herbie Flowers went on to work with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, because Macca is, unfortunately, the most recent victim of what I’m going to call ‘The Grandad Trap’ if he did but know it, and Ringo is his partner in crime. Macca's just released single ‘Home to Us’ has a melody that goes ‘cuckoo’ fully eight times, then jumps to a sixth, before dropping a fourth. The minute I heard it, I thought: ‘that’s Grandad!’

He’s not the first. Back in the 1990s, the band Spiritualised (who coincidentally got a namecheck in my last posting) fell into the trap with the title track of their album ‘Ladies and Gentlemen we are Floating in Space’, whose melody again does that ‘Grandad’ thing across its first four bars. A few people, mostly snarky journalists, noticed the similarity at the time, but it didn’t stop the album from reaching number 4 in the UK charts and being acclaimed as one of the best of the decade. It just accidentally quoted the melody from one of the cheesiest pop singles of all time.

I suppose, being a grandad himself, it’s appropriate for Macca to quote from Clive Dunn’s kiddies’ classic, though I’m sure he did it unawares. The original was no slouch, reaching number one in the charts in January 1971, coincident with Dunn’s 51st birthday. But a lot of other horrible songs have made number one… In fairness, it took more than a trite melody to make 'Grandad' such a horror... the very idea of Corporal Jones making a pop record was bad enough, and then they gave us a kiddie chorus for good measure. Then again, even John Lennon had a kiddie chorus on 'Happy Xmas War is Over'. And lest we should forget, Macca did also give humanity 'The Frog Chorus'...

It may seem unfair to call out a legend like Paul McCartney for accidentally reproducing one of the cheesiest pop song melodies of all time, but no one can deny the similarity. Especially not now that I’ve pointed it out. My advice to him if he should happen to realise (or less likely, read this blog)?

“Don’t panic!”

A Very Peculiar Story

 

It’s rare for any television series to go unrepeated for thirty eight years, unless it was a victim of the BBC’s mass junking policy. Andrew Davies’ satirical campus comedy drama A Very Peculiar Practice arrived in the mid 1980s, in an era when TV archiving had come of age and drama series were retained as a matter of course. The series turns forty later this month, and to mark the occasion, BBC4 will, I understand, be repeating all fourteen episodes, including the seven-episode series two – which has not been seen on terrestrial television since its original broadcast in 1988.

I came somewhat late to the series, and didn’t pick up on A Very Peculiar Practice until a repeat run of the first series on BBC1 in November 1988. (The series had its first broadcast two years earlier, placed in a 9.25pm Wednesday night slot on BBC2, where it ran from 21 May until 2 July.) I don’t know what made me tune in, or even have a VHS tape at the ready, but I did. My laconic diary entry proclaimed it to be good. By week three (Wives of Great Men) my estimation had risen to ‘v. good – v. funny’ (this is one of the series’ outstanding episodes featuring a brilliant guest appearance from Timothy West as a hyper-manic academic). Week four (Black Bob’s Hamburger Suit) was ‘V.G!’ Bob Buzzard, memorably portrayed by David Troughton, was by now my favourite character in the series – utterly unprincipled, snide, untrustworthy, and forever reliant on his ‘rinky-dink computer’.

Bob (‘do you think you can manage Robert?’) is one of the doctors in the university medical centre where nervous young medic Stephen Daker finds himself, alone, newly divorced, and friendless. As he drives into the campus, baffling signs warn him ominously of 'altered priorities ahead'. Daker (Peter Davison) comes with a less than impressive CV (‘Birmingham, Birmingham, Birmingham, Walsall’) but a dedication to his chosen career that sharply contrasts the self-interested motives of his colleagues. Decrepit Jock McCannon (Graham Crowden) is head of the pratice; never far from a bottle of Glenfyddych, and often to be found dictating the latest chapter of his masterwork ‘The Sick University’, he treats all ailments as manifestations of psycho-sexual anxiety. Daker’s other colleague, Rose-Marie (Barbara Flynn), proves to be a tricky and manipulative uber-feminist. With each of his fellow medics pursuing their own conflicting and self-serving agendas, it’s left to Dr. Daker to find a path of least resistance that will enable him to do his job with empathy and understanding. But Daker has problems of his own, entering into an unusual relationship with mature student Lyn Turtle (Amanda Hillwood) that becomes a form of therapy.

This was more than just another campus comedy with a medical slant: this was dark satire, the blackest of black comedy, with an uncompromising message about the state of further education in Thatcher’s Britain. It was knowing, sly and even self-referential: in episode seven, Dr. Daker encounters a writer in residence who’s trying to write a drama set on a university campus but finds that real life keeps second guessing his outrageous plot ideas.

Misleadingly, the Coronet books paperback of series one gave the impression that A Very Peculiar Practice had been a novel before it became a TV series...

The BBC1 repeat run ended on 19 December 1988, and when another series of repeats was scheduled in April 1990, I expected this would comprise the second series: but instead we got a third outing for series one. Surely series two would follow on? ‘Not a chance, buddy’ (as Bob would have said). What had happened to it? In the end, I had to borrow some VHS tapes from a friend who had recorded series two on its one and only BBC broadcast. They were a bit fuzzy, having been recorded using the ‘Long Play’ format, but it was better than nothing. Watching them, I discovered that series two was even more on the edge than series one: the satire was now vicious where it had formerly been wry, and the outlook for the university was bleak, as an American Vice Chancellor arrived and channelled funding into secret defence projects, guarded by a sinister security force.

Series two received its only repeat broadcast on UK Gold in the late 1990s, where it was shown in edited form (the episodes in their original form frequently ran over the usual fifty-minute slot). In 1992, a film sequel, A Very Polish Practice picked up the characters of Daker, his new wife Grete and Bob Buzzard, transplanting them to a chaotic post-Communist Poland. Like series two, this also went unrepeated. At Christmas 2003, series one got a further repeat run on the new BBC4 channel, but once again, series two failed to materialise? Why was this?

A few years earlier, I asked Andrew Davies himself, when I had the chance of a brief conversation following a lecture he delivered at a literary festival. He admitted he knew of no reason why the BBC should have failed to repeat the second series, and no conspiracy or legal wrangle that might have kept it off air. Series one had been refused permission to film on the University of East Anglia campus, who were somewhat sensitive in the aftermath of the controversial 1981 adaptation of Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man, which was filmed at UEA. Davies’ fictional ‘Lowlands University’ was clearly UEA in all but name, but in the end, location filming was done at Birmingham and Keele Universities. To the best of my knowledge, Birmingham University wasn’t entirely happy with series one and refused permission for any further filming (series two lacks the brutalist concrete exteriors of the first and as a result looks quite different). If series one had ruffled academic feathers, series two was even more potentially controversial. Or maybe its non-appearance was simply down to the impracticality of scheduling a series where six of its episodes are 55 minutes long, and the seventh even longer.

The mystery of series two continued to rankle, not only with myself but my friend Tim Beddows, who was also a fan. In the end, it seemed that the only way we would get to see it was by releasing the whole thing on DVD, and this, ultimately, is what happened – although it took a long time to bring the plan to fruition. Network released series one in 2004, but it wasn’t until 2011 that a complete series DVD appeared, comprising both series and the spin-off film. I got to do the sleeve, and composed a desktop scene bringing together various elements from the series including Jock’s dictation machine, a glass of scotch, and a packet of the ‘Confidan’ drug that figured in the plot of Black Bob’s Hamburger Suit (it looks as if it were all photographed in situ, but the elements were, in fact, assembled in Photoshop). I don’t know if anyone got it, but the sleeve text was laid out in the manner of a piece of pharmaceutical packaging, an idea I ‘borrowed’ from the band Spiritualised’s album Ladies and Gentlemen we are Floating in Space.

To date, the DVD has been the only place where fans could legitimately watch both series (although, inevitably, there have been illegal online uploads), all of which makes the upcoming run on BBC4 something of a watershed. According to the iPlayer listings, episodes from series two ‘will be available soon’. So watch this space…

A Very Peculiar Practice begins on Wednesday 20 May at 22.15 on BBC4

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p032kkxy