After reviewing hi-fi through five decades, here's why The Wombles remain my biggest musical influence
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Can you easily name your favourite recording artists? When asked this question, I generally rattle off a rapid list of Led Zeppelin, ELO, Yes, Kate Bush, Pink Floyd – these were the formative artists who shaped my early listening, and their albums feature large (monumentally for Led Zeppelin, given I bought all nine of the 2014/5 deluxe box sets) in my vinyl collection.
If I check my streaming history, however, only ELO and Yes feature there strongly, and even they are both outranked by Philip Glass and 10CC, and are quite dominated by Alex the Astronaut, who thankfully saves me from a list entirely devoid of contemporary artists.
But there is an omission. I have long suppressed from my list the band which may have been most influential of all on my formative musical taste, as well as my appreciation of an extensive range of musical styles, and my understanding of orchestration, not to mention a lifelong hate of littering.
As you’ll have gathered from the headline above, that band was The Wombles.
Some of you will now be fist-pumping the air and yelling ‘Yeh! At last, the truth will be told!’ The rest of you probably know the Wombles primarily as blokes in large shaggy suits, last seen playing Remember You’re A Womble to an appreciative but slightly confused Glastonbury crowd in 2011. And that was great to see. But you don’t know the half of it.
The Wombles were the most successful UK chart act of 1974. Yes, 50 years ago. David Essex – he did well; he was the second most successful. The Three Degrees were, appropriately, third. But nobody could touch our furry friends. Between 1974 and 1975 they had four ‘Top 10’ singles and ten more singles in the Top 40. It was chart domination.
I say ‘they’, but of course the musical genius behind the whole thing was Mike Batt. Not that he invented The Wombles – it was author Elizabeth Beresford who wrote the books about creatures living on Wimbledon Common, collecting litter under the noses of humans, and then repurposing it as the original upcyclers. Their environmental impact on the psyches of a generation of children should not be underestimated. The first book was published in 1968; I don’t know Ms Beresford’s involvement in the counter-culture so we cannot know if they came to her during an acid dream, but sadly probably not; the official genesis is her daughter mispronouncing the London park as Wombledon Common.
The Wombles went on TV in February 1973, as a stop-motion animation series by Ivor Wood, who had previously worked with Serge Danot on ‘The Magic Roundabout’ before making ‘The Herbs’ and then ‘The Wombles’ for the UK’s FilmFair studio, following up with ‘Paddington’ and ‘Parsley the Lion’, before conquering the world forever with the megamerch phenomenon of ‘Postman Pat’.
Back in 1973, The Wombles was narrated on TV by the late great Bernard Cribbins, who was a genuine national treasure all the way from making us laugh on the George Martin-produced single Right Said Fred in 1962, to making us bawl uncontrollably last year with his posthumous performance in ‘Doctor Who’.
And the work for the theme tune of the TV series went to Mike Batt.
Mike Batt is not only a musical genius but also, it seems, a business one. Instead of taking his ￡200 fee for the theme, he locked in the rights for all future musical Womble activities. Nice call.
His subsequent success, however, turned into something of a Coleridgean albatross, because he was known forever thereafter as ‘the Wombles guy’, hampering his ongoing serious music work, which has been both considerable and almost as eclectic in style as the musical range covered by the four main Wombles albums.
Because it is Batt’s extraordinarily wide musical talent that infused The Wombles with such musical wonder. So I’m glad to see that in recent years, just as Robert Plant now happily rather than grudgingly throws some Zeppelin songs into his sets, Mr Batt seems to have reached acceptance of his 1970s shaggy stardom. The albums were re-released as a CD boxset recently (he signed my copy), and I have just received a vinyl copy of the new ’Wombles Golden’ compilation for my 60th birthday. Hoorah! Even though I had them all on vinyl – albums and singles – already. I am a Wombles completist.
The first Wombles album back in 1973 differed from the subsequent three: some great moments, a masterclass in sympathetic orchestration, even some Tomita-style baroque electronica, not to mention two versions of the ‘underground overground’ Wombling theme. It extended ideas from the books and series, notably including international Womble communities before Beresford did so in her books, I believe.
But it didn’t really rock. The second album rocked. And for that, we can credit Batt’s choice of collaborators, who were top UK players and session guys. I’ll highlight just four.
On percussion, Ray Cooper. I don’t think I need to say more about Ray, since he’s an absolute icon, one of the most notable faces in a million concerts over the last 50 years, his happy hands and dazzling dome pretty much ensuring you’re going to have a good time. Everybody loves Raymond.
On bass, Les Hurdle – he’s lesser known (rather shockingly, he has no Wikipedia page) but a legend nevertheless: he was on the first Lou Reed album, the second Elton John album, the first Alan Parsons album, the Donna Summer album masterpiece ‘I Remember Yesterday’. I don’t know where to stop. Look him up on Roon and go on a journey.
On drums, Clem Cattini – who goes back to the days of Joe Meek: he was in the Tornadoes playing Telstar, the first UK single to top the US Billboard charts (in the movie ‘Telstar’ he is played by James Corden). He also drummed on Shakin’ All Over by Johnny Kidd & the Pirates, on Benny Hill’s Ernie (great drum part!), on, er, Rolf Harris’ Two Little Boys. He drummed for T. Rex and Hot Chocolate; he performed on 45 UK number-one singles all up, and rumour has it that Jimmy Page was considering him as the drummer for Led Zeppelin before Robert took him to see John Bonham.
But the man who really brings the boogie to that second Wombles album is the guitarist Chris Spedding. I’m still discovering new Spedding performances – only last month I found he’s the second (often main) guitar on Rodriguez’s second album ‘Coming From Reality’. Spedding’s discography is staggering: too vast even to excerpt, I’ll just point you to this page on his website, which lists 295 artists with whom Spedding has sessioned, from Marc Almond to Tom Waits.
He’s a GOAT, they’re all GOATs, and the Wombles was a supergroup of GOATs under the command of genius Mike Batt. That second album just rocks (Banana Rock, Remember You’re A Womble), and it boogies (Womble Burrow Boogie), yet Batt also brings his orchestration to garnish one of the most beautiful melodies ever recorded, Wombling in The Rain. This was no longer kids’ music; it was just music. Album three had a concept piece (this was the mid-70s): ‘Orinoco’s Dream’ filled side one with pastiches of Strauss and Morricone, and the album ended with the best Christmas single of all time (no, don’t argue with me), Wombling Merry Christmas.
Album four continued the style-stretching with the unmissable Wakeman pastiche: The Myths and Legends of King Merton Womble and His Journey to the Centre of the Earth.
They’re brilliant, they’re witty, and as with all things Batty, the albums are a joy to play on decent hi-fi, being impeccably recorded, mainly at Wessex studios in Highbury. I note Queen also did some Wessex work over the same years, so I shall be reading Mike Batt’s upcoming autobiography to see if there were any Freddie-Womble bon mots to rival the famous exchange between Freddie and Sid Vicious in the corridors of Wessex studios in 1977, after Mercury had referred to Vicious in an NME interview as ‘Simon Ferocious’:
Vicious: “So have you succeeded in bringing ballet to the masses yet?”
Freddie: “We’re doing our best, dear!”
So there, I’ve said it. Led Zeppelin, yes of course Led Zeppelin. Kate, I’ll never stop loving you. Alex, you’re top of my playlist. But The Wombles are what made me. My eternal thanks to you, Mr Batt.
P.S. I can here add, albeit secondhand, a small anecdote to the Wombles legend. It came from a regular listener to a Friday night community radio show I do in Sydney, where, needless to say, the Wombles are on relatively regular rotation.
Mr Jess, now living in Italy, relates the following. “Drinking outside a pub in High Barnet… Thatcher was Education Minister at the time. She had put in a policy to remove free milk for primary school children and had earned the nickname "MilkSnatcher Thatcher". TopShop or Boots, I am not sure, were opening a new store in Barnet High Street. She arrived and was going to do the grand opening along with the Wombles. We were in a small crowd of drinkers that started shouting milksnatcher slogans at her, and I had a half-eaten egg mayonnaise sandwich, so I threw it towards Thatcher. She glared at me – and the flying sandwich, presumably terrorised by her laser stare – promptly changed direction and landed on one of the Wombles. Sticky egg on the outfit and a slice of white bread stuck to the egg. The Womble did not even notice the sandwich, which remained glued to his outfit as he danced during most of the ceremony. The police gave us a short talking to.”
Mr Jess now wishes to publicly apologise to the Womble in question, though not, heaven forbid, to (the memory of) Thatcher.
See how the legend continues…
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