Common Sense Dancing: Mellotron Suite: Long Summer Days

This piece of music was written quite quickly after I realised that I was going to need a third theme in Where Shall We Go, rather than just repeat another variation of what have become called Ambling Excitedly and Caught In The Rain.

I'm very pleased with how it turned out. Quite by accident it seems to evoke exactly what its title suggests. Its mood reminds me of some of the incidental music of my favourite film, Watership Down**.

Extra points if you can smell the dry grass and feel the sun on your face.

Tomorrow we end our journey through Common Sense Dancing - see you then!

** A film that, bizarrely, links Hancock's Half Hour and Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War Of The Worlds..

Common Sense Dancing: Play's Cool

Even as a teen, I would have nostalgic conversations with friends about the television we watched during our younger years.

Coming from different households there would be common programmes, and fringe shows that only a few watched and none of the rest of us remembered. Taken together, they all brought humour, song, teaching, different ways of telling stories, different styles of presentation - real world, puppets, cartoon or stop-frame animation, mixtures of all of them. They would engender laughter, fear, questions.. But they all left a huge impression on us, and even now as I find myself rather older than the teen I once was, those programmes still live me.

It was another BBC documentary which gave me the idea for this song, one concerned with 'The Golden Age of Children's Television.' It defined this era, for the UK at least, as being from the mid 50s to the late 80s - essentially when the broadcasting companies had their own in-house children's programming departments. And this, rather neatly, included my childhood.

Once I had the chorus, I wrote out all the children's television programmes I remembered, and sought to include as many as had made an impression on me without it seeming just like a list. There needed to be context, a story. Many didn't make it in, for reasons of scansion, song-length, relevance to the emotional mood, etc.

Every so often after gigs it gets suggested that I should do a verse about such-and-such a programme, and I sympathise with the suggestions these people make. But I am happy with what I have written, it works for me, describes my experience, and am pleased that it has resonances for others; and I would be utterly delighted to hear of their songs, poems, stage plays, short stories, paintings, interpretive dances, etc. of their experiences of the art of children's entertainment and broadcast education through their formative years.

There's enough art in the universe for everyone to have a go.

Many thanks to Sarah Sharp for playing violin on this.

I had hoped to get Brian Cant to appear on this tune, speaking where the violin solo comes. Though his agent thought he might have been interested to do it, sadly, he was too ill at the time, so the playful, nostalgic melody that was written as a contingency ended up being a necessity. He died later that year. As well the late Clive James, Common Sense Dancing is also dedicated to the memory of Brian. He brought so much happiness to so many millions of children for many, many years.

So let your eyes mist today, and I'll see you tomorrow for a bit of a change of gear!

Common Sense Dancing: Mellotron Suite: Ambling Excitedly

The three longer pieces of incidental music from Where Shall We Go were simply named Theme 1, Theme 2, Theme 3, until I started doing the artwork for the album and I felt that I couldn't really go to press with such mundane names.. I chose names that partly reflected the position of the music in the play, and partly the feel they created.

The underlying guitar part of this piece, Theme 1 as was, originally came about from me playing around with ideas surrounding an arrangement of Peter Gabriel's Solsbury Hill..

The violin and flute parts were initially going to have leitmotifs to represent the She and He of the play, but other than the first melodic idea heard on the flute which is repeated in various ways across the incidental music, this idea was dropped. However, the interplay between the two top lines was intended to be conversational, mimicking the two as they walked - whether it's successful in that is perhaps not for me to say!

After that excited amble, I'll see you tomorrow for something a little more reflective!

Common Sense Dancing: Mellotron Suite: Caught In The Rain

After all that excitement yesterday, we're now on the second half of this tour through Common Sense Dancing, and this piece from the Where Shall We Go Mellotron Suite calms thing down a likkel. It appears during the rain sequence of the play.

Check your weather forecast for today - April showers, and all that..

You can almost see the clouds parting and the blue sky breaking through at the end!

Stay dry, now! See you tomorrow :-)

Common Sense Dancing: Come On! (Put That Hoedown)

As with My Island and Antasia, Come On! (Put That Hoedown) was a product of a KvR monthly contest. The theme that month was 'Hurry Up!'

I chose a dance, a gardening pun - and a tune that just doesn't let up.. There might be the odd touch of Fairpoint Convention or Mike Oldfield in there somewhere.

The violin was jauntily (and nothing short of heroically) played by Clare Lindley (Stackridge, DLM), flute flauted by John Hackett, and lead guitar by the fabulous Nick Fletcher of the John Hackett Band.

Phew! See you tomorrow!

Common Sense Dancing: Mellotron Suite: Main Theme

I had a bunch of short ideas that I never thought I would never make in to full guitar pieces, but when the notion of making Where Shall We Go appeared, I felt I could use those ideas as the basis for the music through the play. During the writing stage I new I was going to be arranging for flute and violin so set up those sounds on virtual Mellotrons (using GForce's excellent M-Tron Pro). And got rather used to the sounds!

Once the real instruments had been recorded I felt it would be a shame to have the Mellotron versions of the music lost, and that it would be nice to have some of the music separated off from the play to be pieces in their own right - thus the Mellotron Suite was born.

This piece, however, never appears in the play in this form. The chord structure appears at the start and end of the play, along with a couple of other arrangements popping up here and there, but without these flute/ violin parts. The melodies appear without the context of the guitar (I'll let you work out where, should you wish to know!), but here everything is presented together, united at last..

See you tomorrow :-)

Common Sense Dancing: Antasia

Like yesterday's My Island, Antasia also started life as a short piece for a KvR monthly competition.

I had had the opening guitar part knocking around as an idea since the mid 90s, I liked it as it was reminiscent of the work of Genesis co-founder, Anthony Phillips. The atmospheric opening section gives way to a more rock tinged second half, which again drew on my love for Ant's work; I had elements of arrangements from the Private Parts And Pieces Vols II and VIII albums in mind with this section. NB 'Antasia' is, of course, a fantasia for.. well, you can work it out ;-)

The violin is by Sarah Sharp, who often performs under the name 'Tsarzi,' and I was thrilled to have Mick Somerset play saxello.
I had hoped to get Ant himself to play harmonium, but sadly that wasn't to be, and is now played on a Mellotron.

See you tomorrow :-)