It is funny on what waves a little bit of gnarly inspiration and a bit of old-fashioned net surfing you can be carried. My mate Ben Valsler posted some photos of the pop band “Go! Team”, which reminded me of the instrumental My World they did, which was a cover of the theme tune to the ITV schools programme from the 1970s. It was originally Mini Moog (pronounced to rhyme with Vogue) and classical guitar. The tune – The Free Life – was one of the first guitar parts I worked out while teaching myself guitar back in the late 1970s, early 1980s. The tune was my phone ringtone for a while.
But back to that surfing, I found out that it was written by someone called Alan Parker. Not the film director, but a session musician and classical guitarist who studied under Julian Bream. Parker was also in the band Blue Mink with Herbie Flowers who wrote and played the double bass part on Walk on the Wild Side and also wrote the Clive Dunn hit Granddad and then went on to be a member of Sky. I already knew all that stuff about Blue Mink and Herbie Flowers, by the way.
Parker also wrote the theme tunes to Angels, Minder (not Denis Waterman), The Glory Boys, Dempsey and Makepeace, French Fields, Red Fox, ITN’s News At Ten, and the BBC’s Walking with Cavemen and Coast. He also created film scores for Jaws 3D (1983), American Gothic (1988), What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993), and Alex Rider: Stormbreaker (2006).
More interesting than that, he was the guitarist (not credited at the time) on the David Bowie song 1984, on No Regrets by the Walker Brothers, and Donovan’s Hurdy Gurdy Man. But, here’s the big one…he was the guitarist on the BBC Top of the Pops instrumental cover version Whole Lotta Love theme tune! Which…if memory serves was probably the second thing I worked out on guitar.