Britishes who were children in the 70s, please identify a tune

So this piece of music has been in my head all evening, please tell me what it is...

It's quite an upbeat orchestral pops number, would not be surprised if it was Ronnie Hazlehurst or someone. It's quite triumphant in feel, I seem to remember a large amount of timpani thumping going on. I associate it mainly with television, but whether that's because it was a theme tune to something or just a popular bit of incidental music I don't really know. It's very well known and if I started singing it to you, you would recognise it straightaway! I can't do fucking musical notation, but if we say it's in the key of C it would go a little something like this:

C C-C C C-C / C-B A G-G A-B / C C-C D-D E....
E E-E F F-F / D-C D E-D C-B / A A-A B-B C....

It's famous, it's cheesy, it's a bit shit. Any ideas?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OV8t3jA-krc

?

BINGO!

Thanks Ogmor! Who wrote it?

Also I swear I have never seen that programme in my life, so I wonder why I know it so well?

never seen van der valk (a bit before my time) but i also feel i've heard this many times.

The memorable signature tune, Eye Level, composed by Jack Trombey (a pseudonym of Dutch composer Jan Stoeckart) and played by the Simon Park Orchestra, reached number one in the UK singles charts in 1973.

i can imagine this has been used during tv montages/sports clips, that sort of thing...

ok now i know where i remember it from:

It was also used for TV adverts for Alton Towers, in its pre-Lunar Park mode of gardens, fronted by Frank Muir and in the 1980s for Oranjeboom lager using "tulips" for "your lips" as "wrap tulips around a pint today".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrQDIDknL1Y

Aaaaaah, okay - thanks!

xp i don't remember either of those things though! :/

my god what a shit advert

Yeah, 'Eye Level' is superb, but way before my time in terms of TV - I actually know it from library music heads, who presumably knew it from it being a #1 hit.

I went and walked the dogs in the rain and listened to Newworldaquarium really loudly on my ipod and it was still going round and round in my brain the whole time. I don't hate it but once it starts up, there's no stopping it.

"speaking as a child of the seventies..."

can only v. dimly remember van der valk, and only then as something my parents watched (ie it was for ADULTS) - based on a series by nicholas freeling, an englishman writing abt post-war holland - barry foster played a psycho in hitchcock's frenzy, round abt the same sort've time - he (and the the prog) were def a big deal for a while - i'm wondering now how the theme music was performed/presented on TOTP

oh shit yes frenzy - wondered where i recognised him from. looks like an evil keith barron

it's pre-ogmor but as soon as i worked out the tune i was similarly plagued by this oddly familiar tune from a show i have never heard of, i sang it down the phone to my dad who informed me it was pretty much the only record he ever recalls my grandad buying, so there may be some genetic component idk

haha, great work ogmor!

might as well ask this here
my brother has been going crazy trying to find out the name of the following 70s tv show
he sent me the following file of him playing it on a Korg and now its bugging me
maybe some kind of kids animal show?
https://soundcloud.com/jobhosle/70s-show

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUTsS8-vukw

that's a john barry tune from midnight cowboy! but was also used as the theme for wildtrack with tony soper

it's pre-ogmor but as soon as i worked out the tune i was similarly plagued by this oddly familiar tune from a show i have never heard of, i sang it down the phone to my dad who informed me it was pretty much the only record he ever recalls my grandad buying, so there may be some genetic component idk

― ogmor, Friday, 31 January 2014 22:24 (1 hour ago)

quite impressive that this sort of proto-shazam produced results just 4 minutes after some sketchy notations

just dropping in to say I love this thread

shazam is poor for anecdotes & tangents

Just dropping in to say that I love how "Britishes who were children in the 70s" is both our demographic and an aesthetic!

beautifully efficient thread. Though I too remember the theme clearly without remembering any of these things that it was featured in.

that's a john barry tune from midnight cowboy! but was also used as the theme for wildtrack with tony soper

Thanks for this, will mail him now and see how he reacts

something else i remembered: i think the van der valk theme was played by ice cream vans.

There was a revival of Van Der Valk in the early 90s, a bunch of new episodes were made. You might have heard it from there?

I first heard it on the aforementioned lager ad.

I never knew that but no, i definitely know it from my early childhood which was long gone by that point.

barry foster played a psycho in hitchcock's frenzy, round abt the same sort've time - he (and the the prog) were def a big deal for a while

See also his shitty performance in the shitty 1sr Sweeney film.

looks like an evil keith barron

LOL yes! Delighted to see Keith Barron is still alive.

My wife pointed out that every time there was a brass band on Nationwide or whatever other program it was after the Six O'Clock News, they would *always* play Eye Level and you know what, I think she's probably right.

There was a vocal version, too: http://youtu.be/pcfuPyjlxQk

NB This was the last time I ever heard my mother get excited about a song on the radio. She doesn't really "do" music.

arggh, i hate it when they add words to already well-known tunes, it always sounds so strained. like when anita dobson did her vocal version of the eastenders theme

do i embed "Floral Dance" here or shall we acknowledge it existed and move on?

No need to embed it, it's already playing in my mind...

My wife pointed out that every time there was a brass band on Nationwide or whatever other program it was after the Six O'Clock News, they would *always* play Eye Level and you know what, I think she's probably right.

I was wondering why I knew the tune and why I had the nagging feeling before ogmor's youtube that the notes reminded me of a hymn or something, and it was probably because when I was a kid every church fete and Harvest Festival and autumn fair would have the local silver band play and they must've done this as their token "pop" number.

a few years later, i def. recall the theme from the life and times of david lloyd george - 'chi mai' by ennio morricone - being a big hit. remembering it now happily led me to this version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgUdrpPqgmk

My god, that is a familiar tune! Cool organ too, my friend Geoffrey's dad had one just like it - elderly guy with silvery hair and massive glasses, all the time I was round at his house his dad would be sat in his slippers blasting away like a maniac at all this crazy easy-listening music, Swingin' Safari and shite like that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2JZFXlUqr4

"Chi Mai" went top 3, maybe number 1

Apparently so! Couldn't have named it for the life of me though. OTM about the Floral Dance btw, that was everywhere.

theme from The Deer Hunter went top 5 round this time to, and the theme from M*A*S*H, it's almost the last gasp for "easy listening" to score high in the charts

Cavatina will alwys be the music from the Take Hart gallery for me, fuck a De Niro

The latest easy listening hit that I recall is this monster:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y31SGh7CFz0

Oh, James Galway's version of Annie's Song, that was Deer Hunter era too right?

Okay I have another song that keeps popping into my head and I have no idea what it is. This one's probably early sixties, it's another upbeat one but much more of a jazz thing, don't think it had vocals but maybe it did? All I remember of the tune is this insistent stabby staccato brass riff that keeps repeating at different pitches, just di-di-di-diiii! di-di-di-diiii! over and over again.

It's *really* well-known, but what I most associate it with is shit telly from the 90s, it's the kind of thing that I can envisage Johnny Vaughan gurning along to in a shiny suit, just totally a piece of music that was always cropping up in dogshit chris evans pfi friday royale with cheese new labour wank culture. Probably still gets used today in makeover programmes when things take a turn for the hip and groovy?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fk3WHOXzZE4

?

Ha not that! Thing i'm thinking of is faster and more insistent, with a really nagging riff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxsOXOPni0o

?

Beautiful ...but too complex and too melodic!

This probably won't help AT ALL, but there's only four notes in the main riff - not sure what the first note is, but the second and third notes are the same and the fourth is three semi-tones lower. And that whole thing gets played four times and then it shifts up a few steps and gets repeated twice, then back down again for two more. Then there's four bars of twiddly bits that I can't quite remember and then it goes all over again. I think.

probably not this, but

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t0fZeySNck

poxy ipad won't load that video - what is it?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_Bossa_Nova

oh man that's it exactly and i'm embarrassed not to have lnown that. also it actually sounds nothing like my description of it so bonus points to you for figuring it out :)

evocative of crap 90s TV/Johnny Vaughan gurning in a suit was a v good clue, I can't imagine how that track would have sounded to people before it took on those associations

like, literally as soon as I read 'Johnny Vaughan gurning along to in a shiny suit' that started playing in my head

I suppose I knew it from the Alan Freeman show. Never seen Austin Powers though...

This sure sounds like something:

was also used from 2001 to 2005 as the title theme in a German "ethno-comedy" TV show Was guckst du? ("What 'ya looking?"), which was based on the British TV show Goodness Gracious Me.

soul bossa nova wiki page doesn't mention a tribe called quest which is where I first heard it

You sure you're not confusing A Tribe Called Quest with Dream Warriors?

Anyone else remember this tune? Always loved it, was the theme to Sunday Sport on Radio 2 and probably several other things besides:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LRsYn9ufY0

oh dude i fucken LOVE that tune, thanks for identifying it

"Soul Bossa Nova" was a great tune from a great Quincy Jones album that has unfortunately been trampled into the dirt by cunts

> You sure you're not confusing A Tribe Called Quest with Dream Warriors?

whatever, that My Definition song. i try not to give it any thought at all. i am mystified why 6music keeps feeling the need to drag it out and play it on a weekly basis.

this ouevre of british light entertainment of the 60s/70s by way of johnny vaughan gurning in a suit is kind of amazing

as if this thread wasn't firing up enough opaque pockets of memory I now inexplicably have Johnny Vaughan saying "Nigel Mansell" looping in my head.

haha! htf did i forget about dream warriors, i could have made this thread so much less painful for everyone.

90s was really a boom time for easy listening wasn't it? hiphop and crate-digging culture on the one hand (though were leasy listening samples dying out a bit once the decade got fully underway? can't remember, i'm shoddy on hiphop history), you had stereolab reviving interest in the more exotic end of the spectrum, and then there's the whole terrible mainstream flirtation with it and i can't really figure out exactly how it became such a huge thing there. thinking about the sudden interest in crooners, robbie williams with his sinatra thing, did i imagine it or was charles trenet's la mer everywhere at one time? and then there was shite like mike flowers pops etc. probably forgetting a huge bunch of stuff here. and then it all kind of faded away to some extent. hiphop moved on, part of the stereolab constituency went more esoteric and disappeared down the library music/hauntology rabbit hole, i guess people like michael buble persist and make a decent living but are pretty ignorable on the whole. what was that all about?

please note i spent the entire nineties living in a dingy basement, eating garbage and listening to nothing but the dead c, so if it sounds like i wasn't really paying attention, that's cos i wasn't

trying to plot out a through line from punk- frank sidebottom's oh blimey big band - vic reeves big night out - the big breakfast, I think there may be some steps missing though.

I'd forgotten that Mark Radcliffe was in the oh blimey big band, I don't listen to 6 music much but I can see that having a kind of watered down/middle aged version of this aesthetic

In this vein, what programme used 'Mini Skirt' by Esquivel as its theme tune? I was thinking it was Eurotrash, but that's actually completely different.

Louis Theroux used it a lot

Before he got all serious

xpost - yep, with the power of posting I figured it out pretty quick. Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends.

One weird point on the easy listening/ exotica timeline was people like Anton LaVey & Throbbing Gristle trying to revive interest in it during the 70s

which ties in with sammy davis jnr's satanic phase!

gis sammy davis satanist and there are a few nice pictures of him w/ la vey

i don't know how much that association had an effect on his music though

http://userserve-ak.last.fm/serve/500/54252697/Suburban%2BExotica.jpg

I love this album, and this album title (which is from 2010, but I think the 90s was when she was at her most high profile?)

my god what is that?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3H4da_QtpJM

does a lot of this stuff hinge on this effect that what once was meant to communicate exotica and glamour now codes as v provincial? Like the hauntology retro modernism thing?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8FXm105j2A

I'm outraged this thread has gone so far without anyone posting Z Cars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWflrCrwUSw

Fuck, I'd never realised Z Cars had what appears to be a jazz bagpipes solo. Incredible.

This one's been driving me nuts for the past few days but my brain is letting me down badly so you're going to have to rescue me: trying to identify something which I think is a film theme, possibly by John Barry, and it's got this kind of a plinky-plonky zither thing going on. Was reminded of it by hearing this Jessie Ware song the other day which either samples it or otherwise quotes it almost the whole way through:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVOkYJEq-po

p sure it's very famous and I am just an idiot

(that's two pop videos i've seen in the last week that've used the barbican greenhouse as a location)

ipcress file?

no, it's not that i don't think

the obvious zither theme is the third man. probably too obvious.

No it's not that either. Maybe I am just misremembering the theme to The Persuaders

well i was in the wrong ballpark completely, what a dummy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXj5mJN0MVc