Sunday 16 November 2014

Singing Old TV Themes

"Aren't they famous? They look as if they ought to be familiar." We were talking about a couple who came along to sing at the Baskerville last week - obviously professional musicians, because they were performing, unlike people like me, who just like to sing occasionally. They called themselves Valeryan and Thunderclap.
The last song I sang that evening was White Horses, which I can do from memory because I learned it from the 1960s TV series about the Lippizzaner horses, and it made me start thinking about other TV themes I could sing, just for a bit of fun. I'd also sung a song in honour of the Philae lander which touched down on the comet this week.
"Ground Control to Major Tom?" Bob guessed, when I said I was going to sing a space song.
"Older than that," I said, and launched into Fireball XL5.
So I remembered The Lightning Tree, which was the theme song to Follyfoot in the 1970s.
I looked up the words, and found that the song was the big hit of a group called the Settlers.
And then I got a Friend request on Facebook from Valeryan - who turns out to have been a member of the Settlers (so she was famous, after all!) along with her singing partner Thunderclap. She said that she wasn't the first singer for the group (that was Cindy Kent, who is now a priest in London according to Wikipedia!), and she learned the words to The Lightning Tree in the back of a van on the way to Taunton, where she was singing it that night on stage!
And because it was so close to Remembrance Day, several of the songs from other regulars were on that theme - one haunting song was about a reluctant soldier in the Second World War who ended up helping to liberate Belsen, from a chap who usually sings comic songs.

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