For the last few weeks, I’ve had a musical track bothering me: I knew it very well, but didn’t know what it was called or where I’d encountered it. An unexpected earworm from the past. Thanks to the wonders of YouTube, I finally managed to track it down — it’s the theme music to a British TV show that I don’t remember watching (yet I know the theme music very well):
It’s a very distinctive late-60s to early 70s sound. I have no idea why I know it so well: perhaps my dad used to watch the show and I just heard the music in the background. Actually, that’s the only thing I could come up with to explain why I’d know the theme music, yet not remember ever having watched the TV show.
I thought I’d exorcise the earworm demon and buy a copy from iTunes. But no, they’ve got several covers of the music by various artists (including an interesting version by the Band of the 1st Battalion, the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment — currently classified as “Rock” by iTunes), but not the original. HMVDirect has a similar selection (covers, but no original performance). “Curses, foiled again!”
I found out more about the TV show from Wikipedia, the Unofficial Sweeney website, and a true labour of love, a page devoted to sleuthing up all the many musical tracks used in the original series named for the only album of music released: the Shut it! The Music of “The Sweeney” site.
This page is an ongoing development to identify the 300 different pieces of music used in the 1970s British television series The Sweeney. As is common practice with many television shows, other than the specially-comissioned title theme, Harry South’s unforgettable, rousing actioner, “ready-made” music was mostly used to provide incidental themes to the action. These came from specialist “Production Music” houses, the most well-known being De Wolfe, KPM (Keith Prowse Music), Chappell and Bruton. The years 1971 to 1978 arguably represented the genre’s most creative era (before competition and corporatism took over and strangled much artistic creativity), serendipitously co-inciding with production of The Sweeney itself.
In 2001 Sanctuary Records issued a Sweeney CD compilation with 25 tracks used in the show. As good as it was, it really only scratched the surface and sadly no further volumes have been forthcoming.
But unless I happen across a physical copy of the CD, I’m stuck with my persistent earworm. Here’s the closing credits, in hopes it’ll help banish it from my mind temporarily:
