Captain Kipper's Clipper (Hypnotone Brain Machine Mix)

Play Away, the first track on Music From BBC Children's Programmes, was sadly not subtitled A Dub Symphony In Two Parts. Instead, the tracklisting revealed, it was built up in true 12" version of Tainted Love style from two shorter tracks known as 'Theme' and Superstition. The first of these, it was not unreasonable to presume, must surely have been the Play Away theme song itself; a song by then so well-known, and indeed so utterly chronologically distanced from its original intended purpose, that it had transcended its small-scale small-screen origins to become almost an alternative National Anthem of sorts. Or at least it would be in a world where Andy Pandy's Coming To Play (Tra La La La La La) had supplanted Land Of Hope And Glory.

For the benefit of those who only know the song from the strangely uniform repertoire of parents trying to sing their offspring into submission, the Play Away theme song was invariably heard at the close of the show with Jonathan Cohen pounding out a few nifty jazz piano chord rolls, and the cast struggling with oversized comedy props bearing their names. Usually Brian Cant took the vocal lead - only fitting as he was the main driving force behind the show - which is why it came as something of a surprise to discover that this earliest known reading was sung, and indeed originally written, by Lionel Morton. And that's not all - in place of the more familiar arrangement there was a looser, more improvised setting based around stand-up bass, percussion, and what appeared to be somebody twanging a ruler on the underside of a desk.

The version presented here, I would later discover, was actually rather bluntly hacked down from a much longer recording on the Bang On A Drum album, omitting numerous jazzy melodic touches and an entire middle eight; in its truncated form, however, it did have the advantage of sounding uncannily like the sort of song Oasis would start droning out a year or so later (from the point of view of this narrative rather than from when Play Away started... come on, keep up!), only with slightly more verbose lyrics and slightly more imaginative instrumentation. More significantly, it was 'retro' in a sense that the aggressively backward-looking Gallagher brothers could never hope to replicate or even appreciate... but we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves there. There's a whole second half of the track to get through first.

So, with the Play Away theme over, the stand-up bass deftly folded back on itself like the way The Stone Roses used to segue between Where Angels Play and Shoot You Down in their live shows, and led straight into Superstition, sung as a duet between Lionel and Toni Arthur, though written by Cohen cohort Peter Gosling and strangely absent presenter Carole Ward. You're probably already way ahead here and formulating your own joke about it not being a cover of Stevie Wonder's identically-titled homage to the Sportsnight theme music, but believe it or not that wouldn't actually be quite as much a joke as you might think. For this musical namesake is similarly swathed in wah wah-heavy jazz-funk inflections, and similarly lyrically concerned with debunking folklore nonsense that "may or may not happen", though Mr. Wonder's failure to include Brian Cant and Chloe Ashcroft doing some inter-verse spoken word ridiculing of never-walk-under-ladders hokum is his loss, frankly.

Due in no small part to its lack of gaudy hallucinogenic puppets, Play Away isn't quite the first show that you'd think of when attempting to break through to a pop-cultural elevated dimensional plane of seventies pre-school television esoterica, and yet just one track in to Music From BBC Children's Programmes we'd reached somewhere that, while not yet quite drifting in a space free of time (nor indeed rollerskating around a lake) somewhere between Diamonds & Pearls and Screamadelica, had succeeded in evoking it both musically and visually (after all, what are those spoken comic exchanges if not a reflection of the show itself?) in unexpectedly funk-inflected fashion. Then an all-too-familiar electronic sting blasted the whole experience into space.

The Party Is About To Begin

Before we go any further into the realms of Music From BBC Children's Programmes, there's just one more detour that needs to be made - and, let's be honest, there've been so many detours even before just getting this far that one more is hardly going to make much of a difference - as there's a couple of things that you need to know about the tracklisting. Firstly, although this was completely unknown to me at the time, its contents were drawn from existing BBC Records And Tapes releases devoted to individual shows. Yes, there really was a full length Crackerjack (no, don't) LP and you'll be hearing all about that in due course. The second thing is that said highlights have been arranged into a series of cut-and-shut medleys combining several individual tracks into one long prog rock-esque suite - sometimes this works, and at other times it makes absolutely no sense at all. And the first such medleyfied track was devoted entirely to Play Away.

A bit of background - Play Away was a programme that came about almost by accident, when the BBC found themselves making more money from their overseas sales of long-running pre-school programme Play School (and there's background on that to come) in 'kit' form (i.e. foreign broadcasters would recieve scripts, films, and a duplicate Humpty decked out in 'poison' colour scheme) than they knew what to do with. Enough spare money, in fact, to pay for a whole new programme, and the resultant stroke of genius was to give the Play School presenters - most of whom were failed or failing singer-songwriters, stand-up comedians and the like - a timeslot aimed at a slightly older audience where they could dole out puns, whimsy, improvisation, mild satire, custard pies and singerwritten-songs to their heart's content, under the leadership of the seemingly indefatigable Brian Cant and accompanied by a bunch of equally career-diverted jazzmen led by piano-pounding Jonathan Cohen.

It was, if you will, the 'free jazz' of the BBC's children's output, though thankfully when they got to record an album - the first of four, in fact - in 1973, they left the AMM-style scraping cellos at home. Instead, what they came up with was a combination of extended comedy sketches, improvised one-liners, party game-friendly instrumental hi-jinks, and a selection of musical solo showcases, ranging from nonsense songs to - naming no decidedly out-of-place covers of If I Had A Hammer - traditional numbers that somewhat gave away the frustrated folky ambitions of certain presenters.

Thus it was that two tracks from the first Play Away album ended up bolted together as a curtain-raiser to Music From BBC Children's Programmes. And it was two of said frustrated folky presenters, promisingly, that were taking the helm for main vocal duties here (with comical spoken interjections from Brian Cant and fellow non-folky type Chloe Ashcroft) - Lionel Morton, the elaborately-coiffured former lead vocalist of The Four Pennies who had come to Play School and Play Away fresh from a less than chart-troubling attempt to reposition himself as a post-Penny Lane 'Carnaby Street' popster, and Toni Arthur, moderately successful setter of geniune witchy runes to music who has always claimed to have been earmarked for presenting duties when a male producer spotted her performing in glittery purple hotpants. A claim that, judging from the cover of the Play Away album, maybe well have its basis in fact.

Though it wasn't obvious at the time, it was perhaps no coincidence that I should be preparing to rediscover the music of Play Away and its contemporaries so shortly after the release of Prince's Diamonds And Pearls, a song so uncanny in its sonic resemblance to Play School's musical numbers that there must surely be a copy of Bang On A Drum hidden away somewhere in Paisley Park, and Primal Scream's Shine Like Stars, a song that I would later describe as "for all people might like to talk about the presenters of old children's TV shows having been 'on drugs', the actual sound of what might have happened had Jonathan Cohen been force-fed powerful hallucinogens". And this album, I hoped, would break through to sonic vistas way further out even than those of Screamadelica. But what was that all-important first track actually like...?