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Resources #1 - Doctor Who Magazine

DWM 1984 Summer Special - Doctor Who Records

1984, Doctor Who Magazine released a "Merchandise Special" focusing on all areas of Doctor Who marketting, including a lengthly feature on audio products, from the Genesis of the Daleks LP to the TV theme singles. The article also touched on several tribute releases, reproduced below.

In this section we'll be taking a look at all the singles and albums that have been released to tie in with Doctor Who. I have, it should be noticed, deliberately missed out a couple of things. If I were to try to list all the appalling versions of the theme tune on assorted Geoff Love and his Music type cheap albums that cover lots of TV themes, I could be here until doomsday researching them, let alone finding time to write about them, so I've ignored them. Secondly, there have been records that pick on names or things from the world of Doctor Who that aren't really relevant: had you ever heard of groups such as The Cybermen, K9 Hassle or Dalek i (aka Dalek i Love You) whose first single came out in 1979 and was called Destiny? Possibly the only one of any merit was the "B" Side to a single by The Human League (now you must have heard of them!) called Tom Baker, which came out soon after the announcement of his retirement from the series. The cover featured a photo of Tom's face and there was an inscription around the centre of the record that simply said "Thanks, Tom". Whilst being a fairly jolly bit of music, it isn't actually relevant to the series, but if you want to track it down the single was called Boys and Girls, was on the Virgin label and the number was VS 395.

While we are talking about the "pop" music influence, two records worthy of mention both occurred during Tom Baker's reign as the Doctor. The best known was by a band of session musicians who called themselves Mankind and produced a single called, would you believe it, Doctor Who which was a disco version of the theme tune, and had a few lyrics randomly thrown in to pad it out to the required three minutes. It came in both 7 inch and 12 inch formats, the latter boasting a sleeve that showed a face with the top of the head cut away from which the words "Doctor Who" floated out. The 12 inch also came in either black, blue or green vinyl. It was on the Pinnacle label originally (PIN 71) but was later reissued on Motor Records (MTR 001) and I believe it to still be available. Next up, there was a record by a group called Blood Donor called Doctor...? that appeared on Safari Records (SAFE 29) and is a tribute to the Time Lord which contains such startling lyrics as: And there you are! Whilst not actually falling into the "novelty record" bracket like the Mankind single (this one is almost a good song, musically it is good) it is hardly Duran Duran or Culture Club. The cover shows on the front the TARDIS materialising on top of a hill, whilst the back cover shows it having landed, the sky having turned into dusk, and the door slightly open letting out a shaft of light. Nice art by Bob Suffolk and almost worth buying just for that.

Back to novelty records now - and back to BBC Records briefly for Doctor Who Is Gonna Fix It (RESL 132) released during 1983 by an Australian man/group (who knows?) called Bullamakanka and is a silly little ditty that is worth having because it is so awful (rather like the 60s record I'm Going To Spend Christmas With A Dalek). When you consider how long Australia has had an interest in the programme it is perhaps surprising that this seems to be the first and only record from the country about the series. Who's Who? is the first and only record by Dalek film star (?) Roberta Tovey, who played the movie version of Susan. Released by Polydor (BM 56021), it ranks high in the stakes of most dreadful record ever, but another contender for that title is Who's Doctor Who? by, would you believe, Fraser Hines, whilst his character of Jamie was at its height of popularity in 1968. This was released on the Major Minor record label, number MM579 (does this mean that there were 578 previous records on this label devoted to TV programmes - and were they all as bad as this one?). The last in our list of "novelty" records is the best. It was actually made by Doctor Who himself, Jon Pertwee. Called Who Is The Doctor it was a sort of galactic poem about the Doctor with a background of a version (in its loosest sense) of the theme music. It was released on Purple records (the EMI offshoot originally catering for the heavy rock band Deep Purple) and had the number PUR 111. Needless to say it has long since been deleted, which is a shame.

Text (c) Gary Russell / Doctor Who Magazine 1984. Reprinted without permission.

DWM 309 - Maim That Tune!

It was then 17 years before Doctor Who Magazine dared to better themselves with a new article on tribute records. Along with in-depth interviews with Frazer Hines and Orbital (reproduced elsewhere on this website), the feature also included a rather interesting look at some of the pop references within the Virgin novels.

HIT AFTER HIT AFTER CHART-TOPPING HIT! NON-STOP PUMPING BEATS FROM FRAZER HINES, ROBERTA TOVEY, JON PERTWEE, WHO CARES (FEAT. SALLY THOMSETT) - ALL MIXED BY DJ DAVID BAILEY! NO HOME CAN AFFORD TO BE WITHOUT THE VERY BEST OF DOCTOR WHO'S EXCITING ADVENTURES IN THE HIT PARADE! OUT NOW! UM, EXCEPT IT ISN'T QUITE LIKE THAT ...

Doctor Who fans have never been known for their pop cultural savvy. We've all been there: the cold, grey playground of our youth, shunted to the edges of school society, our only friends the asthmatic fat kid and the girl with the NHS specs who smells of milk. While other children got excited about the new releases from the Bay City Rollers or T-Rex, Duran Duran or Kim Wilde, we were left with our scratched Mankind singles and, in later days, such wonders as Doctor in Distress and Doctorin' the Tardis.

And yet, only this year, bonafide hip musical outfit Orbital released the album The Altogether, complete with their block-rocking version of the Doctor Who theme. While it may bring back one too many memories of the Time Lord's cheesy efforts at credibility, at least it seems some of today's kids are getting down to the tune we've known for years - the good Doctor is actually funky.

There's no greater barometer of a person's hipness than their taste in pop music, which is why Orbital's open fondness for Doctor Who is so surprising. The formula is usually something like 'Radiohead = cool/sci-fi = not'. But the balance isn't quite equal; liking Radiohead isn't enough to completely negate the social stigma of liking Doctor Who. This rings through time, back to the playground, where the purchase of the new Human League single (c/w Tom Baker) was actually a measure of your unfashionable random, not of your predilection for British clectropop. Which is why Who is Dr Who?, RPM's recent collection of musical Doctor Who ephemera, was so cathartic; allowing us fans a chance to finally buy and enjoy all those trashy songs, in the full and clear acknowledgement that it's only because they're connected to our favourite series (albeit with the grown-up caveat that they've been digitally remastered, and are presented for posterity on pristine CD). Could it be that, in the modern atmosphere of nostalgia and retro-chic, Doctor Who might actually be coming back into fashion?

Looked at with hindsight, there were roughly two periods when the series was trendy, when everyone (except the most crushingly dull counter-cultural hipsters) would happily say they enjoyed Doctor Who, and when the show itself had some sort of impact more far-reaching than Saturday teatimes. The first of these was undeniably the 'Dalekmania' of the mid-1960s, a time when you couldn't move in toyshops without knocking over a (Toyah-approved) PVC Dalek costume or slipping on a Rolykin. Eric Winstone and his orchestra were the first to try and cash in on Doctor Who, releasing a limp version of the series' theme shortly after the Beeb released the bonafide Radiophonic Workshop one. Neither were chart-bothering in terms of sales. Most famously, however, this era spawned the Go Go's' I'm Gonna Spend My Christmas With a Dalek (released December 1964, but didn't chart), a cheesy little number sung (rather creepily) by the I7 year-old Sue Smith as if she were still in junior school. It seems to work on the record's nasal Dalek, though, who was very soon begging, "Please-may-I-have-some-more-plum-pud-ding-and-cus-tard?"

Dalekmania continued into the following year, intensifying as Dr Who and the Daleks stormed Britain's picture houses. Malcolm Lockyer's theme from the film, The Eccentric Dr Who, was released as a single, though it would have been more at home heading a swanky ITC television serial. The movie also spawned one of the catchier - though perhaps also the most nauseating - tie-in singles: Who's Who by big-screen Susie, Roberta Tovey. She couldn't hold a tune in a bucket, but that didn't stop her being pushed into a recording studio to create this chirpy little ditty, with its talk of big spaceships and funny little smiles, and its B-side Not So Old. This song's refrain, "If you wait for me, I will marry you," sung quite obviously to a much older man, was probably seen as all sweet ness and innocence then. Nowadays, of course, it would have incited a News of the World hate campaign before you could say 'Grandfather'! Might have made the record a hit, though ...

On the telly, meanwhile, William Hartnell regenerated into Patrick Troughton, and the young Frazer Hines joined the series as Jamie McCrimmon, complete with saucy sporran and 'TV Scots' brogue. Hines explains that there was a feeling at the time that he could capitalise on his success - and that of Doctor Who - by releasing a single. But it was all easier said than done, and even when Hines finally recorded and released the semi-psychedelic Who's Dr Who? it didn't make the charts.

Hines admits that there was a general feeling that the A-side should actually have been Punch and Judy Man, the single's B-side: "[record label] Major Minor were, of course, trying to flog it on the back of Doctor Who," he says, "and instead of using 'Frazer Hines, from Doctor Who!' they tried to sell the programme first. I think if it had been the other way round, it would have sold a hell of a lot more records."

Four years later, in December I972, Jon Pertwee (via the label owned by prog-rockers Deep Purple, bizarrely) unleashed the frankly mental Who is the Doctor on an unsuspecting - some might say undeserving - public. Pure Mystery, the single's b-side, was awfully similar to Noel Coward's If Love Were All in its spare, melancholy musical arrangement and tale of a man whose only foot in the door of life is his "talent to amuse". I'll leave you to guess which song is better. Who is the Doctor ultimately ended up in the cosmic wastes, beyond the lati- tude of human minds, and it wasn't until Pertwee released Worzel's Song in 1980 that he had a hit (albeit only charting at number 33). Even the June 1985 re-release of Who is the Doctor (backed by Blood Donor's barely-noticed Doctor ... ?) failed to chart. Obviously Worzel Gummidge's singing head held more sway with the public than a shock of white hair. "Know me!" No thanks.

The first Doctor Who record to actually make the charts (at a fairly respectable number 25, and with a Top of the Pops performance to boot) was Mankind's 1978 bonkers disco stomper version of the theme - which neatly coincided with the second period of the show's trendiness. Around the time of the record's release, Season 16 was in full flow and the golden era of the show's popularity was just around the corner. We've all heard the stories of gatherings in university common rooms every Saturday night to watch the Doctor's latest adventures, and what more critical arbiters of popular culture are there than self-consciously hip undergraduates? But students are fickle things...

It was to be another ten years before Doctor Who rematerialised in the charts. The public (well, five million of them) had just waved a less-than-fond farewell to Season 24 when, in March 1988, the Timelords released Doctorin' the Tardis. While we fans muttered darkly about the liberties taken with series terminology ("It's an acronym, for heaven's sake!"/ "It's two words, you know!"), people who got out more were rushing to buy the single. It stayed in the charts for nine weeks, eventually reaching the dizzying pinaccle of Number One. It's no secret now that the people behind the Timelords were Jimmy Canty and Bill Drummond - who, as the KLF and the justified Ancients of Mu Mu (among other names), made an awful lot of money before turning into self-styled 'art terrorists' and burning a million pounds of their pop-gotten gains.

Quite why Doctorin' the Tardis was such a hit is difficult to say. It was Number One during the summer months, a time traditionally associated with novelty records, and it hardly faced much competition in a stagnant music scene desperate for the renaissance that acid house and the rave movement would provide later the same year. It was a year that also brought us Number One hits from Bros, Kylie Minogue, Tiffany and Glenn Medeiros, after all, so maybe people were simply desperate for something a bit different. Doctor Who itself was hardly hip in 1988; viewing figures were right down, and the series was a critical laughing stock. This same atmosphere had scuppered the the remix of Mankind's theme (Doctor Who: The Sequel) in 1984, and 1985's shockingly misguided Doctor in Distress.

The story of the latter is simple: Doctor Who had been taken off the air after Season 22 while producer John Nathan-Turner was asked to look at reworking the show. Long-time campaigner for the series, record producer Ian Levine (who later helped Take That to chart success), decided to do something about what was, at the time, suspected to be an outright cancellation of the show. He roped in lead actors Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant, and a somewhat motley collection of celebrities - recent series guest star Faith Brown, Justin Hayward from the Moody Blues, Hazel Dean, Mike Nolan of Bucks Fizz ... The list goes on, but gets no better. The resultant single aimed for the profile of Band Aid (all proceeds went to Cancer Relief), captured the quality of The Chicken Song, and failed to match the success of either. Of course, using Who Cares? as a band name hardly helped matters.

So the 1990s began, the series slipped quietly from the airwaves and Doctor Who entered a long fallow period as far as the public was concerned. But something interesting happened. In that great English tradition of cham- pioning the underdog, the national newspapers made sure that Doctor Who retained a regular presence in their pages. As time has gone on, the public have never been allowed to forget the series, and they've been constantly reminded of the fun they've been missing. Doctor Who's memory has lived on as part of the nostalgia-fest that is modern television.

We've had two seasons of repeats on BBC2, the second heavily promoted by fast-moving and impressive trailers, a high-profile week of BBC1 programming to mark the 30th anniversary, a whole evening of BBC2 dedicated to the nostalgic cachet of the show ... It's almost as if the 1996 Paul McGann TV Movie is seen as an unwanted, embarrassing blip, too brash and too much of a show-off to be really welcome in Doctor Who's cosy corner of the retro market.

During this time, a common pop vocabulary has developed, and artists have been free to make reference to the show in their songs, knowing their audience will get the joke. The Beautiful South, in their 1999 hit How Long's a Tear Take to Dry?, tell the tale of a man unable to love because "my heart was like a TARDIS - I went and lost the key in a fight". Robbie Williams pours scorn on fickle trendsetters and their "fashion TARDIS" in the title track of his 1997 Life Thru a Lens album. Meanwhile, the much-missed Kirsty MacColl, in Here Comes That Man Again from 2000's Tropical Brainstorm, sings about the time her Dutch Internet lover tried to rig up a webcam so she could watch him ... do his thing. When he asks whether she can see him, she replies, "No, babe. You look like a ghost and sound like a Dalek to me."

And then there's the small number of bands who've embraced Doctor Who in a far more hip, and less overt, fashion than a simple cash-in. The most famous example is probably the Human League and the aforementioned B-side to their 1981 near-miss Boys and Girls, the legendary Radiophonic Workshop tribute Tom Baker. A number of bands have taken inspiration from the show when finding their names (but not, sadly, The Delgados, who named themselves after Spanish cyclist Pedro Delgado): we've had Dalek OK! and Dalex, but the most famous Kaled mutations were probably Dalek I Love You. This Liverpool-based band helped pioneer the synth-based pop sound that would dominate much of the 1980'charts; they later shortened their name to Dalek I, but still failed to find any commercial success - which was a shame, since Dalek I's Talk is an interview headline waiting to happen. in his autobiography, Julian Cope describes Dalek I Love You's live show as "a weird mixture of uncool and brilliant" - a perfect description of how pop culture now sees Doctor Who.

It's always been left to us fans to explain the exact whys and wherefores of the show's greatness. So, when the continuing existence of Doctor Who was left pretty much to the fans, can you blame them for trying to make things a bit more trendy? When Virgin Publishing launched the New Adventures in 1991, no-one could have foreseen what an impact they would have. While the rest of the world is currently coming around to the idea that Doctor Who might not be as embarrassing as first suspected, the fan writers of many novels embraced pop culture ten years back, merging it (almost) seamlessly with the world of the series.

One of the most obvious influences of the writers' musical tastes is in their choice of chapter titles. You can't turn a page in most New Adventures without stumbling over a Beatles quote or a line from one of Morrissey's more obscure works (Gareth Roberts went so far as to use one in the title of a novel). Rebecca Levene, former editor of Virgin's Doctor Who range, claims there are a few reasons for this: "Fans are fans," she says, "and there's a crossover between music fans and sci-fi fans. The same kind of obsessiveness over story codes would mean that they could also remember the number one record on 22 February 1983 [Too Shy by Kajagoogoo, pop pickers!]. The writers are also trying to be hip about what they're doing. 'Look! This isn't sad or, geeky, we refer to cool things too!"'

Levene also points out a more prosaic reason: "Coming up with chapter titles is quite a tough and dull job," she says, "and picking song titles or lyric quotes makes it easier. It certainly beats another quote from Yeats' Second Coming!"

One of the biggest advocates of song tides as chapter headings is prolific Who author Gary Russell, who has a particular habit of theming each book's chapter titles around songs by one particular band. In his first novel, Legacy, Russell chose Gary Numan. For Placebo Effect, 1980s goth perpetrators Siouxie and the Banshees took the honours. This continues right up to his latest novel, Instruments of Darkness, which nicks its chapter titles from The Art of Noise. "There's often something in the song which suggests it as a chapter tide," Russell explains, "not necessarily a lyric, but something will create a mood."

But Russell's use of song titles doesn't end at this level; he also uses them while he brainstorms his books' storylines. "For instance," he says, "in Divided Loyalties [Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, this time] and Instruments of Darkness, from the list of songs available to me, I picked titles that implied a progression through a story. Therefore, the order I put the titles in very much detailed the flow of the story."

Kate Orman has also been known to pepper her books with music references. Beatles songs appear in her first novel, The Left-handed Hummingbird (Sun King and Tomorrow Never Knows), while Rent and Yesterday, When I Was Mad by the Pet Shop Boys show their faces in Set Piece. "Rent was perfect for that," Orman explains. "The song describes the relationship between a prostitute and a man of high social standing - there's affection and perhaps even love between them but, basically, it's to do with the money. Similarly, in Set Piece, Ace finds herself reliant on a romantic Ancient Egyptian nobleman for her survival." Looking further down her CV, Orman admits, "The list is positively embarrassing. No wonder Lawrence Miles took the mickey out of us all in Christmas on a Rational Planet!"

Some pop music had more a oblique influence on Orman's Sleepy. "Kylic Minogue's hypnotic and threatening Confide in Me inspired the Turtle's telepathic call to Chris," she explains, "while Peter Gabriel's Diggin' in the Dirt suggested a scene in which the Doctor is cornered by someone who has found him out, a scene which eventually became his capture by Dot Smith-Smith."

Orman explains that she uses song titles for chapters "as an in-joke to other fans of the band, but also because they fit the action. Phrases naturally pop into your head as you think about what happens in each chapter. And, as I'm a bit of an addict of quotations, I use a lot of those too!"

Orman's husband and writing partner, Jonathan Blum, helped storyline recent novel The Year of Intelligent Tigers, which features a race of tiger-like aliens keen to force humans to teach them music. On board the TARDIS for this adventure was frus- trated 1960s singer/songwriter Fitz Kreiner, the first companion of the Doctor with any kind of musical background. Blum explains that writing for Fitz is a lot of fun: "I think part of my love for Fitz is a wish-fulfilment thing, from my own years as a frustrated guitarist. It's given me a chance to look at things from a different angle, and pay tribute to a few of my heroes."

Having this shared experience between character and author makes for some very useful, and effective, shorthand. Where, in the New Adventures, Ace's fondness for the music of the day could sometimes seem forced and untrue (was there any early 1990s band she wasn't a fan of?), a yen for music has always been a part of Fitz. "It's a great source of metaphor," Blum agrees. "Putting Fitz's initial reaction to the Doctor in terms of hearing I am the Walrus for the first time expresses something that I never could quite put into words before. Same with that melody stuck in the Doctor's head, and he could never quite figure out what it was attached to ... That's one of those images which just grabbed me and banged at me until I figured out how to get it into the story. By the way, Fitz's songs, including that one, are a couple of my own, which I wrote a while back but never finished - and now I'm afraid I'm too rusty to play them!

"When he started out in 1963," Blum continues, "Fitz was actually a couple of years older than the Beatles were, which gives him a slightly different perspective from the generation which followed them. But then he spent a good chunk of time living in the late 1960s, which would probably just have confirmed his suspicions that he was ahead of his time. At least, that's our take on it," he smiles.

Of course, sometimes things get a little out of hand. Back in the early days of the New Adventures, Paul Cornell prepared to take Ace on a very strange trip - to Heaven to meet Happy Mondays frontman Shaun Ryder - until then-editor Peter Darvill-Evans nixed this particular chapter of Timewyrm: Revelation.

When asked what was the most ridiculous musical reference she saw during her own tenure, Levene is quick with an answer. "That's easy," she laughs. "Lawrence Miles had a chapter title [in Christmas on a Rational Planet] that was virtually the whole chorus - in fact, I think it was the whole chorus - of Girls and Boys by Blur! I pointed out to him that he would have had to pay huge amounts to quote it, so he took it out. I was quite fond of it, though, and would have liked to use it."

So, as fans were, though the books, putting pop culture in Doctor Who, pop culture was busy assimilating the series itself. During the 1990s, three notable bands and a movie composer have had their names attached to the series' theme tune. Erasure and the Pet Shop Boys were both approached to record a version of the theme for the 1993 Children in Need special Dimensions in Time. The Pet Shop Boys declined, presumably because they were in the midst of promoting their single at the time, I Wouldn't Normally Do This Kind of Thing (which they performed during the same charity telethon, using the same 3D effects). Erasure were then approached, but time was marching on by this point (October 1993) and the band were recording in studios in Dublin, meaning that producer John Nathan-Turner's fax took a little while to reach them. They agreed to do a version of the theme but, by the time their response reached Nathan-Turner (some two weeks after the initial request), the producer had already enlisted the services of fan musicians Cybertech.

The other artists involved in bringing Doctor Who's theme to the masses - albeit rather more successfully - are Orbital, who regularly performed the theme as part of their impressive live sets. A fan of the show himself, Orbital's Paul Hartnoll reckons the series' time is about to come round again. "I think there's an overwhelming sensation that Doctor Who is about to become very hip," he says. "It's got to be the classic cult TV programme of all time, really. There's a lot of good feeling towards the show and I think an amazing number of people would be interested if it popped up again." Even James Bond maestro David Arnold wanted in on the act, recording his own interpretation of what he descibed as "a phenomenal piece of sound design" for Big Finish's recent run of Paul McGann audio plays.

Barely a month goes by now without some sort of murmuring of a return for the series and, after the recent success of the modern 'remix' of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) - also sporting an Arnold theme - and bearing in mind the number of hip, young fans of the show now working in and around television, any new Doctor Who might just be able to enter at the cutting edge of fashion.

Which, let's be honest, would make a refreshing change.

Text (c) David Bailey / Doctor Who Magazine 2001. Reprinted without permission.