CHAPTER 56

 

#45: THE JOHNNY PEARSON ORCHESTRA

"The Rat Catchers"

from the single "The Rat Catchers"

Released: February 1966

 

 

"The Awakening" placed fifth in my Your Top Songs 2021 playlist and had vanished completely from my 2022 one, seemingly replaced by this. It was a piece of library music extracted from a KPM concept album (of sorts) entitled Twentieth Century Portrait. It begins with hushed woodwind and distantly hovering strings, moving through moods Debussian and Bartokian. The piece then picks up some expectant pace, eventually landing us in an open fortress of tympani, fuzz guitar and brass.

Isn't this fortress beginning to sound sneakingly familiar? Ominously recognisable motifs materialise but have yet to coalesce. When they eventually do, we find ourselves in the apocalpytic outhouse of the theme to ITN's News At Ten with its harsh pronouncements of the conclusion of civilisation (end of the world fantasias routinely led bulletins). As with Neil Richardson's "Approaching Menace" - later deployed as the theme to the BBC Television quiz show Mastermind - the spirit of Roy Harris' Symphony No.3 hovers into unexpected sight. The music then recedes patiently into disturbable quietude.

But that piece was absent from the 2022 list, unlike the perkily threatening (beginning with the initial dialogue exhortation - "Say YES...if you understand me!") theme to the ITV espionage series The Rat Catchers. Little has survived of that show but it seems to have been routine biscuit-cutter melodrama with many decent mid-ranking character actors (Gerald Flood, Philip Stone, Glyn Owen) leading its cast. The theme is pretty standard fare for the period, but very deftly arranged; where the strings and trombones (I don't think there's any other brass on the track) should climax, they disappear to be replaced by sombre low piano chordalities. It would cause a sensation were it to appear and be used today. Actually I prefer Brian Fahey's screeching brass treatment of the theme on his 1967 Time For TV album, but that isn't on Spotify at the moment (2025 update: it is now).