CHAPTER 68

 

#33: TONY HATCH AND THE SATIN BRASS

“Sounds Of The ‘70s”

from the album Sounds Of The ‘70s

Released: 1970

 

 

The greater part of my record library was systematically dispersed, for whatever money I could get for it, after Laura died in August 2001. I didn’t leave myself with nothing – maybe next to nothing, but not quite nothing. The costs of closing everything down and relocating permanently from Oxford to London were actually quite considerable and the thought of restarting from scratch was unavoidable.

 

However, one would find unexpected things when browsing in the charity shop – this was an era when these places actually were for the benefit of poor people, before they were swamped by moneyed collectors and bounty hunters – and one of these things was a three-CD box set of work by Tony Hatch which was clearly a budget job but contained enough useful items to warrant buying it, for not very much money (since not very much money was the best I could afford at the time).

 

One of the tracks on the collection which attracted me most was an instrumental entitled “Sounds Of The ‘70s” which the sleevenote confirmed had recently been sampled by the Finnish electronic dance duo Pepe Deluxé. It has stuck with me these subsequent two decades with its air of robbed optimism. Sounds Of The Seventies! Such hope – a new decade, not like the previous one; wipe clean that slate and let Cape Canaveral count us down into something which might well turn out to be The Future.

 

The main theme is a lurching behemoth of ambiguity, mostly proclaimed by bright trumpets and occasionally cautious French horns. It resembles an update of George Martin’s “Theme One,” which may have been its purpose. There is the air of a shy circus tent being methodically set up. The pinging lead guitar appears to be playing nothing harmonically or rhythmically related to the piece, yet is in complete concordance with the piece’s intended mood (I have not been able to discover who exactly played on the piece, but to a substantial extent it doesn’t really matter – the post-Walton totality is the work’s motor). The more rationed brass voicings in the second half of the main melody suggests a more rational decade, perhaps of sporting television themes.

 

About halfway through the piece, however, there is a lull and the listener is escorted into a French horn-led fantasy world of gentleness and compassion. There is an ineffable sadness about what essentially becomes a minor key progression – coupled with the “Penny Lane” piccolo trumpet leading the ensemble, it is as though the sixties, and everything they stood for, are being sadly laid to rest.

 

But this is only a momentary interlude and the main theme, after a pause as meaningful as a Paddington Bear stare, resumes, more boisterous and optimistic than ever. There is a final rallentando before everything swells up towards a climactic fanfare, and behold this miraculous era which is about to come to us…if we want it.

 

It is now half a century ago. We know that the miraculous era never came to pass, precisely because too many of us didn’t want it. I subsequently came across the entire Sounds Of The ‘70s album, as an element of another competitively-priced box set entitled Hatchbox. It mainly consists of late sixties MoR cover versions and seems tailor-made for the Radio 2 of that period. The title track is its clear peak, and has strangely (or not) stayed with me because it stands, in my mind and perhaps only in my mind, for a bereaved life renewed. If humanity can’t make it, I can at least try.