Will Hodgkinson remembers The Wombles

In 1974, an eight-legged, pointy-nosed, furry-faced colossus ruled British music. They played glam stompers, pastiched anything from folk to country music to classical in a confident and singular fashion, and had their own weekly television show.

They wrote a lengthy progressive concept piece based on a dream experienced by one of the band members and knocked out catchy three-minute hits. They did a legendary set at Biba’s Rainbow Room, after which one of their number made a drunken pass at Biba’s founder Barbara Hulanicki and had to be removed by security.

Their godlike creator found himself so entranced by the beauty of Agnetha and Anni-Frid from Abba at the Eurovision Song Contest in Brighton that he tried to chat them up before Björn and Benny sent him packing.

They were the biggest-selling singles group of 1974. Kids loved them.

“As soon as I had a hit with ‘Underground, Overground (The Wombling Song)’, I knew I had a problem,” says Mike Batt, the self-trained classical auteur who had the vision to turn the teddy bear-like characters from Elisabeth Beresford’s children’s books into the ultimate seventies kids’ rock sensation.

“I had been concerned with not being a one-hit wonder and just my luck, my first hit was a Wombles song. It makes you think what would have happened to David Bowie if ‘The Laughing Gnome’ had been a hit.

“On top of that, the Bay City Rollers could get away with releasing a new single that was exactly like the last because they had screaming girls who wanted to go to bed with them. That wasn’t the case with the Wombles.

“So I went into my little garage at my house in Surbiton and worked out how to come up with a new style for each single. ‘Underground, Overground’ is the same as the Sweet, Mud and Slade: a pop song pretending to be rock. ‘Remember You’re a Womble’ is three-chord blues. ‘Banana Rock’ is reggae. ‘Wombling Merry Christmas’ is a Christmas singalong, which was very popular in the 1970s.”

The Wombles marked a sea change in seventies music by being a pop band aimed entirely towards the pre-teen market. In the sixties, the Beatles had kid appeal, and even more so did their American imitators, the Monkees, but the former at least cut their teeth playing five sets a night to sailors and prostitutes in rough bars on Hamburg’s Kaiserkeller, which is a very different experience from starting life as a fluffy creature with a long nose who likes to womble around Wimbledon Common and makes use of the things everyday folk leave behind.

The child-like whimsy of “Yellow Submarine” and “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” captured a desire for a return to innocence refracted through a psychedelic lens, suggesting an understanding that child is the father of the man. The Wombles skipped the return and went straight to the source.

The Wombles were not alone in the junior pop universe. There were countless attempts to make pop stars of children, some successful (Little Jimmy Osmond), others less so (Ricky Wilde, son of Marty, brother of Kim).

From Rupert the Bear, eulogised in a 1970 hit by the Irish singer Jackie Lee, to Pongo Snodgrass, the hygiene-resistant enemy of the Krazy Gang from the kids’ comics, Krazy and Whizzer & Chips, who was a punk in all but name with his shockingly low hygiene levels, signature tune “I Don’t Care About Washing My Hair” (never released, sadly), unerring ability to annoy people and compromised living arrangements (a dustbin), the seventies really did bring down the median age of the average record buyer in the UK quite dramatically.

Like so many people who found themselves making singles for the kind of pop fans who liked to be read a story before bedtime, Mike Batt started out with high intentions. Batt was ten when his civil engineer father came back home with an old piano, on which Dad proceeded to bash out the same three pub songs he had learned at school.

Having learned a few basics on the piano, Batt was then taught to play an accordion by a Polish boy in his class and became fascinated with the concept of single-handedly creating a full sound: picking out a tune by squeezing the accordion with your right hand while playing chords by pressing the buttons with your left.

It led to school concerts and at 14, answering an advertisement for a pop group formed by a bunch of printers who played in the local youth club: “And I got to sing. But I discovered I had a squeaky little voice, like Peter Noone from Herman’s Hermits. That’s why the Wombles sound like they do.”

The above is an extract from Will’s new book, In Perfect Harmony: Singalong Pop in ’70s Britain.

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