Doctor Teleny, Taping the Top 20 and the Search for a Lost Record

Back in the early Seventies I was a willing participant in a ubiquitous teenage ritual. Every Sunday afternoon, like countless other pop fans, I’d retreat into my bedroom with the family’s portable transistor (a sturdy Roberts) to record the Top 20. I’d set up my equipment and twiddle the radio dial down from Radio 4 to find Pick of the Pops, on Wonderful Radio 1. My nail-bitten fingers hovered over the record button and I waited while the swinging cymbal theme played out, ready to pounce. The skill was to hit pause at the right moment, and thus excise any talking between the records.

Most things got taped. I drew the line at what I considered to be “not proper music” (country & western, juvenile singers who I’d first seen on TV talent shows and anything involving bagpipes). But otherwise – armed with that week’s charts, hastily scribbled down at school during lunchtime the previous Tuesday – all new entries were duly captured on compact, red and grey Philips C60s.

In those days, the first part of Pick of the Pops was usually taken up with records perceived as “bubbling under”: in other words, things Alan “Fluff” Freeman liked that were not yet hits but which he felt for sure would be next week. Sometimes I taped these too. The problem with this was that if a record flopped and was thus never played on the radio again, and if I failed to write down the title or artist, then I was left with a recording of an unidentified song.

I taped one such “breaker” in mid-1972, during the long summer of School’s Out, Silver Machine, Starman and All the Young Dudes – always my favourite year. It was an instrumental with an oddly distorted percussion sound – not unlike the Dr Who music, I thought at the time – and a twangy guitar riff that resembled the theme to one of those detective shows my dad watched. I was with Fluff on this one, and waited for it to chart. But it didn’t and sure enough, I never heard it again on the radio. The tape it was on – like all my Top 20 compilations – was played again and again over the next year or two but in the end was recycled. As my musical tastes changed, albums became more important than the charts, so I borrowed them from friends and taped over Pick of the Pops. Then punk singles took over and I made mixtapes of those. The beauty was that you could reuse cassettes lots of times. So I did. But when I no longer had that recording from 1972, I could no longer hear that mystery record.

Later, as I looked back, ten, twenty, thirty years, fondly recalling my Sunday afternoon ritual with the cassette recorder, I remembered hearing Virginia Plain for the first time and being totally floored (a song without a chorus?). I remembered the way the fadeout of All the Young Dudes was abruptly interrupted on the tape by the first bar of Layla – clumsy editing there. I also remembered that weird distorted percussion and twang record. What the hell was that? But with no lyrics to search up and no real memory of the melody I had virtually nothing to go on. I couldn’t hum it or sing it to anyone. It just lodged there among my synapses and neurons, a fragment of an echo, trapped in my internal netherworld along with other random childhood memories.

I flicked through reference books of chart hits in the hope that a title or artist might leap from the page. The only one that did was Peter Straker and the Hands of Dr Teleny, who had a hit with The Spirit is Willing in 1972, an interpretation of J.S. Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. Peter Straker … nope, nothing there. Hadn’t he been in the musical Hair? But, hang on, Dr Teleny. A very faint “ping” rang in my head. YouTube yielded nothing though. Just Straker’s hit single, a piece of frilly-cuffed pop which certainly wasn’t my long-lost ghost of a record and I doubt ever made my Philips C60s.

Then in 2017, whilst surfing Soundcloud in an idle moment, I discovered episodes from seventies Radio 1 that various people had put up. Shows by John Peel, Johnnie Walker and Alan Freeman, lovingly taped back in the day (news bulletins and all) but never erased, were now uploaded and ready to be heard again: it was yesterday once more.

One Alan Freeman show, uploaded by Noel Tyrrel (thanks Noel!)* and dated Whitsun Bank Holiday, 29 May 1972, looked good. It wasn’t Pick of the Pops but I clicked play. The sound of ancient tape hiss and muffled spooling gave way to T. Rex and their exuberant Metal Guru. This was followed by other current releases (Neil Sedaka, Sweet), interspersed by chitchat from Fluff. About twenty minutes in, following a tedious “get it off your chest” slot about fox hunting, and obviously anxious to get on with the music, Fluff reached for his big turntable lever (a la Smashy and Nicey) and said, in that urgent, authoritative way he had which made everything sound of the utmost importance: “And right now, the Hands of Dr Teleny”.

Before I could utter “not ‘arf”, a melodramatic string section swirled into action and what sounded like someone hammering and bending a tubular bell segued into cop-show guitar stabs. THAT’S IT! This was my mystery record. When it finished, I slid the cursor back and played it again. And again. And the record I could barely remember suddenly seemed as familiar as when I last heard it, which must have been getting on for forty-five years ago.

“What an arrangement,” said Fluff enthusiastically and helpfully told me it was called O Brave New World. Armed with that I searched again online. I could find no audio of it anywhere and virtually nothing about the record, except an entry on 45cat, which revealed it was on the orange RCA Victor label, like Bowie, and the B-side was called Cities of the Plain. There was a clue here – Teleny was a Victorian homoerotic novel and so was The Sins of the Cities of the Plain. Teleny is authorless but often attributed to Oscar Wilde. Elsewhere it is claimed it was written by several hands – the hands of Dr Teleny?

According to the label, the musical director was bandleader Zack Laurence. O Brave New World was an arrangement of something by Chopin. Searching on, I found that Laurence had made a whole album of electrified classical “interpretations”, released the same year under the name The Outrageous Dr Teleny’s Incredible Plugged-In Orchestra. This had the equally cumbersome title: Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley Present Stolen Goods – Gems Lifted From The Masters. And that, I discovered, is on YouTube. Howard and Blaikley are two of the UK’s most successful producers and songwriters and in the Sixties wrote hits for everyone, from Lulu, The Herd and Marmalade to Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich, as well as anonymously creating Ark 2, the ambitious concept album by Flaming Youth, Phil Collins’ first band, in 1969 (a flop, like Dr Teleny).

But, hang on … the first track on Stolen Goods, lo and behold, is O Brave New World – except here it is called The People, Yes. I can only imagine that the title was considered rather rubbish and so it was renamed for single release. But which came first I don’t know, so I’m guessing here. And is it any good? Not really, to be fair. At least, forty-five years on it sounds very dated. I don’t expect you to like it. But I don’t care. It’s my mythic lost track from summer 1972 and now I’ve got it taped again.

*Alan Freeman Show from 29 May 1972 on Soundcloud. Fast-forward (cassette fans) to 27:43.