MIKE BATT

Every month we get inside the mind of one of the biggest names in music. This issue it’s Mike Batt. Best known for writing the theme tune to the popular children’s TV show The Wombles, the British composer and arranger began his career gigging in seedy strip clubs but soon found himself teaming up with Family on their debut album. He’s since had a strong association with progressive music, working with everyone from Steeleye Span to Hawkwind, as well as working with contemporary pop acts including Katie Melua and Olly Murs. Last year, he released Songs From Croix-Noire, a prog concept album based on an ambitious multimedia project. Here he discusses his career so far and why it was finally time to dust off his eye-wateringly expensive, and previously unreleased 70s rock opera album.

Words: Jo Kendall

There are polymaths, and there’s Mike Batt. He’s most widely known in the UK as the man behind the hit-laden music for children’s TV show The Wombles, but not long before that he was a young singer-songwriter musician with dreams of arranging and conducting orchestras.

Southampton-born Batt found himself with a top job in A&R at Liberty Records in London in 1968 at age 19, and moved into arranging via Family’s debut album, Music In A Doll’s House. Batt also recorded albums of popular cover versions, created film scores, collaborated with Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd-Webber and wrote jingles for adverts.

Batt in a promo pic for his first record as a solo artist, You Would Have Been A Rock ’N’ Roller, in March 1975.

WATFORD/MIRRORPIX/MIRRORPIX VIA GETTY IMAGES

Mike Batt’s prog concept album, Songs From Croix-Noire.

For all his commercial work, and massive success with songs such as the No.1 hit Bright Eyes from the film Watership Down, the discovery and management of best-selling jazz-pop musician Katie Melua, and classical acts Vanessa Mae, Bond and The Planets, Batt’s always pushed the envelope. He moved from The Wombles to producing Steeleye Span to creating his own, elaborate and imaginative solo records. He’s put the wildest combination of contributors together, such as Frank Bruno, Ozzy Osbourne and Billy Connolly for The Dreamstone TV series (“If you don’t ask, you don’t get!” he says), and saw his 1984 Lewis Carroll mega-musical The Hunting Of The Snark fly high, with animations he’d created himself, then get hobbled by the record industry.

And yet, in the pursuit of art, he would still throw all caution to the wind.

“I’ve not been constantly wealthy, because I’ve taken risks,” Batt tells Prog. “I’ve done things I wanted to do, not because they necessarily paid the mortgage.”

Batt is currently promoting his Croix-Noire collaboration with young French writer Jean-Charles Capelli, aka Ace Hansel Jr, and developing a Reggie Perrin musical with authors David Quantick and Jonathan Coe, based on the 70s sitcom that explored a suburban middle-manager’s escapist fantasies. His 1973 orchestral rock album that cost him £11,000 and fell through several major label cracks, Variations On A Riff, has just hit Spotify.