March 2019
You meet some interesting people on holiday. In Antigua recently I got chatting to someone with a past he’d prefer to forget. At first he didn’t let on about it, just that he’d been a musician and composer. Now in his 70s he said that these days he spent most of his time writing for a motoring magazine. All I could gather wast that his name was Simon.

Being curious as to who this former musician/composer might be I managed to track down his full name from the motoring magazine he wrote for. Typing it into google the first entry I came up with was ‘The Simon Park Orchestra’.

Ring any bells?

To my amazement the next entry was a YouTube link to a an episode of Top of the Pops back in 1973 with Noel Edmonds introducing the year’s most unlikely hit – Eye Level by the Simon Park Orchestra! And there was a very youthful Simon, aged about 28, conducting.

As anyone who was around in the 70s will remember, the very hummable tune ‘Eye Level’ was the theme tune to the hit TV detective series Van Der Valk. It was Simon’s good fortune at the time to be asked to record it. It came straight in at No 1 and stayed there for 4 weeks!

When I emailed Simon to tell him he’d been rumbled he replied saying ‘Aaargh! I’ve been dogged by that wretched tune for 47 years. You may well understand why I prefer to forget it when I tell you I only conducted the orchestra. I earned hardly a penny in royalties because someone else wrote the tune.’

Well, as a lifelong pop music fan I’m still in awe of meeting someone who’s had a No 1 hit and been on Top of the Pops. It really made my holiday!