95: LIEUTENANT PIGEON
Mouldy Old Dough/ The Villian (Decca, 1972)

THIS record is a bit rubbish, really – but do you not often find that there are things about yourself that kind of let the side down, so to speak?

Perhaps you’re a health food fanatic who just can’t help, every now and again, eating an entire block of lard in one sitting, straight from the fridge. Perhaps you temper your high-minded appetite for literature written by Booker Prize winners such as Aravind Adiga and Kiran Desai with the occasional copy of Nuts magazine.

With me, it’s a shameful fondness for novelty records with no intrinsic worth whatsoever. Mind you, I say that, but Mouldy Old Dough has arguably got more bass presence on it that any other record released in 1972: heaven knows how they managed to cut it without making your stylus jump clean out of the groove...

I’m getting ahead of myself here, though. For those of you who may not have been about at the time, Mouldy Old Dough captured the public imagination to an inexplicable degree and actually planted itself into the number one slot in October 1972. It was a largely instrumental piece – save for the repetition of the title – and was built around the ragtime piano playing of Hilda Woodward, a sweet old lady who was the mother of band member Rob Woodward.

Few were aware in those days that Woodward and bandmate Nigel Fletcher led an exotic double life as members of Stavely Makepeace, an altogether wonderful experimental music ensemble funded in the main by Lieutenant Pigeon’s vast hit single (outsold in 1972 only by the Band Of The Royal Scots Dragoon Guards’ ear-punishing bagpipe rendition of Amazing Grace).

So you see, they were a bit cool after all: and they brought a great deal of cheer to a certain Scottish/Italian git in his penultimate autumn of primary school, for which I’ll always love them.