Musical adventures of man behind Wombles

MUSICIAN Mike Batt has sailed around the world with his family, written several hits, including Bright Eyes, from the animated film Watership Down, and worked on everything from classical to heavy metal — but he is perhaps most famous for founding Seventies band The Wombles.

Fittingly, the composer, songwriter and producer now lives in Wimbledon, of all places.

Mike, who has just published his memoir, The Closest Thing to Crazy: My Life of Musical Adventures, says: “Would you believe, Wimbledon? It was completely by accident, it wasn’t by design.

“I never lived in Wimbledon until about four or five years ago. If I feel like a little natter with Great Uncle Bulgaria, I can just wander along the road…”

In his book, Mike reveals some of the highs and lows of his varied career, including a near-fatal car crash in Spain where he broke his neck, tense negotiations in getting Art Garfunkel to sing Bright Eyes, and the times he hung out with Beatles members George Harrison and Paul McCartney.

But back to the Wombles…

“I was in Surbiton when the Wombles thing all happened in 1970, when I was first married,” says Mike.

Having been approached to write a theme tune for the new Wombles animated series for BBC television, he suggested creating a song and came up with The Wombling Song. Instead of being paid £200, Mike requested the character rights for music-related activities. They went on to create four gold albums.

He says: “Well, I just thought they were such great characters. I was doing a few jingles but I certainly wasn’t rolling in money and I was desperately trying to have a hit.

“I’d been signed to a record label and we’d had a few near-misses.

“I don’t know why it was, but I just found the Wombles fascinating and so I got the character rights for entertainment purposes.”

Mike’s parents, Norman and Elaine, lived in Bracknell at the time. He says: “It enabled me to ring my mum up and say, ‘Hey Mum, do you think you could make me a Womble costume, because the record company aren’t taking me seriously?’ which looking back on it I think is a really unusual thing to say, because how could you be taken more seriously if you’re wearing a Womble costume?

“The fact was they didn’t see it as an artist that could be promoted and I couldn’t get an appointment with the marketing manager.

“I thought, no, this is a hit act, we can make this into a hit act. Eventually the only way I could get in was to dress as a Womble.

“Having never having met the managing director before, I thought, right, I’m not going to need an appointment with my Womble costume on, and I walked up to the top floor to the managing director’s office.

“I said to the managing director’s secretary, ‘Oh, is Mr Asher there?’ as it was Dick Asher, who became a famous executive over the years.

“Anyway, she said, ‘Who shall I say it is?’ and I said, ‘Tell him it’s Orinoco Womble’.

“So, she went in and he came out absolutely laughing and falling over.

“We had photographs with all the staff and a picture of me, we used a broom handle and took the top off it as a great big wooden pencil and so we had a picture of me ‘signing’ the contract, and that’s how the Wombles were born.

“Suddenly, CBS had an act that they could promote, but I used to go around everywhere in my Womble costume with a board on a stick, saying, ‘Buy a Womble record today’, and people did.”

Outside of the Wombles, Mike, who is now married to the actress Julianne White, and has four grown-up children (two from his first marriage and two with Julianne), has worked in all arenas with various artists.

“I’ve been lucky that I’ve always been quite adventurous with regard to what I want to do artistically, which has sometimes meant people don’t really know how to pin me down,” he says.

“I enjoy working with all sorts of different musicians and I love all kinds of music. I’ve got lots of little pockets of interest and people who know me for one thing or another.

“But if you say Mike Batt, most people will say the Wombles, but other people will say oh yeah, he wrote Bright Eyes, and other people will say, oh, yeah, he discovered Katie Melua and wrote Nine Million Bicycles. And in a way I rather like that Mr Mystery Man identity.

“I’ve done a lot of classical work, my version of The Planets with the Royal Philharmonic was made in the Nineties and I’ve had quite a lot of flirtations with the various big symphony orchestras.

“One minute I’ll be working with a rhythm section or a well-known pop group like Steeleye Span, with whom I did All Around My Hat years ago, but it’s funny how one thing leads to another.

“If I hadn’t done the Wombles, the more ‘serious’ Steeleye Span would never have contacted me and we would never have done that. So in a way, it’s a sort of winding, Alice in Wonderland career that has led me through all these different glades full of strange characters.”

Mike was particularly inspired by another Lewis Carroll story, The Hunting of the Snark, so much so that he turned it into a musical theatre piece.

He says: “It’s weird, it’s very strange how real life and art tend to imitate each other, but not deliberately.

“So, for example, I took my family away on a two-year sea voyage when I had a few bob.

“When things were going particularly well I bought a great big yacht and we went round the world and ended up in Australia. When I got back, I found, almost actually tripped over it in Foyles, a copy of The Hunting of the Snark, a new annotated version by a bloke called Martin Gardner, and literally they had just been delivered.

“I thought, wow, this is interesting and I just sat there and read it there and then in the shop, and I thought this would be great for a sort of musical thing.

“It never struck me that The Hunting of the Snark was about a long sea voyage, where you go off looking for something and you don’t really know what it is.

“It’s called the Snark but each person who goes on the ship thinks of it as something different. So you’ve got the Bellman, the Baker, the Butcher, the Beaver, everybody’s character begins with B for some reason, because it’s a nonsense poem.

“So I thought, oh, I’ll add a Bishop as well because that will make it more dramatically interesting, because maybe the Bishop thinks the Snark is God, whereas a Banker might think it’s a load of money, who knows?

“So, I started to write this piece and not at all imagining that it reflected my own life to a certain extent, having just come back from a circumnavigation of the world in my own boat and I wrote the entire thing without it ever resonating with me, because my life in itself has been slightly nonsensical.”

In 2011, Mike was delighted when the Wombles were invited to play Glastonbury.

During rehearsals in London, a roadie from the next rehearsal room introduced himself.

“He said, ‘Oh, you’re Mike and you’re rehearsing the Wombles, aren’t you? and I said yeah. He said, ‘I’m a roadie for Primal Scream’ and Primal Scream were in the next studio and they apparently were all Wombles fans. Bobbie Gillespie and his mates said, I don’t suppose we could come and watch, could we?’ So Primal Scream came in.”

The Wombles played the Avalon Stage at the festival that year. “My mum was alive at that time, so she’d still do all our costumes, and it was so hot, 82 degrees in Fahrenheit [28 degrees C], but we did an hour’s live set and we pulled a massive crowd.

“The people that were running Glastonbury told us as we came off stage that they had a ‘crowd-ometer’, and we had the biggest crowd of the Sunday afternoon.

“It was fantastic and it was bloody hot in the costume, singing live, but it was really fun and it brought home to me, and I said, whenever I’m feeling envious of my heroes and what they’ve achieved, I just think to myself, yeah, but Leonard Bernstein and Frank Zappa never got to play Glastonbury wearing a Womble costume.

“So the Wombles started off being a sort of oh, god, I’ve got to live this down and now I look back on them and think hey, that was me, so isn’t that fun?”

• Mike Batt is at Henley Literary Festival in conversation with Bill Buckley, at Henley town hall, on Thursday, October 3 at 6pm. For more information and to buy tickets, call (01491) 575948 or visit www.henleyliteraryfestival.co.uk