Another of the most successful songwriters of the 60s, Ken Howard, has died. Together with his songwriting partner Alan Blaikley (whose death I noted here) he wrote hits for The Honeycombs, The Herd and, most notably, Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich. Their songwriting list is impressive.
This was a no 4 for the latter band in 1965.
Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich: Hold Tight!
Later in their career Howard and Blaikley went into writing TV Themes and musicals.
This is perhaps the most familiar of those tunes.
Vejle Symfoniorkester: Miss Marple TV Theme
Kenneth Charles (Ken) Howard: 26/12/1939 – 24/12/2024. So it goes.
One of the two men behind the hits of Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich (not to mention The Honeycombs and The Herd,) Alan Blaikley, died in July but I only found out when his obituary was published in today’s Guardian.
The two were apparently the first British composers to write a song for Elvis Presley.
An (incomplete) list of the songs the duo wrote is here. It’s not a bad CV.
This is the one featuring the “man with the whip” as the Queen Mother is supposed to have said to Dave Dee. In reality I believe the sound was made by scraping a bottle across the strings of a guitar.
Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich: Legend of Xanadu
Alan Tudor Blaikley: 23/3/1940 – 4/6/2022. So it goes.
The Herd’s follow-up to From the Underworld kind of carried on from where that one left off but Paradise Lost was still a very odd concoction, with its intro and coda reminiscent of The Stripper but Prog leanings elsewhere.
(By contrast the band’s third single – which I featured in a different context here – was a straightforward bouncy pop song.)
When a very young Peter Frampton joined The Herd, the group with whom he made his name, they had just been dropped by Parlophone, but simultaneously brought in composers Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley, who had written a barrowload of hits for Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich and signed up to Fontana. The songs concocted for the Herd were of a different order to those hits though. Elements of psychedelia and glimmerings of prog rock are here.
The Music Goes Round My Head wasn’t a big hit (if it was a hit at all.)
It did however bear a resemblance to a slightly later hit by the group which launched Peter Frampton (the Face of 1968 as I recall) into the world, The Herd.
