Notes From The Deadline

I had been commissioned to compose the theme song for their new BBC show, and obviously we would need to get together for them to record the vocals. The combined insanity of the schedule and deadline looming on the horizon meant that the only possibility for us all to meet up would be in a hotel near to where they were filming. I’d been told that we would have just 90 minutes during a filming break to record all the vocals, and that even this would have to include a ‘planned interruption’, which everyone was being strangely vague and non-committal about.

Eventually the Jedward boys arrived and the vocal session got cracking. Suddenly there was a knock at the door and in burst Hacker T. Dog, the CBBC puppet (think Basil Brush for the Sunny Delight generation), who arrived, along with a full camera crew and several producers and sound recordists, to film a promo with the boys. Including Jedward, there were now 16 people working in my tiny hotel room/improvised recording studio. The director of their TV show and I were forced into the adjoining toilet, and had to observe the goings-on through the towel rail. Perhaps, like many producers unaware of their artists’ abilities, I approached the project with mild trepidation, but I was genuinely surprised that the reason I experienced mixed feelings about having included so much fancy-pants syncopated three-part harmony in the vocal arrangement was not, in the end, because of my singers’ talents, but because of the session-derailing appearance of a hyperactive TV presenter with his hand stuffed up the arse of a life-sized terrier from Wigan with movable eyebrows.