If you were setting out deliberately to make a novelty hit record, you might well come up with this irritating instrumental which topped the charts for four weeks in 1972.
It’s got two essential ingredients: a made-up band name (Lieutenant Pigeon) and a made-up title (Mouldy Old Dough). Both stick in the mind through their utter meaninglessness.
And the instrumental tune is annoying as hell. Which makes it annoyingly catchy. It gives Grandad, Ernie and Chirpy Chirpy bloody Cheep Cheep a run for their money.
Everything about it is bloody awful: the military tattoo of the drum intro, the pseudo-jig of the penny whistle, the plinking and plonking of the two pub pianos playing counter-melodies, played by a mother and son.
The story behind the song is pretty odd too. It was written by Nigel Fletcher and Rob Woodward, who had a band called Stavely Makepeace, and launched a sideline for novelty records (presumably because their own material, featuring yodelling and falsetto voices, wasn’t novelty enough) and recorded in the front room of Woodward’s home – a semi- in Coventry – with his mother Hilda playing the piano.
When it hit No.1, that made them not only the first (and last) mother and son top the charts, but made Hilda, at 59, the oldest woman ever to do so – a record that still stands.
Fletcher’s contribution, apart from looking like a knob in this Top of the Pops appearance, where band members seem to be in fancy dress (Robin Hood and Henry VIII stand out) was to growl the title at random intervals. When asked what the “lyrics” meant, their author – Woodward – admitted he had no idea. Which probably didn’t set him too far apart from many of his contemporaries, including Marc Bolan.
Their manager, David Whitehouse, was singularly unimpressed with this composition when they presented it to him but went ahead with its release anyway. Predictably, it was a complete flop, but was picked up in Belgium where it weas used as the theme music of a TV news programme, and went on to top the charts there.
Encouraged by that, Decca re-released it here and, with the enthusiastic endorsement of Noel Edmonds – then a Radio 1 DJ – it went to No.1 in an early demonstration of the British public’s terrible judgment when left to make decisions for themselves; something confirmed by the fact that the only record to sell more than this one in 1972 was the equally/even more dismal bagpipe version of Amazing Grace by the Royal Scots bleedin’ Dragoon Guards.
Jazzmongers like Tim Cowen will no doubt know that the title is a corruption of “Vo-De-De-O” – a phrase from the 1920s (Marilyn Monroe toyed with it in I Wanna Be Loved By You in Some Like It Hot) – and, possibly, that the song is strikingly similar to an instrumental called White Silver Sands (a cover of an even older Don Rondo hit) recorded in 1960 by the Bill Black Combo, a group formed by Elvis Presley’s old bass player guitarist, Bill Black and Scotty Moore.
Footnote: Hilda’s piano is now on display at Coventry Music Museum (who knew?!) alongside other ‘artefacts’ belonging to the band. Which must make a change from all the Specials memorabilia (Jerry Dammers’ front teeth? Terry Hall’s cheery demeanour?). And apparently it’s played at Oldham FC when the team comes out for games at Boundary Park, officially the coldest football ground in England. Which doesn’t seem to have inspired them to much success at all.