Sound Bank: 12) Snow White

"You could write songs for Kylie," said the A&R man at Go! Discs.

He didn't need to spell out that this wasn't a compliment. Kylie was in the dumper, and we both knew it. This was the dark period between 'sex Kylie' and 'indie Kylie'. I believe official biographers refer to this era as 'shit Kylie'.

My dreams of being a pop svengali vanished almost overnight. In retrospect, I didn't make a very big fuss about it. I just indulged in a weird fantasy about eating an entire box of Quality Street in one go. Let me tell you, that gave me the worst hangover I've ever had. Kids: Don't Do Chocolates.

Later, and quite by accident, I fell into writing jingles. It all started with the theme for the BBC's Hausa language news service -- they arrived in the office one day with a pile of CDs and asked me to find a suitable piece of music for their new magazine programme. I, in a rare moment of resourcefulness, went home and dashed off a piece of music that was in no way inspired by the theme to John Craven's News Round. That demo ended up on air for the next 10 years.

Over the years, I've written music for TV shows, documentaries and sportscasts. But I really found my muse when I was commissioned to create the music for a series of kids' audio books. Suddenly, all those hours playing computer games and watching cartoons paid off (in your face, tertiary education!)

The first song I wrote for the project is still my favourite. With unrestrained artistic licence, I called it Snow White Theme. Here it is.



Sadly, the audio books appear to be out of print but you can hear more of my jingles on the (badly neglected) Discopop Poductions website.

Sound Bank is a series of blog posts I'm running in August while I'm on holiday. If you want to know more about it, there's an explanation on this page. Normal pop blog service will be resumed around 25th August

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