British library music: De Wolfe, KPM and the TV themes

On 29 September 1973 the top of the British singles chart was held by the theme tune to a television detective series. It stayed there four weeks.

The piece is “Eye Level”, the theme to Van der Valk, recorded by the Simon Park Orchestra for Columbia. The sleeve credits a composer called Jack Trombey.

Jack Trombey did not exist. It was one of the names used by Jan Stoeckart, a Dutchman who graduated from the Amsterdam conservatory in 1950 and played trombone and double bass before he wrote anything. He had others: Willy Faust, Peter Milray, Julius Steffaro.

In the early sixties the conductor Hugo de Groot introduced him to a London music publisher, De Wolfe, and Stoeckart went on to write more than twelve hundred pieces for them.

Music sold to productions, not to the public

De Wolfe dates from 1909. Meyer de Wolfe, a graduate of the Dutch royal conservatoire, came to London to work for the cinema chains and assembled a library of original compositions to accompany silent films, printed as sheet music and played live in the hall.

In 1927, once pictures had sound, the company started recording: first to disc, then onto 35 mm nitrate film.

The trade never changes: write music to catalogue, file it by genre and mood, and license it to whoever is cutting something. Newsreels, documentaries, training films for the Ministry of Information and for British Rail, and then television.

The green sleeves

The other house that matters is KPM, and its records are recognisable across a room: the 1000 series all came out in the same green sleeve, and collectors simply call them the greensleeves.

Inside are the names you then find everywhere: Keith Mansfield, Alan Parker, Alan Hawkshaw. In 2019 KPM digitised the catalogue, more than thirty thousand recordings.

Listen while you read

These are records made to be used, not played end to end. That they now change hands at collector prices says more about the record market than about how they were meant to work.

The themes everybody knows and nobody can place

Alan Hawkshaw is the clearest case of how the job worked. He wrote music for more than thirty-five films and for a number of television programmes his own agency did not try to count.

In Britain three of his themes are common property: Grange Hill, Countdown, the Channel 4 News. Before that he had played in Emile Ford & The Checkmates, who toured with the Rolling Stones, then in the Shadows, and he worked as Olivia Newton-John’s musical director.

It took us a while: three pieces we were playing off three different records, from three different programmes, turned out to be the same man.

Hawkshaw died on 16 October 2021, aged eighty-four. His agency called him one of the most sampled musicians in the world and pointed at the biggest one, Jay-Z’s “Pray”, on American Gangster. He put it his own way: I am one of the oldest rap artists in the world.

Anonymity as a working condition

“Left Bank Two”, the piece lodged in the head of anyone who watched British television as a child, was the gallery theme from Vision On, a programme for young viewers. It is played by the Noveltones, a group that mostly exists on that record.

That is the rule of the trade rather than the exception. The music circulates for decades, the name on the sleeve is often invented, and you find out who wrote it only if you go looking.