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62: ANDREW BOWN
Tarot/Lulli Rides Again
(Parlophone, 1970)

LET'S go back to your childhood (childhood childhood)...

Should you be of a certain age, you may well have fond and poignant memories of a children's TV series from 1970 called Ace Of Wands which followed the adventures of a young magician-cum-sleuth called Tarot and his assistants Lulli Palmer and Sam Maxted. I'm swooning with nostalgia already just mentioning those names...

Ace Of Wands has since deservedly acquired a shrine of its own in the pantheon of classic TV serials, and a growing sub-stratum of enthusiasts are of the opinion that its theme song rivals the uber-groovy Magpie theme (by The Spencer Davis Group) as the greatest kids' TV theme of all time.

I must admit, I'm with them all the way. Andrew Bown, the man responsible, can nowadays be found cheerfully knocking out 12-bar chord sequences by the trillion with Status Quo, but in 1970 he was presumably reacclimatising to real life after a heady couple of years being screamed at alongside Peter Frampton ("the Face of 68") in The Herd.

Tasked with providing a theme song for Ace Of Wands, Bown and series creator Trevor Preston genuinely surpassed themselves. Bown's buoyant melody, chivvied along by insistently-strummed acoustic guitars, was a perfect match for Preston's charmingly cod-mystical lyrics:

Jet white dove,
Snow black snake,
Time has turned its face,
From the edge of mystery,
Where running is no race.

Isn't it great? Children's TV went off at some marvellously peculiar and unlikely tangents back then.

Couple this with a title sequence which was, frankly, psychedelic and you have one of the most pertinent contributory factors to my generation growing up to be such a bunch of oddballs, permanently disappointed that life didn't turn out to be as florid, weird and magical as this.

10:44am Friday 28th March 2008

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