The best of times, the Wirtz of times

EMI in the 1960s was fortunate indeed to have on its books a number of staff producers whose formal musical training was combined with a willingness to experiment that was entirely symptomatic of the age.

Sir George Martin (before he abdicated to set up Air Studios) is the best-known and most celebrated, but just mention the great Mark Wirtz to those in the know and watch them genuflect.

Wirtz was born in Strasbourg but moved to the UK in 1963, just as things were starting to hot up in the old country. Within four years, England would be swinging "like a pendulum do", and Wirtz would have a single lodged at number 2 in the charts in the shape of Excerpt From A Teenage Opera, co-written and sung by Keith West of underground darlings Tomorrow.

Unusual, vivid, beautiful and faintly unsettling, the orch pop glory of Excerpt promised much and expectations were accordingly high as to what the remainder of Wirtz's Teenage Opera would sound like. When the follow-up single Sam flopped, however (inexplicably - it's a masterpiece), EMI started to get cold feet, and the Teenage Opera project was ultimately shelved after the release of one more single - He's Our Dear Old Weatherman.

Wirtz's playfully unconstrained arrangement takes in accordion, flutes, mandolin and even kazoo over the top of fiercely compressed bass and drums in a production that stands alongside the very best that EMI had to offer in 1968. This kind of toytown pyschedelia was to all intents and purposes already on its way out by then, soon to be buried alive under an avalanche of hirsute, po-faced and generally not terribly interesting rock bands, but it's a wonderfully uplifting world to visit for a fortifying blast of sheer positivity.

Mark Wirtz is still with us, and now spends much of his time performing stand-up comedy. Life is rewardingly strange sometimes.