Charles Blackwell, arranger behind 1960s hits for Engelbert Humperdinck and Tom Jones – obituary
Charles Blackwell, the composer, music director and producer, who has died aged 84, was one of the busiest music arrangers of the 1960s, adapting, harmonising and orchestrating dozens of pop melodies and film scores.
He started working as an arranger aged 18 with the sound engineer, composer and record producer Joe Meek, who was musically illiterate and could not notate or harmonise his melodies. Blackwell became skilled in turning Meek’s musings into catchy pop songs, though he admitted it was uphill work: “The demo tapes I remember were of him singing in a high falsetto and talking at the same time, singing ‘da di da da di da – strings go in here – da di da.’ ”
Meek appointed Blackwell music director when he established his short-lived record label Triumph Records, and their first big success together was Johnny Remember Me which became a No 1 for John Leyton. Writing in Disc magazine, Jack Good, the television and record producer, described Blackwell as “the mastermind and surely the only teenage music director in the business”.
Blackwell recalled: “When we worked at [Meek’s] flat in Holloway Road he’d have the rhythm section in one room, a string section in the dining room and French horns in the bathroom.” But Meek, bipolar and gay at a time when homosexual acts were illegal, had a troubled personality.
“He would use an ouija board to get in touch with Buddy Holly to find out if a record [Mike Berry’s Tribute to Buddy Holly, another Meek-Blackwell collaboration] was going to be a hit,” Blackwell said, “and was known to crawl around graveyards taping cats hissing... He believed he was possessed.”
The collaboration ended, in Blackwell’s words, “before things got pretty dark and Joe shot his landlady and himself”.
That was in 1967, and by then Blackwell’s career had “snowballed because I was getting hits. Almost all of the other companies and other producers were interested in working with me.”
Though he was mostly uncredited by the record labels, the list of stars with whom Blackwell worked reads like a Who’s Who of British Sixties pop, his hit arrangements including I’ll Never Fall in Love Again for Tom Jones and A Man Without Love and Release Me for Engelbert Humperdinck.
The latter held the No 1 slot in the British charts for six weeks in 1967, preventing the Beatles’ Penny Lane from reaching the top. It became the biggest-selling record of 1967 and still holds the record for the longest consecutive stay in the charts, 56 weeks. In 1968 Blackwell bought an estate from the royalties he received from the hit.
Blackwell was also responsible for the sophisticated arrangements of Burt Bacharach film scores for two Peter Sellers films, What’s New Pussycat? (1965), the title song becoming a hit for Tom Jones, and After the Fox (1966). He was involved in the recordings of Hold Me for PJ Proby and several Kathy Kirby hits including Secret Love. In 1969 he composed the music for the James Bond spoof Some Girls Do.
Blackwell also developed a sideline in arranging and conducting studio recordings for French artists, most notably Fran?oise Hardy, for whom he composed several hits.
In an interview with Gordon Thompson for his book Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop Inside Out, Blackwell described his approach: “I would hear the whole song in my head and the whole feel of the arrangement... I always found it very helpful to have some picture in my mind of what artist would be singing it.”
He created his own orchestra, and his arrangements were collaborative efforts with the instrumentalists. “He was such a good arranger and he let us have a little freedom,” the drummer Bobby Graham recalled. “If we said ‘Charlie, this passage here, can we change that and do so and so?’ he’d say ‘Yeah, go for it.’”
“Catching people’s ears” was paramount and Blackwell paid particular attention to what one critic called “sure-footed, stop-what-you’re-doing vocal intros”. He worked closely with producers and singers, often helping perfomers during recording sessions by hitting the note they should sing on the piano, which only they would hear on their headphones.
He did much work with Jack Good, producing for Decca. Good “used to be one for atmosphere and feel”, Blackwell recalled, and he remembered going “into the control room and saying, ‘It’s a great take but the bass guitar’s off a little bit.’ ‘Oh I don’t care,’ Good replied, ‘there’s lots of hit records with mistakes on them’.”
Blackwell was born Charles Ramsey in Leytonstone, Essex, on May 20 1940. His parents divorced when he was young and when his mother remarried he took his stepfather’s name. During his parents’ divorce he lived for a time with his grandmother and fell in love with her upright piano, picking out tunes by ear. Later he had piano lessons and began composing songs.
Aged 16 he sent some of his efforts to the Denmark Street publishers Campbell Connolly. They did not publish the songs but gave him a job as a stockboy. Moving to a similar job at Essex Music, he began attracting attention when arrangers needed a copyist. He worked with several arrangers, including Harry Robinson, music director for Jack Good’s ITV show Oh Boy!, learning his craft with musicians in the television house bands as he went along.
In 1957, when Joe Meek visited his then patron, Denis Preston, who shared offices with Essex Music, he heard the 17-year-old Blackwell play the piano and suggested they write together: “So I left Essex Music and went freelance.”
Among other hits, he wrote Come Outside, a single credited to Mike Sarne (who performed it with the future Are You Being Served? star Wendy Richard) “with accompaniment directed by Charles Blackwell”. It went to No 1 in 1962. The same year, more lamentably, he was musical director for Ahab the Arab, a novelty song sung by Jimmy Savile during a brief and unsuccessful attempt to launch a recording career.
During the 1960s Blackwell was briefly romantically involved with the American singer-songwriter Jackie DeShannon. Before she went back home she played a show in which she dedicated her biggest hit, What the World Needs Now Is Love, to “someone very special” she had met in London. According to a report in The Times Blackwell, in a front-row seat, “blushed with pride” – before DeShannon added: “This one’s for Jimmy Page.”
Blackwell remained busy in the 1970s, including arranging and conducting the Luxembourg entry (Bye Bye I Love You, sung by Ireen Sheer) at the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest. It finished fourth. But by the end of the decade his output seemed to have dropped off somewhat.
In the 1990s, in what one critic described as the “nadir” of Blackwell’s career, he helmed a long-running campaign to get David Hasselhoff into the charts, achieving some success in Germany. He was also later commissioned by the European Parliament to orchestrate and conduct the Anthem of Europe (Beethoven’s Ode to Joy) with a 70-strong orchestra, for a new recording that is played at every parliamentary sitting.
Very few recordings feature Blackwell on the credits. Those that do include the album Those Plucking Strings, with “Charles Blackwell and his Orchestra”, originally produced by Joe Meek but not released by the time his Triumph label folded.
In 1997 a test-pressing surfaced at a north London record shop. For 30 years it had been in the hands of the daughter of Joe Meek’s ill-fated landlady. Those Plucking Strings was finally released in 2006, though Blackwell told the audience at a Joe Meek-themed show in London, “If you’ve never heard it, don’t buy it. It’s crap!”
Charles Blackwell, born May 20 1940, death announced August 16 2024
