From Wimbledon to Ski Sunday, it's more than just nostalgia that brings people back to these brilliant sporting theme tunes
A good decade or so ago I was standing waiting for some indie band or other to take to the stage at Leeds festival when the warm-up DJ opted to crank out the Grandstand theme. That I remember the entire tent going nuts to this, but can't even recall the name of the band I was there to see, says a lot about the brilliance of BBC Sports theme tunes.�Wimbledon, which starts today, has a particularly great one and it's not just familiarity that makes me regard this music so fondly.
"Those themes are iconic partly due to repeat exposure, but largely down to the fact they're simply great pieces of music," says Daniel Pemberton, a composer who has provided theme tunes for Dirk Gently, Hell's Kitchen and Peep Show. "They also had live musicians playing on them rather than someone on a keyboard, so they sounded fantastic ? you could hear the passion."
Both the Grandstand and�Wimbledon�theme (aka Light and Tuneful) were composed by Keith Mansfield, who also penned World Series which was used to soundtrack the Beeb's athletics coverage.
Proof that Mansfield's music stands out in its own right comes from the fact it has been sampled by Danger Mouse (Gnarls Barkley sampled Funky Fanfare on Run) and used in films by Quentin Tarantino (Kill Bill and Grindhouse). Mansfield didn't have a monopoly on these classic theme tracks, though. I'm particularly fond of the Ski Sunday tune where the strings slalom elegantly across a backdrop of crashing Black Beauty-esque drums. The track sounds like it was composed with skiing in mind but Pop Looks Bach was in fact recorded as a library track by Sam Fonteyn (the title is a nod to the string part, which pays homage to the organ melody on�Bach's�Fugue in D minor).
And, of course, there's the Snooker theme,�a song anyone who's ever been in a guitar shop for more than five minutes will know all too well. It boasts a riff so fine that Bill Bailey recalled being constantly frustrated that the song was cut short just so that some blokes could hit coloured balls around a piece of baize: "I don't want to watch the bloody snooker, I want to hear the rest of the track!"
Even when the pieces were originally intended as pop songs the BBC did a great job of picking the right one for the job. The riff from Fleetwood Mac's The Chain mirrors the tension and release of the Formula One grid, whereas it's staggering that Booker T and the MGs wrote Soul Limbo ? a piece of music so well marinated in Caribbean flavours it could have gone into business with Peter Jones ? without cricket in mind.
Pemberton, whose favourite sport theme tune isn't a BBC one but the original Channel 4 music for the Tour de France (composed by Pete Shelley of Buzzcocks fame, no less) reckons the lack of live musicians isn't the only thing holding back today's efforts.
"There's a real committee culture operating these days," he complains. "If you presented one of these songs as a theme tune now then three or four people would probably pull it apart for various reasons and nobody would be brave enough to use it."
Has sports broadcasting really lost track of how to find a winning theme song? Let us know your thoughts ? and your favourite sporting themes ? in the space below ?
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/jun/20/wimbledon-sporting-theme-tunes
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