117. The Timelords - Doctorin' The Tardis

One week at number one on 25th June 1988One undisclosed afternoon (or was it evening?) Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty – aka the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, The KLF, Disco 2000 and now The Timelords – were fiddling around in their recording studio (or was it The Village recording studios in Dagenham?) trying to come up with a House beat which combined neatly with the “Doctor Who” theme tune. Their reasons for doing so made absolute sense at the time. The Doctor Who theme is one of the most enduring and haunting musical products of British television; a track whose peculiar oscillations, screeching electronic pronouncements and menacing hissing sounds is understood by multiple generations. It had been released several times as a single, initially by Decca then the BBC themselves, but it only charted once in 1978 – on Pinnacle Records no less! - when that distributor and label found a mob called Mankind performing it to a disco beat, saw an opportunity and took the track on. It…