The Wombles have always been a very mixed blessing for me. They established me with my first eight hits - and so it was a great, happy time in 1974 with the first smell of proper success in the air. I was twenty-three, and had been 'in the music business' for five years without a hit, and so I was beginning to think it would never happen. I had always vowed that I would follow up my first hit successfully- whatever it was. It just happened that it was the Wombles. In any case, I enjoyed being Orinoco. It did annoy me a bit that a certain element of the press thought I was a lightweight because of the humour attached to the Wombles; not everyone said that - in fact I got my fair share of respect from those who were broad minded enough to listen to the album tracks and the more adventurous Womble stuff - and people always liked the lyrics and the orchestrations - so I'm not complaining. It's just that part of the "joke" about Wombles was a kind of inherent tweeness, without which it wouldn't've been funny. So that sort of rubbed off on me -or rather on my image as a serious operator, which, until Wombles, had been intact.

Now, so many years later, I'm much more relaxed about it. Maybe it's because I've done much more. I still get introduced as the "Womble Man"- which is a bit irking if I'm conducting a concert with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra for Classic FM, playing Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique!

I have never seen any reason why I should get twitchy about my image, and so, unlike some of my more "image-protective" rock and classical star friends, I have a very varied and, I like to think, unpretentious creative existence. But sometimes I think you have to be a bit pretentious to be taken seriously, and I find it hard to do the frown and the black cape! It's all part of showbiz, I suppose, the classical musician with the serious frown and throwing a tantrum if the humidifier in the hotel room isn't quite right. or the rock guitar player sweating onto his telecaster and not smiling in photos.

We are probably going to make an album called "The Wombles Classical Album" one day soon. It would be fun with The Three Womble Tenors. and maybe Shansi, the Chinese Womble girl playing Toccata and Fugue in D minor, standing in the duck pond on Wimbledon Common. There ia a photo somewhere of me as Orinoco in 1975, having just jumped out on Pierre Boulez, the famous modern classical composer and conductor, just as he was conducting Schoenberg's 'Gurreleider' with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Is the classical community ready to learn that Orinoco conducted a section of the recording' And, more importantly, can they spot which bit Orinoco conducted'.

Wombling Free (Feature:1977)

Mike Batt's first movie score was for the dreadful "Wombling Free" which was made for £500,000 at Pinewood Studios. Having spent two years developing the Wombles as the biggest selling singles group in the UK (Music Week magazine, 1975) he was contractually obliged to do the music for this spin-off or suffer the worse ignominy of conceding the score to another composer. It does, for all that, have its moments. David Tomlinson tries hard to lift the movie into Disney/family teritory but misconcieved story and unimaginative direction of musical segments -(which were poor copies of Batt's own brilliant Womble pop group pastiches -on which they were based) did nothing to help. The symphonic score is good -although Batt cannot claim new "hits" from the score in this case since most of his songs in the film were already hits before the film was made.

THE WOMBLE WITH THE HORN
Orinoco giving you a blast of Underground Overground, on what is actually not a HORN - although some of us call ALL brass instruments horns- but it ain't a FRENCH HORN, it's a Susaphone - an instrument more common in the USA in marching bands. We had to get hold of twenty susaphones for a bit of a surrealistic video we made in 1998 - of loads of Wombles coming over a hill, all playing susaphones. It looked great, but finding that many susaphones was very difficult, in England. The truth is, Orinoco can't even play the susaphone- he was miming...but keep that a secret, please. (He does play a mean alto sax, mind).