Exclusive Shindig! Qobuz playlist #5: KPM – An evolution in British library music 1967-78

We’re very excited to be media partners with the truly unique online streaming platform and download store Qobuz. The fifth of our monthly bespoke playlists, which take in all manner of genres and sub-genres, scenes and beyond, then and now, focuses on the evolution of the KPM music library

TV production music, like so much else in 1966, was changing with the times. KPM had started as a publishing house in 1890, named after founders Robert Keith and William Prowse. By the mid-60s, under the tutelage of Robin Phillips, whose thoroughly contemporary mindset steered the company to work with musicians au fait with the current fads in popular music – The Shadows’ Brian Bennett and Manfred Mann’s Dave Richmond among them – the output of the library entered the “now”. The green-sleeved 1000 series of “music specifically recorded for film, radio & television,” debuted in 1966 with the aptly titled The Mood Modern. The earliest track featured on this epic playlist is Alan Hawkshaw’s ‘Raver’ from the following year’s The Sound Of “Pop”. As the first album to truly mirror “new music” it was one of the few volumes to feature both vocal and instrumental numbers. Hawkshaw’s pounding beats closely resemble the kind of sounds heard in the clubs of London’s Soho.

Over the next decade the KPM library evolved with fashion, but always offered suitable pieces in the jazz, classical and easy-listening modes for the less adventurous creatives in search of affordable production music. This playlist focuses on how the company kept abreast with trends and technology, whilst stamping a particular KPM seal on the recordings across the golden period of its output.

Much of this music became appreciated for the first time in the early ’90s, when a new generation of record collectors and producers stumbled upon this “sample ready” cannon of work. In recent years KPM samples have appeared on numerous hip-hop smashes. To name just one cut featured here, Brian Bennett’s ‘Glass Tubes’, from the ’75 album Industry (Volume 2), was sampled on Drake’s ‘Summer Sixteen’. To save you, the inquisitive Qobuz user, the hassle of skipping through copious albums in search of a groove or a soporific piece of mood music, Shindig! has put together a three-hour selection encompassing several stylistics that embody their sonic adventures in the late ’60s and ’70s.

The early part of the playlist features lots of heavy Hammond, fuzz guitar and jazzy flute redolent of the EMI takeover in ’69. Alan Parker’s ‘Maximum Thrust’, from ’70’s Progressive Pop, offers heavy riffing guitars and organ that capture the essence of Deep Purple, suitable for any number of token long-haired club scenes appearing in shows of the era. Two years later, the Jazz Rock album upped the horns with John Cameron’s ’49th Street Shakedown’, coming across like Chicago playing the theme from Hawaii Five-O. Dave Richmond’s ‘The Amazing Music Machine’, from Counterpoint In Rhythm, has a thoroughly unique sound, part jazz, prog, and funk, which showed just how fast KPM’s forward-thinking composers evolved.

The next section of material has a more pastoral feel, skirting jazz, folk and classical influences. The eccentric Basil Kirchin appeared on a couple of Greensleeves albums in the late ’60s, and his ‘Exotic Butterfly’ subtly takes us away from the heavier material. James Clarke’s ‘Quiet Hills’ predates John Cameron’s score for the Ken Loach film Kes and may very well have been an inspiration on the fellow KPM composer. Clarke’s ‘Free As A Bird,\ from ’70’s Gentle Sounds (Volume 3), saw a move towards louche funk, as did Cameron, on Voices In Harmony (’73), with the sensual ‘Liquid Sunshine’, proving that they too had been listening to Issac Hayes.

KPM undeniably had time for mavericks, which can only be applauded. Ron Geesin had worked with Pink Floyd on Atom Heart Mother, and later cut three albums for the library. ‘Land Of Mists’, from ’75’s Electrosound (Volume 2), is entirely synthesised yet folkish. As we come to an end, the influences of funk, rock and the encroaching disco and new-age music inform equally, but the sound is always KPM. The last track, ‘Mountain Stream’, by one-time member of progressive folkies Gryphon, Richard Allen Harvey, from the ’78 album that he shared with Curved Air’s Francis Monkman, Pictures In The Mind, marks a new era for KPM as they enter the ’80s.

The highly creative 11 years chronicled on this playlist mark KPM’s biggest transformation, and what a pleasure it is to hear.

© Jon ‘Mojo’ Mills / Shindig! Magazine in partnership with Qobuz