Art Garfunkel Bright Eyes

The Wombles at Glastonbury 2011: interview

These days, it takes an extraordinary rock band reunion to capture the public imagination. “Reunion fatigue” has long since set in. However, the news that the Wombles, heroes of mid-1970s pre-teen pop, are to perform their first ever live set at this year’s Glastonbury Festival has been met with hilarity, disbelief and outrage.

For those who are too young to remember, or have somehow blotted them from their memory, the Wombles arose from a BBC stop-motion animation series, circa 1973-75. The programme was based on children’s books by Elisabeth Beresford, in which a bunch of furry creatures inhabited a burrow in Wimbledon Common, only breaking cover to clear away litter.

The band was the brainchild of Mike Batt, who won a commission to write the theme song, but, waiving his £200 fee, opted instead to secure the character rights for musical production. So, concurrent with the series, Batt’s “band” unleashed four Top 20 albums, and a string of hits, including The Wombling Song, Remember You’re a Womble, and Superwomble.

The Glastonbury appearance was enmired in controversy last week, though, when Michael Eavis, the festival’s head honcho, said that he was “cross” that his minions had booked the Wombles. It was, he fumed, “a bit of a mistake”. As the story spread, even the NME leapt to the Wombles’ defence, suggesting that Eavis might have mislaid his sense of humour. Batt responded that the show must go on, but that the Wombles, who are due to appear at 2pm on the festival’s closing day, may now think twice about helping with the clean-up operation.

When he first landed the Wombles franchise, Batt was just another struggling singer-songwriter, whose production company was steeped in debt. After cutting the original Wombling Song theme, he released it as a single, and soon had his mother sewing a costume of the show’s cuddliest character for him to wear.

“I’d go unannounced into record shops and radio stations,” he recalls, “and the DJ would say, 'Er, a mouse just came into my studio.’ I’d say, 'Hello, my name’s Orinoco, do you want to play my record?’ ”

Batt was targetting six- to eight-year-olds, and the first Wombles album was “rather twee”, but, as the Wombles’ audience mushroomed, he came to an important realisation. “If you were a pop band of human beings, instead of Wombles, you’d have to have the same sound, whereas with the Wombles, I almost had to change the style for every single, because otherwise older listeners were going to get bored.

Facts of Love Books One, Two, Three.: Art Garfunkel - Bright Eyes

What has the sparrow forgotten, what has the wind left un-caressed? What meaning has a life left unexplored? What dues must we pay to live in peace? Why do we give the gift of our belief to appearances? Are We so lazy that we narrow our vision, our possibilities so that the meat is gone from the bone of love we offer to ourselves? So, that We live in hollow endurance, vicariously through the meager leavings of our own secret perversions, predisposition, our own bought and paid for ignorance, when the Exuberance of God waits?

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