Spent uncountable hours watching the test card. My favourite track was 'Days of the Old School Yard' Cat Stephens which was regularly played during my youth.
Melancholic Rock, what a starter, both here and on the original TC sequence where it just defied all the following tracks to equal its impact. That said, this special compilation is a pretty hot sequence in itself. The thought of such entrancing productions emerging from BBC studio sessions of the time is, sadly, laughably improbable.
Nonchalance reminds me of the music airlines used to play over the loudspeakers just after landing. My father worked for a holiday company in the 60s and 70s and we used to fly Britannia Airways a lot. Immediately after landing they always used to play piano style music similar to nonchalance just after we landed. This brought that memory back to me very vividly.
Yes, George Hersee was a BBC engineer who designed Test Card F. The central circle needed a realistic flesh tone to test the colour rendition of the system, so he got a photographer to make a high quality slide of his daughter with the clown doll.
I really like “You Belong To Me” - do you have any other recordings by the Opus Orchestra? I suspect this track will have come from the Disc Imports library. I’d also be interested in anything by the Brno Radio Orchestra or Orchestron Symphony.
I don't have any others. There was a Rondor Music Ltd LP series from the early 1980s. These were not intended for retail sale but to be liscensed for use as background music in public spaces such as hotels, department stores and shopping malls, or for use as ‘on hold’ music in telephone call systems. Discographic info is hard to find but the first LP was of instrumental arrangements of songs by The Carpenters, which has been listed on Ebay and elsewhere.
