Doctor Who Chronicles: 1972

Doctor Who spin-off and cash-in records have been around for pretty much as long as Doctor Who itself has, and people who are unable to view anything outside of any other lens than via how anything and everything relates to Doctor Who and Doctor Who alone have been misunderstanding the more interesting examples, usually with a hefty helping of comically exaggerated disdain, for pretty much just as long too.

There’s The Eric Winstone Orchestra’s incredibly quick off the mark 1964 cover version of the Doctor Who theme, widely considered a risibly clueless attempt at replicating the original arrangement but in actuality no better or no worse than the hundreds of other hastily commissioned approximations of vogueishly popular television and movie themes in a still just about pre-Merseybeat ‘pop’ idiom aimed at punters who had scant other avenue for revisiting their current viewing favourite in the comfort of their own home – where they also, erm, watched Doctor Who but let’s just gloss over that for now – and from the sound of it may well have employed one or two fairly fiddly tape-manipulation effects for the era. There’s I’m Gonna Spend My Christmas With A Dalek by The Go-Gos, admittedly plastered in whimsy – albeit charming whimsy – courtesy of someone who apparently had never actually seen a Dalek, but which features an impressive Joe Meek-influenced arrangement, an abundance of Joe Meek-influenced electronic effects and an actual proper Dalek voice provided by one of the actual proper Dalek voices, and was performed by a rough tough club circuit band who got to exercise their actual musical muscle with a blues cover on the b-side; and if you don’t believe me about that, you can find much more about this endlessly fascinating record here. There’s Doctorin’ The Tardis by The Timelords, a scathingly witty and subversive prank at the expense of the music industry from a band who would go on to make their feelings even more famously abundantly clear in a remarkable live television award ceremony takedown which you can find much more about here, invariably dismissed and derided by rock bores, classic pop classics dullards and smartarses fancying themselves as the next next Charlie Brooker but one alike as an embarrassing and inexplicable novelty hit not only no better than Jive Bunny And The Mastermixers but in their ‘humble’ opinion arguably even worse. Then there’s that version off that TV Favourites And Other Children’s Songs album, which at least has some amusing synth noises on it.

Essentially overdramatically delivered beat poetry with often linguistically challenging evocations of the more portentous and mysterious aspects of the character set to an early electronic rock arrangement of the Doctor Who theme, Jon Pertwee’s 1972 single Who Is The Doctor? – essentially to all intents and purposes a vocal version of the theme music – is often similarly held up as a high watermark of what-were-they-thinking-ness, somehow simultaneously posited as a camp reverb-drenched manifestation of Pertwee’s lofty ego and a textbook example of him just reading out whatever was handed to him for the money to rank alongside ‘SPLINK!’. The story behind the record, of course, is inevitably far more interesting than that might suggest – it was on Deep Purple’s record label for a start – and in Doctor Who Chronicles: 1972 I’m delving in to the events that led up to Who Is The Doctor? and why it resolutely failed to trouble the charts. As well as revealing how Madonna, Tina Turner and an animated frog are bizarrely connected to the single, there’s also a look at the rest of Jon Pertwee’s surprisingly sparse yet suitably eccentric discography, the surprising link between Smoke On The Water and Sutekh The Destroyer, and what was really going on with that famously odd b-side. Elsewhere in Doctor Who Chronicles: 1972 you can also find Mark Ayres on the career of BBC Radiophonic Workshop mainstay Malcolm Clarke, Paul Kirkley on how Doctor Who was faring as its tenth anniversary loomed and much more besides. What’s more, you won’t have to cross the void beyond the mind to find any of this out either.

You can get Doctor Who Chronicles: 1972 directly from Doctor Who Magazine‘s website here and from all good newsagents. Toward that point you guide your flight!