RIP David McCallum

I have faint memories of watching The Man from U.N.C.L.E. as a kid and enjoying it. 

But the bloggerati's real reason for a David McCallum RIP is K-punk's beloved Sapphire & Steel. 

Which I never watched back at the time of its original showing, oddly - it would have been right up my street and I was the right age too. 

Rereading Ghosts of My Life a year or two back spurred me to watch it finally. And it does live up to Mark's praise. Especially considering it was targeted at children, and made on a modest budget on a studio set, it's an eerie, unsettling, ideas-laden program, with excellently icy performances from McCallum and Joanna Lumley as the interdimensional agents assigned to deal with anomalies and glitchy rifts in timespace. 

Now there is another branch of  David McCallum's career that makes him blogworthy, or at least a  curio fit for Hardly Baked - and that is his peak-of-stardom foray into being a recording artist.  

McCallum released FOUR albums between 1966 and 1967! Mostly contemporary 'beat' numbers that had already been successful in the hit parade for their creators, here conducted by Mr. McCallum himself in an easy-listening but boppable mode fit to soundtrack those archetypal Sixties-movie scenes of people jiving in a nightclub. 

It wasn't a complete folly or cash-in conceit - McCallum had studied at the Royal Academy of Music before deciding on acting as his true vocation. But his role seems to have been largely limited to conducting - the arrangements are by H.P. Barnum, who I think is the guy in the middle of the clinch in the big photo above. The other guy is Dave Axelrod, as in Electric Prunes producer and solo creator of concept albums.  But apparently McCallum did write a few originals, including (I believe) the non-album single below. 

 

My friend Paul Oldfield had this single "Communication" with its amusing period-piece voiceover from McCallum. It's a bit Austin Powers, dolly birds clustered round his motorbike and then he drives off like Mr. Cool. 

Paul also pulled this LP out of a jumble sale or junkshop pile. I don't remember us deriving an immense amount of pleasure from it though. In some ways it files alongside another cover version oriented psychedelic easy-listening outfit that we found going cheap, The Rotary Connection. 

He looks like a handsome seagull.

Don't know what impact these records had at the time. 

But there was one lasting repercussion that counts as a kind of low-key musical legacy. You will recognise the intro here of "The Edge" as a famous sample to a famous song by a very famous producer - a tune still heard quite often on the radio here in Los Angeles.

The Cleaners from Venus pay tribute to David McCallum's most famous character - along with a host of other echt-Sixties names 

Bonus bit on McCallum's deep musical background, borrowed from Wallace Wylie

 "His father was David McCallum Sr.... was, at various times, the leader of the Scottish National Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. He was also one of the violinists who played on the famous orchestral climax passage of A Day In The Life by The Beatles."