October 4, 2010

As the RAF faces an uncertain future, its Central Band’s latest album celebrates the Service’s role in a pivotal moment in our history – the Battle of Britain. Adam Sweeting reports.
By Adam Sweeting

UK TELEGRAPH, 15 September 2010 -As news reaches us of disreputable attempts by Army and Navy chiefs to fight off threatened budget cuts by dismembering the Royal Air Force, the RAF’s Central Band comes thundering low over the horizon with an immaculately timed riposte. It’s their debut album for Decca, Reach for the Skies.

 

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The disc has been designed to precision-bomb the heartstrings of the nation by bringing together every lip‑trembling, blood-stirring anthem ever associated with Britain’s gallant airmen, from Ron Goodwin’s rumbustious theme from 633 Squadron to the elegiac Battle of Britain March. William Walton’s Spitfire Prelude flies in formation with The Dambusters March and Reach for the Sky, and for light relief there’s Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines.

 

Leaving no nostalgic tear unshed, the album lobs in a couple of Winston Churchill’s greatest hits – his Battle of Britain tributes about the RAF’s “finest hour” and the “Never was so much owed by so many to so few” speech – with appropriately reverent musical accompaniment.

 

“With a little help from Winston Churchill himself, we have produced an album of which we’re all immensely proud, and one that we hope will continue to showcase the excellence of musicianship for which the RAF has always been known,” said Decca’s general manager, Mark Wilkinson, who is doubtless well aware that the Central Band was the first military band to make a long-playing record when it recorded Eric Coates’s theme from The Dam Busters film in 1955.

That was for HMV, but recently it has been Wilkinson’s team at Decca which has repeatedly demonstrated an uncanny knack for tapping into an uncool, but massively popular mood, whether it’s by signing up Welsh male voice choirs or the band of the Coldstream Guards or even relaunching the indestructible Vera Lynn.

 

The label’s repackaging of the RAF band looked destined for success from the start, with the album leaping to the top of Amazon’s pre-release chart, ahead of offerings from the likes of Robert Plant and Phil Collins a month before its official release date. Timed to surf the wave of emotions surrounding the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, the defining moment in the 90-year saga of the RAF and a pivotal point in recent British history, the disc hits every emotional hotspot with Svengali-like sleight of hand.

 

Even the Central Band’s most senior members are far too young to have experienced the Battle of Britain at first hand, but the musicians are well aware of the RAF’s historic legacy. For instance, French horn player Senior Aircraftswoman Ellen Driscoll learned about the Battle of Britain from her grandmother, who was a plotter at the embattled Biggin Hill fighter airfield in 1940.

 

Read the entire article here at telegraph.co.uk

 

©UK Telegraph

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