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Lieutanant Pigeon Mouldy Old Dough

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Lieutenant Pigeon - Mouldy Old Dough' 1972
MP3 VBR 270-298 kbit/s

Lieutenant Pigeon was a British musical group popular in the early 1970s. A spin-off from an experimental music band Stavely Makepeace, it was fronted by Rob Woodward. The group's sound was dominated by a heavy ragtime-style piano played by Woodward's mother, Hilda.
Lieutenant Pigeon achieved two UK hits: "Mouldy Old Dough", written by Rob Woodward with bandmate Nigel Fletcher, reached #1 in 1972, followed by "Desperate Dan" (#17 in 1973). Both tracks were largely instrumental, with the titles providing virtually the only lyrics.

Biography by Richie Unterberger
A truly odd popular music ensemble for 1970s Britain, Lieutenant Pigeon enjoyed a fairly long and successful recording career with their offbeat, mostly instrumental music. Not exactly easy to categorize as rock, it's nonetheless hard to know what else to call their mix of martial percussion (similar to that heard in Napoleon XIV's infamous hit "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Ha"), century-old sounding parlor music, and weird insertions of fifes, rickety pianos, and half-buried miscellaneous vocal growls. That their debut single made it all the way to number one in the U.K. is a testament to the British tolerance and indeed encouragement of eccentricity that could be cultivated nowhere else.

The mainstays of Lieutenant Pigeon were Rob Woodward and Nigel Fletcher, both of whom had been playing in bands since the early '60s. Under the name Shel Naylor, Woodward had recorded a couple of singles for Decca in 1963-1964; one of those, "One Fine Day," was a Dave Davies composition that the Kinks never officially released. By the late '60s, the pair were making home recordings in the front room of the Coventry house of Woodward's mother, Hilda Woodward. Rob Woodward and Fletcher formed a band, Stavely Makepeace, which began releasing records in 1969.

Lieutenant Pigeon was conceived of as sort of a novelty alter ego band of Stavely Makepeace, intended to emphasize humorous instrumental music. As further evidence that it was not as seriously aimed at the pop/rock market, Hilda Woodward, then in her late fifties, was added to the lineup on piano. The semi-joke became more successful than could have been reasonably anticipated though, when their first single, "Mouldy Old Dough," came out in 1972. A characteristically zany, unclassifiable bit of instrumental madness with Joe Meek-like wobbly piano and those unavoidable marching rhythms, it became number one in Belgium after it was used as a theme for a current affairs television show. By the end of the year it was number one in their native Britain as well.

Lieutenant Pigeon had just one more big British hit, "Desperate Dan," which made the Top Twenty after its release at the end of 1972. They continued to grind out records for most of the rest of the 1970s though, getting a number two hit in Australia in 1974 with their version of "I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen." Woodward and Fletcher then established themselves as producers of jingles, voice-overs, and such for radio. They told their own story in their joint autobiography When Show Business is No Business, published in 2001.

Tracklist:
01_Mouldy Old Dough
02_Desperate Dan
03_Grandfather's Clock
04_Disco Bells
05_The Blue Danube
06_Jumpin' Jack
07_Monkey Song
08_Pigeon Rendezvous
09_Yellow Submarine
10_Dirty Old Man
11_Aunty May
12_I'm A Window Cleaner
13_Scarecrow
14_I'll Sail My Ship Alone
15_Goodbye (From 'White Horse Inn')
Running time:39:57 min

Lineup:
Robert Woodward - keyboards
Hilda Woodward - piano
Stephen Johnson - bass guitar
Nigel Fletcher - drums

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