The art of the musical arranger has faded somewhat into history thanks to changing tastes and the galloping advance of music technology, but Charles Blackwell, who has died aged 84, was a pre-eminent practitioner. The list of artists with whom he worked in the 1960s and 70s resembles an encyclopedia of a vanished era of pop history.
Having cut his teeth in the music trade as a teenager, working with the brilliant but dangerously unstable producer Joe Meek – whose life ended in 1967 when he shot his landlady and then himself – Blackwell was in constant demand, his work as an arranger frequently extending into production as well as songwriting. He was versatile enough to cover virtually any musical style, and artists drawn into his orbit included Shirley Bassey, Lena Horne, Vera Lynn, Marlene Dietrich, Billy Fury, Adam Faith and Slim Whitman.
His most prominent hits were made with Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, Kathy Kirby and John Leyton, and he earned himself further glory by arranging the title song for Gerry Anderson’s puppet space-opera Fireball XL5. He also concocted numerous hits with the TV producer Jack Good, creator of Oh Boy! and other pop shows.
He was born Charles Ramsey in Leytonstone, Essex, but took his stepfather’s surname, Blackwell, after his parents divorced and his mother remarried. The family moved to Islington, north London, where his elder brother, Edward, stayed with their mother, while Charles moved in with his grandmother, who lived in the same road, and began learning music by playing her upright piano.
He had no formal musical education and, as his daughter Mandy recalled, he later developed his own way of working. “Dad used to explain that he’d write the music and arrangement on music sheets, book the recording studio, engineer and musicians, then that would be the first time he’d hear it all put together.”
He first met Meek in 1957 at the offices of the music publisher Essex Music in Denmark Street, London, where Blackwell had found a job as a copyist for musical arrangers. He would work on countless recordings with Meek, for everyone from Jimmy Miller and the Barbecues and James Davis and his Quartet, to Joy & Dave and George Chakiris, but their most memorable creation was Johnny Remember Me by John Leyton.
Arranged by Blackwell, written by Geoff Goddard and featuring a splendidly eerie production by Meek, it was the story of a young man apparently haunted by his dead lover. The BBC banned it because of its death references, but nonetheless it reached No 1 on the British chart in August 1961. Its climb up the charts was greatly assisted by Leyton’s performance of it in the TV series Harpers West One, which had been organised by the Australian entrepreneur Robert Stigwood, who was then building a career in London.
Another artefact from Blackwell’s liaison with Meek was the album Those Plucking Strings, a set of instrumental pieces attributed to Charles Blackwell and his Orchestra and originally intended for release on Meek’s Triumph record label in 1961. The collapse of Triumph dispatched the album into limbo, and it belatedly appeared on CD only in 2006. It was revealed to be a zestful and wittily arranged collection of folk and skiffle songs. Blackwell, appearing at a Meek-themed concert at the Borderline club in London in 2014, instructed the audience that, “if you’ve never heard it, don’t buy it. It’s crap!”
Through Stigwood, Blackwell began working with Mike Sarne, who enjoyed a brief career in pop before moving on to film directing and acting. Sarne auditioned for Meek but did not work with him, and was appalled by Meek’s squalid studio in Holloway Road, where, as Blackwell recalled, “he’d have the rhythm section in one room, a string section in the dining room and French horns in the bathroom”. Sarne described it as “this dark, dismal, horrible, creepy, smelly place Joe lived in with the pale young boys coming out of the dark like Night of the Living Dead”.
But Sarne did collaborate with Goddard and Blackwell, and it was Blackwell’s composition Come Outside that took him to the top of the UK chart in 1962. It featured contributions in a broad cockney accent from Wendy Richard, the future star of Are You Being Served? and EastEnders, for which she was paid £15.
Through the 60s, Blackwell was in the charts constantly with pop’s top names, though even his skills, and an accompaniment by the Tremeloes, could not make a hit out of Jimmy Savile’s recording of Ahab the Arab (1962). He helped create Kirby’s best-known hit, Secret Love (1963), PJ Proby’s Hold Me (1963) and Jones’s What’s New Pussycat? (1965), from the movie of the same name starring Peter Sellers, even though Jones had to be persuaded by the song’s writer, Burt Bacharach, to record it. In 1966 Blackwell collaborated with Bacharach again on another Sellers film, After the Fox.
In 1967 Blackwell’s arranging skills gave Humperdinck a UK No 1 hit with Release Me, which spent six weeks in the top slot and notched up a record-breaking 56 consecutive weeks on the chart. It also went to No 4 in the US. Blackwell had previously tried, unsuccessfully, to record the song with Jones. “Tom Jones’s version was more gospel, so for Engelbert I changed the arrangement into what you might call orchestral country music,” he recalled. “In those days you’d have a singer, rhythm section, choir and orchestra all in one big room. The two top guitarists I used were Big Jim Sullivan and a very young Jimmy Page, just before he formed Led Zeppelin.”
Blackwell also worked with a number of fine female vocalists, including Jackie DeShannon, Brigitte Bardot and Françoise Hardy. DeShannon enthused about recording Don’t Turn Your Back On Me with Blackwell in 1964. “Great musicians – that wonderful Charles Blackwell, so shy in charge of the session. I’m raving about it!” Rumours of a romance between Blackwell and DeShannon evaporated when she hooked up with Page.
Blackwell did some of his most memorable work with Hardy, who, aged 18, had become France’s top pop star with her hit Tous les Garçons et les Filles. She came to London after becoming disillusioned with the formulaic attitude she had encountered in the French music business, and she found a sympathetic ear in Blackwell. “I was free to make another kind of music, not this mechanical music I had been trapped in,” she said.
Their fullest collaboration was on the album L’Amitié (1965), for which Hardy was accompanied by the Charles Blackwell Orchestra. Blackwell shaped the sound of the album, which included a couple of his own songs. Non Ce N’est Pas un Rêve was adapted from Blackwell’s Don’t Come Any Closer, and his song Just Call and I’ll Be There was remade as Le Temps Des Souvenirs. Blackwell commented: “Frankly, I am amazed by her record success. The same songs sung by Marianne Faithfull, for instance, would have meant nothing. Her image and the lonely quality in her voice are all-important in her sound.”
When barely into his 20s, Blackwell was making at least one appearance in the UK Top 10 every week, and would become in such demand that he had to turn down requests to work with Abba, Olivia Newton-John and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Mandy recalled: “As for Frank Sinatra, Dad didn’t even speak with him, my mum took the call and told him he was too busy.”
Patti Boulaye recalled working with Blackwell on her 1976 debut album, Patti Boulaye, and on the album from her stage musical Patti Boulaye’s Sun Dance (2004). She described how he “encouraged and allowed me to recreate the African sounds and rhythms I was hearing in my head”.
In the 1990s he collaborated with the Baywatch actor David Hasselhoff, and contributed material to his albums Looking for Freedom, Crazy for You and David, which were successful in Germany and Austria. A form of immortality subsequently descended upon him when the European parliament commissioned him to orchestrate and conduct the European Anthem, which is Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, and recorded it to be played each time the parliament assembles.
Blackwell married Doreen Bennett in 1959. She died in 2021, and their son, Raymond, and daughter, Sharon, also predeceased him. He is survived by Mandy.
• Charles Blackwell, musician, arranger and songwriter, born 20 May 1940; died 14 August 2024
