We might not have been able to coax any words out of The Wombles themselves, but we did have a long chat with Mike Batt – the man who wrote their surprisingly sophisticated songs and secretly sang lead vocals on their hits (ten in two years!). We had quite a lot to ask him about, and he had quite a lot to say, so this is a bit long – but it’s all killer no filler. Top of the Pops anecdotes ahoy!

Hi Mike. We have a theory that if you’d been a real band and written The Wombles’ songs about cars and girls instead of litter you’d be considered one of the great groups of the 70s by now… 

"I’m flattered that you should think it. Obviously, I was influenced by all the great bands like The Beatles and The Stones. I was even influenced by a Sunday afternoon of Fred Astaire films. I always had very wide musical tastes. The great thing we had with The Wombles – I say we as if we were a band, well we were a band – is that in order to stay fresh we had to keep changing the style. Other bands like Mud or The Sweet, that we were competing against, they had to stay within their style because that was what their identity was. With The Wombles, we did nearly 50 songs and so had to keep coming up with new ideas. For me, it was always interesting and while it was interesting for me I hope it was to other people."

Your appropriating of the more symphonic and sophisticated side of The Beatles wasn’t far from what ELO were doing…

"I think when you’re pastiching something – for example we did a pastiche of Rick Wakeman. We called it The Myths and Legends of King Merton Womble and His Journey to the Centre of the Earth, because he had King Arthur and he also had Journey to the Centre of the Earth. I made it very pompous and overblown. But we like to think we did them as well as the things we were pastiching.

"For me, as a young guy in my early 20s, it was like a do-it-yourself course in song arranging. My big passion was singing, producing and arranging. And I had so much more opportunity to be varied where, let’s say I was David Essex or somebody, I wouldn’t be able to mess with the successful formula."

You can hear your love of 60s pop in the music of The Wombles. There are nods to the Beach Boys, The Kinks, Small Faces…

"I was brought up on all those people and I did respect them. Small Faces – I was a huge fan. I don’t think I deliberately pastiched them because you need a voice like Stevie Marriot to do it. I was hugely influenced by The Beatles – who wasn’t? It’s almost too much of an admission to make in an interview but when we were at the height in 1975-76, even though we were in a Womble costume you sort of felt a little bit like one of The Beatles, but on a hairy, distant, pathetic level. But there was something nice about being in a band where you could get on TOTP regularly and leap about, even though no one knew who the hell it was underneath. It was a dreamlike experience, looking back on it.

"I like to think that when people say, if it hadn’t have been for The Wombles you’d have been the Beach Boys of your generation, or whatever, I love that because it’s a testimonial to the quality of what I was trying to do. But there’s no doubt that the fact it did have that big W hanging over every song meant they were destined to be looked back on as children’s stuff unless they’re taken out regularly, dusted off and listened to."

How did you get the Wombles job?

"Originally it was only going to be one theme tune rather than a song. I was signed as an artist, but worked as an A&R man for Liberty UA. I left, and used to make my living doing jingles for Smarties and Guiness and things like that. I had an agent lady who used to ring me up and say can you do this and that, and one of the things was she said, 'I’m making this thing called The Wombles for the BBC'. So I went along and met Ivor Wood, the animator, and he said 'I’d like a tune that sounds Wombly'. So I said, 'why don’t you have a song, ‘cause then I can mention the characters and stuff?'

"But I couldn’t get a record deal for it for months. I couldn’t get any time with the marketing director at CBS records. So I asked my mum to make me a Womble costume, she made me a Womble costume and I got into the Womble costume every Monday morning and I stayed in the Womble costume, apart from sleeping, until Saturday evening. So I spent six days a week in the Womble costume; I’d get in the train and I’d go to Birmingham, Manchester, wherever it was I thought I could get some attention. Even though they didn’t know what a Womble was. And I’d walk into BRMB Radio, because in those days you could, and they’d say, 'Oh, this mouse type thing has just walked in with a record.' And they’d interview me and play the record. After a while, down at CBS control they’d see a hundred records be sold in Birmingham the day I turned up. So I thought, if I go somewhere every day I’ll sell a hundred records every day. So that’s how it happened."

What did you think your career was going to be before that?

"Well I wanted to be a Cat Stevens type of bloke. Not in a religious sense, I wanted to be a solo Beatle. I wanted to be a popstar; a singer songwriter. And I’ve spent my life doing that but in different guises and in different ways. Looking back on it I’ve had a really nice varied career and I’ve enjoyed all of it. It’s funny, you set out to do one thing and you achieve something else. And if you end up grumbling about the other thing you’re a pretty miserable bastard. You might as well enjoy the good things that came along instead."

Were you under pressure to keep The Wombles’ songs coming?

"The people who made the children’s programme were only interested in having the one song, and they only ever played the one song – as an outro and an intro. But the other songs were written because of demand. The head of the record company would phone me up and say, 'We need another record in six week’s time'. And I hadn’t even started writing. But I’ve always loved a deadline, it makes me excited and frightened – all the things I need to create. But they didn’t have time to guide me on what to write. I was just having a lot of fun, looking for inspiration. I’d think, 'I’ll do a Mozart one: Minuetto Allegretto. I wonder if I could just nick it and put lyrics to it' Which I did. And the same with Wombling White Tie & Tails, I thought, 'Wouldn’t it be great to write for a big fuck-off Hollywood orchestra?' And while it was selling, the record company didn’t mind at all.

"In fact, they never didn’t sell. Well, by single number eight, number nine I started thinking, 'I’ve probably written enough songs to last a lifetime. And I’ve rammed it down everyone’s throat for long enough'. Two years is a long time, particularly when you really wanted to be Cat Stevens.

"A few other things happened. I wasn’t in full control of the copyright so there were some really dodgy pantomimes put on by the copyright holders, which pissed me right off and in the end stopped me from carrying on. But I’m now back friends with them and we’ve got mutual control of The Wombles and now everything we do with the Wombles will hopefully be something we’re all happy with. Rather than have things happen with Wombles that I can’t control."

There’s a now legendary story that for one Top of the Pops appearance the people in the Womble costumes were folk rock superstars Steeleye Span. What actually happened?

"The way that happened was in those days you used to have to rerecord the record for Top of the Pops. The Musicians Union bloke was gonna come along but I was at Air Studios in the middle of recording the follow-up album to Steeleye Span’s All Around My Hat. So I said, 'This is a ridiculous rule. I can’t just stop working with Steeleye Span and get a bunch of session musicians in to do the backing track'. So I said to Steeleye Span, would you mind just playing the track for me, for Superwomble? So they said, 'No problem, we’ll quite enjoy it'. So I taught them the chords. Then the bloke turned up from the M.U. – we used to call him Dr Death – they’re not like that now at the M.U., they’re really nice people, but then they were bastards. So we performed it and he said, 'Can you just fill this form in with your names?' And the band said, 'Well we’re not sure we really want to do that'. And he said, 'Well you have to because we have to make sure it’s the same people in the costumes on the show tomorrow'.

"And so they looked at me like, 'look what you’ve got us into!' So I said, 'Guys, I’m really sorry but… how about it?' So we got them to the Kensington Hilton, at the bottom of Holland Park, got them all dressed up in the heads and everything. Got this blacked out limo, put them in it, sped them to BBC TV Centre, the Top of the Pops studio, straight into the studio. Did it – heads on all the time – back into the limo, back to the hotel and no one knew it was them.

"Great Uncle Bulgaria, playing a great big Hohner harmonica was Pete Knight, the guitarist was Bob Johnson, the drummer was Nigel Pegrum, Rick Kemp was there… but I’ve got a feeling Maddy Prior wasn’t in it. I think it was just the boys."

When you came to write Bright Eyes (for the film Watership Down), did you think, ‘My career is just going to be furry things down holes’?

"Ha ha ha ha. Chance would be a fine thing! I must say that I have got trapped in animal land a little bit. It isn’t just that, there are other things. Snarks. Although Snarks could be more of an idea than necessarily being furry but… I tend to have got involved with animals quite a lot."

Did you eventually get pissed off being known as the Wombles man?

"Only for the reasons that you put your finger on. Sometimes I think to myself, that was a good body of work, those two years, and even though a lot of critics got it, some of them didn’t. And at the time I’m sure a lot of people were thinking, 'I wish my favourite band was on instead of these people dressed up as hairy monsters'. But as we get further away from it it’s easier to appreciate it. We’re getting a better hearing now than I did at the time."

And does it help that you’re better known as the Katie Melua man now?

"It helps that Bright Eyes happened. It helped that Vanessa Mae happened. I’m not saying everyone would like everything I did but there’s enough distance from the old Wombles days and I’ve done enough things to be remembered by since then that now I look back on it as part of what I am but it’s not all of what I am. It’s two years of a 40 year career."

Wombling Merry Christmas is released on December 12