"Was there a LP soundtrack for Three Hats for Lisa?"

 I see from the magic of statcounter that someone who googled the above question today was directed to the Gnome Thoughts ... 25 post on this blog rather than, say, post 3, which is all about the film. Presumably google picks up words from the labels on the right as well as the posts, which is unfortunate, but if that person should chance to revisit this blog then I think I'm fairly safe in saying: no. There wasn't. I've certainly found nothing online and have searched thoroughly.

Ah, you say, but what's that image above?



Why, a rather crudely executed mockup, of course.

So why didn't the film merit a soundtrack release?  It was a supporting feature, for a kickoff, and apart from Robert Ross's Sid James Companion I don't think I've come across anything much in the way of critical appreciation - though I do remember a critic in the Glasgow Herald praising its freshness when it was televised around the late seventies. I saw it on the big screen around 1979 or 1980, at a kids' matinee screening in Paisley, so that probably didn't count as a major revival.

And much as I love it, and captivating as Sid James' chance to shine during Bermondsey may be, I have to admit that overall the music ... well, What a Crazy World it ain't, let's put it that way. Which doesn't matter when you see it, when you take it as a single experience, the fairytale which the music over the closing credits implies, but I suspect that certain songs, heard without the distraction of the picture postcard visuals or the beguiling features of Sid James reacting to Sophie Hardy, or Una Stubbs' dervish act, or whatever, might wear out their welcome a tad more more quickly.

I occasionally work with a friend of Leslie Bricusse and when I mentioned the disparity between Bermondsey and some of the other songs he did suggest that it was not unknown for Bricusse to reuse material from his bottom drawer - and as this was hardly a big budget production, maybe that was the case here. I haven't seen it for a while but I've got a feeling that the song Joe Brown - literally on his bike - sings at the beginning, was by another hand, though why that may have been I don't know. Possibly that was released as a single? Bricusse is otherwise responsible for the music and lyrics and the story itself, although the screenplay is by Carry On and Up Pompei writer Talbot Rothwell. But I won't say more, as everything else I know is in that earlier post.

I did toy with creating my own Three Hats For Lisa soundtrack CD, by the simple act of recording the relevant bits of audio from my ebay-purchased off-air recording, and might indeed have done so had the recentish mammoth Leslie Bricusse songbook contained anything from the film.

But it didn't, although it did contain one song which is a tribute to Lennon and McCartney, entitled The Songs of John and Paul written, the accompanying note says, not long after John Lennon was shot. I can't read music, and I can't find a recording, so all I can say is that lyrically it doesn't add up to much, but, like Three Hats For Lisa, context is all ...

... though I suspect that for rather different reasons neither the shade of John nor the living Paul will be entirely happy about Bricusse's concluding line (my emphasis):

They gave us Yesterday.

Ouch! As Neil Innes (or Phil Pope) might have put it.