Jim Parker, John Betjeman and A Shropshire Lad

The composer Jim Parker has died - you can read his obituary in the Guardian.

He was a hugely successful composer of music for television, but I remember him for two of quirkier projects. The first, Captain Beaky and his Band, was briefly a cult in the early Eighties and explains why the Gloucestershire fast bowler David Lawrence, after first being nicknamed Syd Lawrence after the bandleader, came to be known as Hissing Syd Lawrence.

More substantially, Parker composed the music to which John Betjeman read his poems on four LPs, beginning with Banaba Blush, between 1974 and 1981. As Jon Wilde wrote in 2013, it was not cool to like these at the time, but they have turned out to have a cult following:

In music circles, Betjeman has his disciples. Morrissey referenced Betjeman's 1937 poem Slough on Everyday Is Like Sunday and chose Child Ill for his 2004 NME compilation Songs to Save Your Life. Nick Cave, Suggs and British Sea Power have all cited Betjeman as an inspiration, whereas dance producer Andrew Weatherall has covered his music. Jarvis Cocker is known to play selections from Banana Blush on his BBC 6 Music show.

This setting of A Shropshire Lad can be found on Banana Blush and I can remember it getting some radio plays in the Seventies.

I was once minded to choose it as a Sunday music video, but allowed myself to become annoyed by Betheman's idea of a Shropshire accent. So I ended up choosing the recording of A Shropshire Lad by John Kirkpatrick, which uses Parker's tune and the correct accent for the part of the county the poet namechecks.

But here is Betjeman himself, reading his poem to that tune.