Telstar is known to be Margaret Thatcher's favourite pop record, though I cannot find where she said this. It was not during her appearance on Desert Island Discs.
When choosing The Shadows' Wonderful Land I suggested that tune shared a quality of "innocent optimism" with Telstar. That is not a quality one easily associates with Margaret Thatcher.
If you have seen Telstar: The Joe Meek Story you will know Telstar reached number one in the UK and America, but that the money from these sales was held up by a law suit brought by a French composer. claimed that Telstar owed too much to his music for the film "Austerlitx".
The webpages for True Blue: A musical about Margaret Thatcher draws a political lesson from this:
In a nutshell there is the Thatcher ethos at home and abroad; British ingenuity and small business chutzpah is appreciated in America but strangled by the envious French. The whole of her foreign policy was guided by such instincts and the memory of Joe Meek.
2 comments:
Margaret Thatcher apparently mentioned Telstar in an unlikely 1987 interview with Smash Hits that was republished last week in the Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/apr/09/margaret-thatcher-smash-hits-interview
Of course one should associate "innocent optimism" with M. Thatcher. The other parties insisted on managed decline with the lousy failed ways of the last 35 years and Thatcher insisted on something different which was never guaranteed to work, but did. Thatcher herself had never experienced anything other than the Attleeite consensus since she was 17, so it wasn't clear another way would work - the fact no-one - not Blair's Government, not Sir Keith's - goes back to that consensus (except on the failed NHS) is evidence it did work.
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