Ted Dicks

Ted Dicks was a writer of novelty pop and television themes who scored only a couple of films, both for the producers Hazel Adair and Kent Walton and their company Pyramid Films. Clinic Exclusive, directed by Don Chaffey, is a thin blackmail melodrama dressed up as a sex film. The score answers it with something altogether more considered.

What Dicks delivered is a small-group jazz session in the British light-jazz manner of the period: unhurried piano figures, brushed drums and vibraphone, bluesy and faintly melancholic, closer to the mood music written for production libraries than to anything the footage asked for. It works in low light and at low volume, written to colour a scene rather than command it, and it holds together as a continuous listen with no film attached.

That detachment is the source of its pull now. This strain of early-1970s British instrumental jazz was made functionally, to order, with no expectation of being heard on its own, and it is precisely that absence of self-importance that lets it read so vividly today, as atmosphere rather than statement. At this distance the smoky tempos and soft harmonic turns carry a strong period charge, the sound of a particular London moment that a small but committed audience keeps returning to.

This is the first appearance of the music in any form. Pressed in a single edition of 500 copies with no repress, the full-colour sleeve reproduces the film's Italian release artwork. It follows Trunk Records' earlier Virgin Witch, the other Dicks score for Adair, within the label's long run of recovered British film and library recordings.