Charles Blackwell, musical director for Tom Jones

After Charles Blackwell’s parents separated when he was still a boy, he was sent to live with his grandmother while his mother and father battled over the divorce proceedings.
He found solace from the hurt and confusion of family break-up in the old, upright piano in her front room. He lifted the lid and began picking out tunes by ear, at first tentatively and then with an increasing confidence that would lead to a career as a prolific studio arranger and musical director for acts including Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck and Shirley Bassey.
Charles Ramsey was born in Leytonstone, Essex, in 1940. When his mother remarried he took his stepfather’s surname and began formal piano lessons. Soon he was writing his own songs and at 16 he sent some of them to a music publisher in London’s Denmark Street, the tiny lane off Charing Cross Road that was Britain’s Tin Pan Alley.
It did not publish Blackwell’s songs but was impressed by his youthful enthusiasm; he was taken on as a stock clerk. It was 1956, Elvis Presley had just scored his first UK hit with Heartbreak Hotel and working in Tin Pan Alley, even in such a lowly role, placed him at the centre of the nascent rock’n’roll explosion. Music publishers, promoters and agents all had their offices in Denmark Street while its instrument shops and the local cafés were a magnet for aspiring musicians and songwriters.
Blackwell soon moved up a rung when another publisher recognised his ability to write and read music and gave him a job as a copyist. Still only 17, it was in Denmark Street in 1957 that he met Joe Meek.
A maverick figure who a decade later would shoot his landlady and then turn his shotgun on himself, Meek was in the process of setting up a recording studio and record label. A brilliant audio engineer who had learnt his skills as a radar technician in the RAF, he had plenty of ideas for songs but was a musical ingenu who could not read or write a note.
On hearing Blackwell play the piano, Meek was convinced he had found someone with the musical knowledge to match his technical expertise and suggested they went into partnership.
Blackwell became musical director at Meek’s Triumph Record labels, taking the half-formed ideas his partner put on tape with instructions such as “strings go here” and finessing them into pop songs with catchy hooks and professional arrangements.
Their first significant hit together came with Johnny Remember Me, a No 1 for John Leyton in 1961. Recorded in Meek’s Holloway Road flat, which doubled as his recording studio, Blackwell remembered Heath Robinson-style recordings with “the rhythm section in one room, a string section in the dining room and French horns in the bathroom”.
After their first hit, Jack Good, the television and record producer, described Blackwell in his weekly column in Disc as “the mastermind and surely the only teenage music director in the business”. In truth, Good was not quite an impartial observer for by then Blackwell had already worked on Good’s ITV show Oh Boy!, learning his craft as an arranger with the show’s house band under the musical director Harry Robinson.
However, Meek was becoming increasingly erratic. Their next production together was Mike Berry’s Tribute to Buddy Holly and when Meek used a Ouija board to contact the singer who had died in a plane crash in 1959 to ask whether the record was going to be a hit, Blackwell knew it was time to move on.
By the time Meek had his biggest hit in late 1962 with the Tornados’ instrumental Telstar, Blackwell was already working as an arranger for other producers.
Away from Meek, further hits included Come Outside, which Blackwell wrote and arranged for Mike Sarne and the future Are You Being Served? star Wendy Richard, Tom Jones’ What’s New Pussycat? on which he worked with Burt Bacharach, Engelbert Humperdinck’s 1967 No 1 Release Me, and a number of records with Françoise Hardy.
He also worked on recordings by Adam Faith, Marlene Dietrich, Paul Anka, Brigitte Bardot, Lulu, Vera Lynn and Gene Pitney. Not everything he touched was quite so successful and a veil is best drawn over Jimmy Savile’s attempt to launch a recording career with the novelty song Ahab the Arab, on which Blackwell served as musical director.
Also best forgotten was an LP titled Those Plucking Strings produced by Meek and credited to Charles Blackwell and his Orchestra, only to go unreleased at the time. Years later a test-pressing was unearthed and the album was finally released in 2006. “Don’t buy it. It’s crap!” Blackwell advised.
His final contribution to musical posterity came when he was commissioned by the European parliament to orchestrate and conduct the recording of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy that is played at its every sitting.
Information about surviving family is scant but he was romantically linked in the 1960s with the American singer Jackie De Shannon, on whose recordings he acted as musical director.
One of his favourite stories, recounted in The Times in 2005, involved De Shannon announcing in concert that she was going to dedicate a song to “someone very special” she had met in London. In his front-row seat Blackwell “blushed with pride” before De Shannon declared, “This one’s for Jimmy Page.”
Charles Blackwell, musical arranger and songwriter, was born on May 20, 1940. His death from undisclosed causes was announced on August 16, 2024. He was 84