Hi there, Nigel of Lt Pigeon here. Further to the broadcast of the recent piece we did for BBC1’s “One Show”, we’ve received lots of letters and emails off you. Rather than answer them all individually we thought it best to write this general reply as they all covered pretty much the same question.

Basically, what you’ve been asking is, “When will we see Lieutenant Pigeon back in the charts”.

Gosh, where do we start!

Although there is still an official Top 40 its construction has changed radically. In the good old days of vinyl singles you simply had to physically out-sell all your rivals. Today it’s far more complicated as most people ‘download’ their music from the internet. Real ‘sales’ figures are extremely difficult to assess because of this. In fact it’s a very nebulous area to even decide what an ‘official released single’ any more.

We ourselves have our own downloads page and it has always produced encouraging – if not massive – sales figures. However, no official body can hope to monitor sites like ours. There must be tens of thousands of sites like our own around the world.

In many ways the new system is beneficial to the music business per se as there is a much fairer “sharing out of the cake” so to speak but most of us in the industry would probably go back to the good old days in a flash if it were possible. The problem lies in knowing who is selling what today!

Of course there still remains the so called mainstream pop charts. Breaking into this exclusive club has never been easy. Who actually decides today sales figures to take into account when compiling these charts these days seems to be a well guarded secret. Without doubt it doesn’t represent an accurate picture of all music sales in the country.

Sales of CDs are dropping year on year too. What’s left of the big record companies seem reticent to release product by anyone other than established artistes. This is why the ‘Golden Oldies’ syndrome has become so prominent.

As if all this were not enough, various TV talent shows now decide who to make famous. An elite group of so called ‘judges’ decide what diet of music will be force fed to the British public. All this has made life for un-established acts almost impossible.

Back in 1972 when Mouldy Old Dough became a hit, every new released single was given an airing on BBC Radio One’s “What’s New” programme. Today the vast majority of recorded tracks, regardless of their merit, remain completely unheard. Who knows how much excellent talent is being missed now in the 21^st century?

Perhaps the saddest consequence of all the changes in the recorded music industry however is the demise of the ‘novelty’ or ‘fun’ record. If somebody produced a ‘one off’ track in the same vein as Mouldy Old Dough today, it would be ignored by all and sundry.

To sum up, we, Lt Pigeon and Stavely Makepeace, will continue to issue our CDs and downloads for as long as there’s a demand for our style of music. We know that we will never be ‘main stream’ again, in fact, in the words of the great Stan Laight, we feel there’s more chance of ‘juggling soot underwater’ than seeing one of our tracks back in the charts!

As a footnote to the question of novelty records, we have decided to release an album full of such tracks very soon. It will be called “When the fun went on” SMA 1612.

Summer 2011