Alan Blaikley is an English songwriter and composer. He is best known for writing a series of international hits in the 1960s and 1970s in collaboration with Ken Howard, including the UK number ones "Have I the Right?" and "The Legend of Xanadu". Together with Howard, he has also written two West End musicals and a number of TV themes, including the theme music for the BBC's long-running series of Agatha Christie'sMiss Marple.
Early life and career
Born Alan Tudor Blaikley in Hampstead Garden Suburb, London, Blaikley was educated at University College School, Hampstead, and Wadham College, Oxford, where he read Classical Moderations and English, and was Reviews Editor of the university newspaper, Cherwell. After coming down from university, he joined forces with two old UCS friends Ken Howard and Paul Overy with whom, between 1962 and 1963, he ran and edited four issues of a magazine, Axle Quarterly, publishing early work by Melvyn Bragg, Ray Gosling, Alexis Lykiard, Gillian Freeman and Simon Raven, among others. An offshoot of the Quarterly was a series of five booklets on controversial topics commissioned by Blaikley, Howard and Overy, Axle Spokes : Peter Graham The Abortive Renaissance, a critical examination of British New Wave cinema; John Gale Sex – is it easy?, the emergence of the permissive society; Gavin Millar Pop! – hit or miss?, the British hit-parade in the early days of the Beatles; Anthony Rowley Another Kind of Loving, homosexuality in the years when it was still a criminal offence in the UK; Melville Hardiment Hooked, an enquiry into the extent and nature of drug addiction in the early 1960s. At the same time, as a freelance, Blaikley wrote and narrated several BBC radio programmes, including Writing for Children, in which he interviewed C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Enid Blyton. From 1963 to 1964 Blaikley was a trainee producer with BBC TV Talks Department and worked on the daily current affairs programme Tonight. It had been earlier, during his years as a choir-boy at St-Mary-at-Finchley, that he began to realise that, while his voice was less than brilliant, he did possess a gift for inventing ear-catching melodies. This period as a chorister he regards as his essential musical education.
Blaikley and Howard's concept album, Ark 2, performed by Flaming Youth, drew the comment that Blaikley and Howard "have a wit, gaiety, dignity and melodic flair reminiscent of Leonard Bernstein...which suggest that pop is becoming the serious music – in the proper sense – of the age"
Musicals
Blaikley and Howard wrote two West End musicals, Mardi Gras and The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, and two BBC TV musicals Orion and Ain't Many Angels. They also wrote music and lyrics to the 1990 UK tour of Roald Dahl's Matilda.
TV themes
Blaikley and Howard have also been responsible for theme and incidental music for several television drama series including The Flame Trees of Thika and By the Sword Divided, both subsequently aired in the US on Alistair Cooke's Masterpiece Theatre, and the BBC's long-running series of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple.
Interest in psychotherapy
Blaikley had long been interested in analytical psychology and, at the instigation of his analyst, mentor and friend, Dr William Kraemer, he trained as a psychotherapist at the Westminster Pastoral Foundation. On graduating he ran a private practice from his home between 1981 and 2003. This led to a collaboration between Blaikley and Howard and the maverick psychiatrist R. D. Laing on the cult album Life before Death.
Blaikley is working on a memoir Have I the Right? – Memories, Reflections, Notes as well as maintaining his collaboration with Howard, with whom he is co-director of an active publishing company, Axle Music Ltd.
Personal life
Blaikley's partner from 1978 to 2015 was the translator David Charles Harris, with whom he entered into a civil partnership in 2007.
