5. Dougal And The Blue Cat

This is very important, because it’s basically a dialogue album with a few songs, ‘Florence’s Sad Song’, ‘Florence It’s A Lovely Morning’ and ‘I’m The King’, it’s essentially the soundtrack of almost the whole film, narrated by Eric Thompson. I went to see it in the cinema and then my mum bought me the album, and what happened is, having seen the film only once, it became like a radio play. I also had a Goon Show album, which was a radio thing of course. I know a lot of people have spoken word albums like this, Monty Python records and all of that sort of thing, I had Dougal And The Blue Cat, which incidentally some bands have started covering, someone said recently some hip band did a version of ‘Florence’s Sad Song [note: Belle And Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch included it on his 2008 children’s album Songs For The Young At Heart] I listened to it over and over again and I can, and I’m not making this up, recite the whole of Dougal And The Blue Cat from beginning to end because of that album. When I finally met Emma Thompson, who is Eric Thompson’s daughter, I said, "You know I can recite the whole of Dougal And The Blue Cat Soundtrack, and if you challenge me I can do it?", and I can, it’s a party piece.