Little Mouse – The Demo Recording

Been meaning to blog this for a while. Back in 2002, me and Peter Serafinowicz were trying to figure out a song for the Music episode of Look Around You, Series 1. This was the one composed by the ‘song-writing computer’, the Harrington 1200 (£999.99½). Eventually we ended up with ‘Little Mouse’, but for a while we’d been thinking of a song called, ‘Henry VIII’. The chorus went…

‘Hey there, King Henry the Eighth,

You better get out of the cold…’

Anyway, this gradually morphed into a track about a small, and quite friendly rodent. I remember, one day, we were at my old flat, and we’d been quite stuck. We had the title – Little Mouse – and a few lyrics, but couldn’t get the whole tune. We were about to give up for the day, when suddenly it came to us and we wrote the song really quickly. We then recorded us singing the finished version on a crappy tape cassette. The choruses had slightly different lyrics (‘Look to the north and we’ll find our Xanadu…’ etc) and I didn’t have a guitar solo as yet.

A week later we called up Barnaby Pinny – one of my oldest buddies (who can also be seen playing drums on ‘Regaeman’ in Series 2) who’s an incredible song-writer and producer. He turned our song into a SONG. And the rest is… the present.

So here’s the original demo recording by me and Peter. I’ve cut it to a slide show of behind-the-scenes pics from the filming of Series 1. You’ll also see the brill Tim Kirkby who directed the show, in lots of pics with us.

And here’s the song done all proper, like…