Lord Rockingham's XI
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Lord Rockingham's XI was a group of British session musicians, led by Harry Robinson (1932-1996), who had a #1 hit on the UK Singles Chart in 1958 with "Hoots Mon".
The group was put together to play as the resident band on the pop TV programme, Oh Boy!, which was produced by Jack Good, and shown nationally on ITV in the UK in 1958/59. They were fronted by Harry Robinson, and also included jazz saxophonist and later writer Benny Green, and organist Cherry Wainer. They recorded several novelty rock instrumentals for Decca Records, the first being "Fried Onions", which failed to chart. However, the second single, Robinson's "Hoots Mon", a rocked-up version of the traditional Scottish song, "A Hundred Pipers", and featuring mock Scottish cries like "Hoots mon, there's a moose loose aboot this hoose!", rose up the charts supported by weekly TV exposure, and stayed at number one for three weeks.
Following a legal case brought by descendants of the real Lord Rockingham, which was settled out of court, the group toured and made several less successful follow-ups. They disbanded with the end of the TV show in 1959, although the name was revived for a couple of albums in the 1960s. Robinson's career in TV and music continued, one notable credit being for his string arrangement on Nick Drake's track, "River Man".
[edit] See also
- List of British pop musicians of the 1950s
- List of British pop musicians of the 1960s
- List of artists under the Decca Records label
- List of artists who reached number one on the UK Singles Chart
