Episode 6: Paul K Joyce. How Bob the Builder erected a 2021 bridge to the prog-rock band YES
Paul updates us on a long awaited album from Yes and how he was honoured to arrange and record the orchestral arrangements.
John produces Paul’s music session and interview which was broadcast on Extravaganza on BBC Radio Nottingham in March 1976. Paul was just 18 and studying biology at Nottingham Trent Polytechnic. He’s from Nuthall, in Nottingham, and was educated at Eastwood Comprehensive, formerly Eastwood Hall Park.
They listen to ‘Sunrise’ and comment.
John’s next contact was when Paul formed the band Sense NB not the band from Canada
They discuss Paul’s music for the sci-fi horror ‘Quatermass and the Pit’ and the live performance in a quarry in Cropwell Bishop
John shows CD of ‘The Snow Queen’ recorded in Nottingham’s Albert Hall in The Nottingham Choral Trust Youth Choir and Orchestra and conducted by Angela Kay. That was in 1998, which Paul describes as his pivotal year.
The germ of the idea came about when he was asked to set Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem ‘Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep’ to music for a friend’s funeral.
He explains how Bob the Builder funded The Snow Queen performance in London with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Burntwood School Girls’ Choir and narrated by Juliet Stevenson.
He didn’t just write Bob for Children’s TV. He is also very proud of composing theme for Noddy and singing on Fimbles signature tune.
BBC commissions The Snow Queen for Christmas broadcast in 2005. It later is named as the highest rated children’s TV show of 2005.
They jump to December 2019 and the tour of ‘Celestial’, which visited The Metronome in Nottingham. It’s based on the poems of the late Johnnie Douglas, narrated by Michel Sheen and includes the YES guitarist, Steve Howe
Mark asks how he persuaded Sheen to contribute
His next move to novel writing it. He’s already self-published ‘The Will of the People’. Three more are on the way including ‘Martin’ a horror story about a driverless car that imprisons its passengers. Cover design by graphic artist, Tom Partridge
Mark, rather cheekily, asks if he is concerned that despite his broad cannon of work, he’s most famous for writing Bob the Builder.