Alan Hawkshaw

The ubiquitous Alan Hawkshaw was the best-known British composer you’d never heard of Michael Hann

The late musician’s track The Champ was sampled on more than 700 other records, while others pop up everywhere from Jay-Z songs to Milk Tray ads. What links them all is his compositional joy and irreverence Alan Hawkshaw, Countdown and Grange Hill composer, dies aged 84

‘I asked my daughter who Jay Zed was’ … Alan Hawkshaw. Photograph: c/o DNA Music

Mon 18 Oct 2021 02.00 EDT

lan Hawkshaw’s late-life status as a funky hero to American hip-hop producers came as something of a surprise to him. “I remember getting an email asking for clearance for a piece,” he told me a few years ago. “And I rang my daughter asking who ‘Jay Zed’ was.” Jay-Z was not alone: whosampled.com lists 205 tracks that sample Hawkshaw’s music, right back to the dawn of hip-hop, when the Sugarhill Gang used part of Here Comes That Sound Again, a track by his project Love De-Luxe, in the intro of Rapper’s Delight in 1979.

Even then, Hawkshaw – who has died aged 84 – was something of a veteran. His music career began in the early 60s when, as a member of Emile Ford and the Checkmates, he played on bills with the Beatles and the Stones. In the 70s, he joined the Shadows. But the vast majority of his work was undertaken away from the stage. As a session player, he appeared on more than 7,000 tracks, often playing Hammond organ. And as a composer of library music (compositions written and recorded to a brief, to be later licensed for commercial purposes) his music travelled the world over the opening credits of TV shows – though not always in the expected manner: what was written as a news theme might (and would) appear accompanying a sports broadcast, for example. Library composers had no control over where their music went.

Hawkshaw worked for most of the big library music companies but is most closely associated with KPM, for whom he produced theme after theme after theme, all written and recorded to tight deadlines and budgets, with minimum fuss. In later years, he and other KPM writers were able to form a band to play live, the KPM All Stars. But even within the strictures of producing music to order, Hawkshaw found freedom.