The Closest Thing to Crazy: My Life of Musical Adventures
by Mike Batt
Bonnier Books Ltd
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1785120848
$26.33 from Amazon or autographed directly from Mike Batt (ships from the UK)

Our first pick today in The 2024 PopCult Gift Guide is a bit of a cult item for those of us in the USA.

Mike Batt is undeservedly obscure in America, but he’s pretty famous in the UK and around the world. He’s had an amazing life, from being the man behind The Wombles to crafting a series of amazing progressive/orchestral/New Wave-ish albums, to collaborating with an arranging for some of the top names in musical theater and popular music and way more than I can mention in one sentence without rambling like a lunatic.

I’ve been a big fan since his conceptual ballet/operetta, Zero Zero, wound up on Night Flight in 1981, and I’ve followed his career since. I’ve even featured his music and his fantasy book, The Chronicles of Don’t Be So Ridiculous Valley, in previous editions of The PopCult Gift Guide, so I have no qualms about recommending his new book, which tells the story of his amazing life, even though I haven’t got my copy yet.

Because of that, I will turn this gift recommendation over to the publisher’s blurb…

Described variously as a ‘polymath’, a ‘renaissance man’ and ‘one of the most colourful characters in the music business’, Mike Batt has led an extraordinarily vibrant and challenging life that has been full of both glorious victories and bitter failures.

For better or for worse, he is a man who has always lived life on his own terms. Idiosyncratic but mainstream, complicated but compassionate, steadfastly maverick in spirit but avowedly commercial in outlook. He is a man of great contradictions, but even greater talent.

After starting out in the music business as a teenager, Batt shot to fame in the early 1970s for his part in the creation of the Wombles pop group. But this success proved to be just the beginning as he then went on to work with various artists as a songwriter, composer and producer, including Art Garfunkel, George Harrison, Cliff Richard, Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Katie Melua.

Featuring cameos from some of the biggest stars in the business from Paul McCartney to Prince, The Closest Thing to Crazy takes us not only on the rocky (and classical) journey of Mike Batt’s life but also on a tour around the inside of his mind.

I don’t want to wait to read this book, but because I am buried under work writing The 2024 PopCult Gift Guide, it’ll have to wait until next month. This is the perfect gift for the Anglophile music lover with impeccable taste on your holiday shopping list.