Shut it! The Music of "The Sweeney"

This page is an ongoing development to identify the 300 different pieces of music used in the 1970s British television series The Sweeney. As is common practice with many television shows, other than the specially-comissioned title theme, Harry South's unforgettable, rousing actioner, "ready-made" music was mostly used to provide incidental themes to the action. These came from specialist "Production Music" houses, the most well-known being De Wolfe, KPM (Keith Prowse Music), Chappell and Bruton The years 1971 to 1978 arguably represented the genre's most creative era (before competition and corporatism took over and strangled much artistic creativity), serendipitously co-inciding with production of The Sweeney itself.

In 2001 Sanctuary Records issued a Sweeney CD compilation with 25 tracks used in the show. As good as it was, it really only scratched the surface and sadly no further volumes have been forthcoming.

In many cases the incidental music was as good as that of the main title theme - indeed much of it is heard in other shows of the era, notably The Protectors, The Return of the Saint and The Famous Five.

A lack of reliable documentation ("music cue" sheets) made the task of identifying all the pieces a huge challenge! However with a tremendous collaborative effort between fans, we have now achieved about 85 percent, the results of which are shown in the table below.

In 2005 Network Video not only issued all episodes on DVD but included an isolated music track. The "DVD Start Time" column indicates whereabouts in an episode a particular track may be heard, using the "Music Only" option. The "Complete" column indicates whether the track appears in its entirety on the disk - with several episodes using many pieces, it was sometimes only possible to include excerpts. Oddly the audio quality varies from excellent to downright awful!

De Wolfe, KPM, Bruton and Chappell have their own websites, from which many of the tracks are available to hear in full and high quality.

As the Bruton library did not come into being until 1977, only episodes from the final season of The Sweeney make use of them.

With very few exceptions Library albums are not officially available to the public, though they frequently turn up on auction site eBay. Happily some enterprising independent record companies have recognised the popularity of this type of music and have negotiated the release of a substantial number of tracks for retail compilation CDs, details of which are provided here.

If you recognise any of the remaining unknown tracks, then please...

... contact Dave Matthews.

In the meantime big thanks to "Bionic Boy", "Dodgy Strawberry", "Fraykerbreaks", Gonzo Duque, "IronBoat", "Lord Thames", "Marty Hopkirk", Andrew Sargent, "Sie Vulture", Rob Taylor and Andy Walls from the excellent Very Good Plus forum!