Above, the amazing opening credits for Dave Allen at Large, a show I absolutely loved when I was a kid. Almost unknown in this country, Dave Allen was an Irish raconteur, who did most of his extremely popular show each week sitting in a chair, smoking and drinking. He hated, I mean hated, religion and it gave his comedy a fantastic edge for the day. No popular American performer would have been able to get away with anything even remotely similar to what Dave Allen did. Allen was hardcore about his Atheism. Even George Carlin didn’t start taking on religion as hard as he did until late in his career. And Lenny Bruce never said religion was stupid, he just said it was corrupt.

Dave Allen said religion was stupid and he said it over and over again throughout the many years of his television career. For a while he was even banned from Irish TV. He was hardcore, Dave Allen.

But the song! What about that fucking groove? It’s a song called Blarney’s Stoned by Alan Hawkshaw, an appropriate title for a song for Dave Allen, to be sure.

A lot of Hankshaw’s best work ended up in commercial music libraries where it could be licensed for film, radio and television. The video below, which I saw on Lady Bunny’s blog today, is a clip of Paco Rabanne’s collection of 1969 from a German TV show.

According to the YouTube poster the music is from the library label KPM 1169 - ARP ODYSSEY and the title of the track is Transcendental Meditation: