When I was a youngster Eric Coates’s worst fears were being realised, in other words (and here I quote him) that ‘wrong attitudes towards the best light music [were fostering] an insidious form of musical snobbery among listeners, teaching them to despise melody’. Coates died when I was nine years old but already his presence was writ large in my musical imagination, principally through By a Sleepy Lagoon (via the BBC’s Desert Island Discs) and Coates’s many superb 78s, all of which have been restored to circulation on CD by Nimbus (10/13). But if you want the best possible match for Coates’s own rostrum wizardry – like Elgar, he kept his own music very much on the move – then you couldn’t do better than John Wilson, whose discography now includes by my reckoning three all-Coates CDs, of which this is the finest, and certainly the best-recorded.

The closing section of ‘Knightsbridge’ – which incidentally at 4'18" matches the timing for Coates’s own New Symphony Orchestra recording exactly – vies with the final pages of Elgar’s Cockaigne for grandeur, something that had never occurred to me until I heard this version. The three-tier London sequence is a jewel in light music’s crown, and one of the high points of my career was a decade or so ago when I joined Wilson, Frances Fyfield and other guests (including handwriting expert Ruth Rostron) while inspecting the manuscript of London for the BBC Radio 4 programme Tales from the Stave.

As for Wilson, what he doesn’t know about the inner workings of Coates’s methods isn’t worth knowing; and just as he has approximated the playing styles of American orchestras under the likes of Paul Weston and Nelson Riddle, so he has resurrected the warmth and vitality of our own finest vintage light orchestras. The music itself is incomparable. Who could resist the varied colours in The Jester at the Wedding, the Tchaikovskian strains of the early Ballad (1904) or Dancing Nights (fade up to the transition at 5'14" to hear the Wilson magic at its most seductive)? And could any sensitive listener turn a deaf ear to the Two Symphonic Rhapsodies of 1933, even if the second of them, consisting of ‘Bird Songs at Eventide’ and ‘I heard you singing’, could be jokingly daubed as ‘Delius for Dummies’ (and by that I mean no disrespect to either composer)? Nothing more to say really, save to voice my sincere impatience for Vol 2 and, hopefully