"Sailing By" is a short piece of light music composed by Ronald Binge in 1963, which is used before the late

Shipping Forecast The ''Shipping Forecast'' is a BBC Radio broadcast of weather reports and forecasts for the seas around the British Isles. It is produced by the Met Office and broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency. The for ...

BBC Radio 4 BBC Radio 4 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC. The station replaced the BBC Home Service on 30 September 1967 and broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes from the BBC's headquarters at Broadcasti ...

. A slow

waltz The waltz ( , meaning "to roll or revolve") is a ballroom dance, ballroom and folk dance, in triple (3/4 time, time), performed primarily in closed position. Along with the ländler and allemande, the waltz was sometimes referred to by the ...

, the piece uses a repetitive ABCAB structure and a distinctive rising and falling woodwind

arpeggio An arpeggio () is a type of Chord (music), chord in which the Musical note, notes that compose a chord are individually sounded in a progressive rising or descending order. Arpeggios on keyboard instruments may be called rolled chords. Arpe ...

Context and usage

"Sailing By" is played every night on BBC Radio 4 at around 00:45hrs before the late

. Its tune is repetitive, assisting in its role of serving as a signal for

sailor A sailor, seaman, mariner, or seafarer is a person who works aboard a watercraft as part of its crew, and may work in any one of a number of different fields that are related to the operation and maintenance of a ship. While the term ''sailor'' ...

s tuning in to be able to easily identify the radio station. It also functions as a buffer: depending on when the final programme before closedown finishes, "Sailing By" (or part of it) is played as a "filler" as the forecast starts at 00:48hrs precisely. In the 1990s the tune was also adopted for the weekly maritime programme '' Seascapes'' on Ireland's

RTÉ Radio 1 RTÉ Radio 1 () is an Irish national radio station owned and operated by RTÉ and is the direct descendant of Dublin radio station 2RN, which began broadcasting on a regular basis on 1 January 1926. The total budget for the station in 2010 w ...

, ceasing at the end of 2009. It has since been reinstated.

Popularity

Besides its intended function, "Sailing By" is thought of affectionately by many British radio listeners, as it is considered a soothing accompaniment to bedtime. The lead singer of the

Britpop Britpop was a mid-1990s United Kingdom, British-based music culture movement that emphasised Britishness. Musically, Britpop produced bright, catchy alternative rock, with significant influences from British guitar pop of the 1960s and 1970s. B ...

band Pulp,

Jarvis Cocker Jarvis Branson Cocker (born 19 September 1963) is an English musician. As the founder, frontman, lyricist and only consistent member of the band Pulp (band), Pulp, he became a reluctant figurehead of the Britpop genre of the mid-1990s. Cocker h ...

, chose "Sailing By" as one of his ''

Desert Island Discs ''Desert Island Discs'' is a radio programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4. It was first broadcast on the BBC Forces Programme on 29 January 1942. Each week a guest, called a " castaway" during the programme, is asked to choose eight audio recordin ...

'', saying for many years he had used it "as an aid to restful sleep". A version was released in 1965 by John Scott and his Orchestra on the

Parlophone Parlophone Records Limited (also known as Parlophone Records and Parlophone) is a record label founded in Germany in 1896 by the Carl Lindström Company as Parlophon. The British branch of the label was founded on 8 August 1923 as the Parloph ...

label (R 5333). The BBC issued it as a single in 1973 on its own BBC Records label, played by the John Fox Orchestra. The piece appeared on a single recorded by the Royal Ballet Sinfonia in a quest to save the "

Radio 4 UK Theme The ''BBC Radio 4 UK Theme'' is an orchestral arrangement of traditional British and Irish airs compiled by Fritz Spiegl and arranged by Manfred Arlan. It was played every morning on BBC Radio 4 between 23 November 1978 and 23 April 2006. T ...

". In 1993 there was a similar reaction by BBC listeners when "Sailing By" was temporarily taken off the air on weekday schedules, leading to it being re-instated in 1995. The recording used by the BBC, performed by the Alan Perry/William Gardner Orchestra, was originally only available as library music, but has since 1997 been available commercially as track eleven on the second disc of the

EMI EMI Group Limited (formerly EMI Group plc until 2007; originally an initialism for Electric and Musical Industries, also referred to as EMI Records or simply EMI) was a British transnational conglomerate founded in March 1931 in London. At t ...

CD set titled ''The Great British Experience'' (

EMI Classics EMI Classics was a record label founded by Thorn EMI in 1990 to reduce the need to create country-specific packaging and catalogues for internationally distributed classical music releases. After Thorn EMI demerged in 1996, its recorded mus ...

CDGB50).Catalogue entry for ''The Great British Experience'' at Warner Classics
/ref> It is also available as track eight on the CD ''Elizabethan Serenade: The Best of British Light Music'', produced by Naxos and performed by the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra. The unexplained crediting of the BBC recording to the "Perry Gardner Orchestra", suggesting the existence of a conductor or arranger by that name, is apt to be confusing; indeed, "Alan Perry" and "William Gardner" are pseudonyms for composers Ernest Tomlinson and Peter Hope. The BBC broadcast the original stereo version for a few weeks in the late 1980s, but soon reverted to a mono version.

References

{{Authority control BBC Radio 4 programmes Classical music in the United Kingdom Radio theme songs Light music compositions Compositions by Ronald Binge

Context and usage

Popularity

See also

References