Paul receives an “Outstanding Services To British Music” award

The 34th Ivor Novello Awards were presented by BASCA and sponsored by PRS on 4th April 1989 at the Grosvenor House, London. Paul McCartney received an “Outstanding Services To British Music” award, presented by Sting.

From Club Sandwich N°52:

How do you say thanks for an award without being gushing? Paul had this problem on 4th April, when he was honoured once more at the Ivor Novello Awards. He solved it in a way John Lennon would have admired – with a rap.

Paul’s peers responded with the biggest cheer of the day. The Award? For Outstanding Services to British Music, the latest in a long line of McCartney/Wings ‘Ivors’ stretching back to his theme for The Family Way in 1967.

Novello was a Welsh composer of musical shows and actor-playwright-producer in straight drama who died in 1951. The Songwriters’ Guild of Great Britain began the Awards in 1956, sponsored by such as Billy Butlin of holiday camp fame. Sponsors since 1974 have been the Performing Right Society, while the event is organised by the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Artists.

Compere this year was Paul Gambaccini, also one of the judges. Interest spread far beyond the music industry, due to a two-hour broadcast of proceedings on the evening of the Awards lunch by commercial radio stations nationwide. Novello Records was launched almost simultanteously, to concentrate on CD’s of new and historic classical material.

What of the Award itself? Well, it’s a statuette of Euterpe, the Greek Muse of the Flute, designed by Hazel Underwood of the St. Martin School of Art. Impressive, eh? I’m just worried whether the groaning McCartney sideboard can take the extra weight…

This Ivor Novello was a pretty fine chap

But just one thing he didn’t know how to rap

‘Cause if he was living in the present day

He’d have to think of something to say.

I think I know what it might just be

He’d say whatever happened to the melody?”

Ivor Novello Rap, by Paul McCartney

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