Stan Butcher
British composer and bandleader (1920–1987)
Stanley Robert Butcher (26 January 1920, London – 1987) was a British pianist, composer, arranger and bandleader in the fields of jazz and easy-listening.
Life and work
Butcher served during the Second World War in an infantry division and played in a military band. After the war, he led a band with trombonist Don Lusher in Pembroke Bay; he then worked in the orchestras of Joe Daniels (1947–48), Freddy Randall (1951), Bernie Stanton(1951), Geoff Sowden (1953), Jack Newman (1954) and in the 1970s with Stan Reynolds. In 1949-50 and again in 1952 he led his own groups and wrote arrangements for Dixieland bands. With songwriter Syd Cordell he composed the song "Sing, Little Birdie" for the 1959 Eurovision Song Contest. A recording by duo Pearl Carr & Teddy Johnson reached number 2 in the charts. In 1962 he composed, again with Cordell, for Ronnie Carroll, the British Eurovision entry "Ring-A-Ding Girl", which came fourth. In the 1960s he led the big band His Birds and Brass and recorded easy-listening albums for Columbia and Fontana. In 1979 he issued the fusion album Magician, on the Hobo label, in which Barbara Thompson and Ray Russell participated.
His instrumental version of The Seekers' "Morningtown Ride", from his 1966 album His Birds and Brass, was used as the theme tune for the weekly Saturday morning BBC Radio 1 programme Junior Choice presented by Leslie Crowther and Ed Stewart.
“Stan Butcher” enters the record as british composer and bandleader (1920–1987). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Stan, Butcher and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Stan Butcher” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Stan, Butcher and British provides the most credible route into that argument.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 23, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q1644807. VIAF identifies the subject as 7043147665835960670009. The Library of Congress control number is n2016053104. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1920, 1987, 1947 and 1951.
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This entry incorporates text from “Stan Butcher” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.