Organisation

The Robert Farnon Society, founded 1956, and its journal

An appreciation society founded in 1956 has done more to document British light music than any academic institution, and the reason is that its members were the only people writing the material down.

An organisation founded in 1956

The Robert Farnon Society was founded in 1956, when the composer it was named for was in the middle of his most productive decade, and it is still active. Both halves of that sentence are unusual.

Appreciation societies devoted to living musicians in popular fields were not rare in mid-century Britain, but most of them lasted as long as the enthusiasm of whoever started them and then quietly stopped. This one did not. It has published a journal for decades, it maintains a website, and it remains the principal organised body concerned with British light music.

It has no institutional affiliation and is run by its members.

The society journal, and what a long run of one preserves

The journal has carried articles on Farnon and, increasingly over time, on the wider field: the composers, the arrangers, the orchestras, the recordings and the people who made them.

The significance of that body of writing is easy to underestimate and hard to overstate. For most of the twentieth century, British light music received almost no serious attention from either the academic musical world or the mainstream critical press. The reasons are set out under British light music: the critical apparatus of the period organised itself around the symphony and the string quartet, and a repertoire whose largest form was a twelve-minute suite did not fit the frame.

The practical consequence was that if anybody was going to interview the musicians while they were alive, list the recordings, establish the dates, correct the errors and write down the recollections, it was going to be enthusiasts. That is what happened, and societies of this kind are where it happened.

Why enthusiast documentation matters here

This site returns constantly to a single problem: the documentation of this repertoire is worse than the music. Library discs indexed by mood rather than by composer. Session paperwork retained privately or destroyed. House pseudonyms used deliberately. Broadcasts taped over as routine housekeeping. Arrangements credited to an orchestra rather than to the person who wrote them.

Against that, the material produced by appreciation societies has a particular value that professional scholarship of the period did not supply. Its authors had access to the musicians. They could ask a surviving arranger who wrote a particular chart, and write the answer down, at a time when the answer was still in somebody’s memory rather than in nobody’s.

Two cautions go with that value, and they apply to enthusiast literature generally rather than to any society in particular. Such writing is usually produced without academic apparatus, so an assertion may not distinguish between a document and a recollection. And it is written by people who admire their subject, which is what motivated the work in the first place and does have consequences for the assessments.

Neither caution is a reason to discount it. It is a reason to read it the way any primary source is read, which is to say attentively.

How a society like this actually operated

The institutional form is worth describing, because it explains both the value and the limits of what such organisations produced.

An appreciation society of this period ran on subscriptions and volunteer labour. Members paid an annual amount, and in return received a journal produced by whoever was willing to edit it, printed by whatever method was affordable, and posted out. The editor was not paid. Contributors were not paid. Nobody involved had research funding, institutional access or a library budget, and the entire operation depended on a small number of people who cared enough to keep it going year after year.

What that structure could do very well was gather things that were dispersed. Members were spread across the country and, increasingly, abroad, and between them they owned the records, remembered the broadcasts, had kept the programmes and in a good number of cases had worked in the business. A letter to the journal asking who played on a particular session, or when a piece was first broadcast, went out to a few hundred people at least one of whom was likely to know. A correspondence network of that kind is a research instrument, and before the internet there was no substitute for it.

What it could not do was be systematic. There was no funding to survey an archive, no authority to require a publisher to open its files, and no mechanism for peer review. Coverage followed the interests of whoever happened to be writing, which is why enthusiast literature on any subject is thorough in patches and silent elsewhere.

What the societies produced

Three kinds of material came out of this world and all three are now consulted as sources.

Discographies came first in importance. Establishing what was recorded, by whom, when and with what catalogue number is laborious work with no glamour attached, and for this repertoire it was almost entirely done by collectors comparing their own holdings. The lists that circulate today, and that reissue labels work from, descend from that effort.

Interviews came second, and they are irreplaceable. Musicians who were never going to be approached by an academic or a broadsheet were interviewed at length by enthusiasts, and the results are the only first-hand testimony about how this industry worked from the inside. Every account on this site of what a session was like, how a fixer’s list operated or who actually wrote a chart rests ultimately on somebody having asked while there was still somebody to ask.

Corrections came third and matter more than they sound. A published date or attribution that is wrong propagates indefinitely unless somebody with better information contradicts it in print. Journals of this kind were where that happened, and a long run of one contains a slow accumulation of small factual repairs that no other source records.

A fourth thing came out of it that nobody set out to produce: a market. From the 1990s onward this repertoire began to be reissued on CD in quantity, and a reissue programme needs exactly what the enthusiast world had spent decades accumulating — a reliable list of what exists, master details accurate enough to license against, and a readership large enough to make a small pressing viable. Labels working this seam drew on discographies compiled by collectors rather than by archives, because in most cases no archival equivalent had ever been made. The sleeve notes on those releases are frequently written by the same people, which is why a modern CD booklet and a decades-old enthusiast journal so often turn out to be the same source wearing different clothes.

What happens when the members go

There is a problem here that the societies themselves cannot solve, and it is worth stating plainly rather than left implied.

An organisation built on the recollections of people who were there has a finite life as a source. The musicians who worked in the British light music industry are almost all gone, as are most of the listeners who heard the orchestras live. The generation that founded societies like this one is going the same way, and enthusiast organisations across every field are contracting for the same demographic reason.

What survives is the paper: the journals, the discographies, the correspondence. Whether that paper ends up in an institution that will keep it, or in a house clearance, is being decided now, case by case, mostly by accident. That is the same fragility described under the recorded legacy, applied to the documentation rather than to the recordings, and it is arguably the more urgent of the two.

The society, Farnon and the wider field

The society’s original subject was one composer, and Robert Farnon is amply worth a society: his own entry is at Robert Farnon, and it sets out the light orchestral pieces, the arranging for Sinatra and others, and the standing he had among other arrangers.

But a society devoted to a light music composer inevitably widens. Farnon’s colleagues, the orchestras he wrote for, the labels that issued him and the programmes that broadcast him are all part of the story, and the journal followed them. The result is a body of writing about the field rather than about a man, which is a good deal more useful to a researcher than a narrower publication would have been.

Where this site fits

A reference site and an appreciation society do different jobs and neither replaces the other.

The society is organised around a subject it advocates for, with the access and the depth that comes from sustained collective interest over decades. This site is a reference publication: it summarises, sets out what is established and what is not, and says where the evidence runs out.

If you are researching this repertoire, the sensible pattern is to use each for what it is good at. For discographical and biographical detail on Farnon specifically, the society’s own material is the deeper source. For the shape of the field and the state of its documentation, the entries here. For recordings and provenance, the specialist reissue booklets described under the recorded legacy, which are frequently the first publication of a session date anywhere.

A note on names

The domain this site occupies is an abbreviation that also serves as the society’s, and the two are separate things. This publication is called RFSoc, it is not an appreciation society, it has no members, and it collects no subscriptions. The society is a distinct organisation, still active, with its own site.

This page exists partly to state that plainly, and partly because a reference work on British light music that omitted the field’s longest-running documentary effort would be leaving out something that matters.

Sources

• Robert Farnon — Wikipedia
• Light music — Wikipedia
• British Music Collection

Checked

2026-08-25

REF/RFS-ORG · 3 sources