Australia’s longest-running drama series, Neighbours, is celebrating 40 years on our screens. The lives of the various occupants of six houses on a cul-de-sac in sunny suburban Melbourne have entertained generations since it was first broadcast in 1985 (1986 in the UK); even The Queen Mother was a fan.
The anniversary is celebrated just weeks after it was announced by Amazon that production would cease on the long-running soap at the end of the year. The streaming giant answered the prayers of fans two years ago when it revealed it would make new episodes, following Neighbours' last cancellation by Channel 5 in the UK in 2022.
Despite the comings and goings on Ramsay Street over the years, one thing has remained (just about) the same: the theme tune.
Who wrote the theme tune for ‘Neighbours’?
‘Neighbours’ was written by British composer Tony Hatch, with lyrics by his then wife the late Jackie Trent. They had moved to Australia in the 1980s after a high-profile career in the UK, writing pop songs and the odd theme tune. Petula Clark’s hit ‘Downtown’ was written by Hatch, with Trent co-writing Clark’s hits ‘American Boys’ and ‘A Sign of the Times’, among many others.
Hatch was no stranger to writing for TV, or indeed soap opera, having written the themes for Sportsnight and both Emmerdale Farm (now just Emmerdale) and Crossroads. For Neighbours, Trent and Hatch were asked to write something upbeat and sunny by the show’s creator Reg Watson. They didn’t hang about, apparently turning the tune around in a day.
To give the piece a truly Australian stamp, they asked one of country’s best-known singers to take on the vocals. Barry Crocker, who was interviewed recently on BBC Radio 2, admitted it was a last-minute request and he simply ‘popped round to Tony and Jackie’s’ to give it a go late one evening. That demo went down so well with Watson it was used as the theme tune from the beginning, when Neighbours made its debut on Channel Seven (the show would actually be axed in a matter of months, before being picked up by Channel Ten the following year).
Crocker’s version of the theme was freshened up later in the 1980s, then replaced in 1992 with a brand new arrangement featuring lead vocals by Greg Hind. The change took a bit of getting used to for those who had been watching from the start, but remained with the show until 1998. Since then a further seven versions have graced the opening and closing titles; that includes the current (and final) version, which is sung by Chris Sebastian, a former contestant on The Voice in Australia.
Sebastian’s version made its debut in 2023 and was arranged by the show’s composer and music supervisor Jamie Messenger. The version before that was sung by Bonnie Anderson, and the brief from producers for that version was relatively open, as he told me back in 2022 when I spoke to him ahead of the show's finale on Channel 5.
‘All they wanted was a fresh, more modern version. The only thing they did specify was getting Bonnie involved on the vocal, which was lovely because she was part of the show at the time. I guess her voice guided me… I wanted quite a joyful, upbeat version, which is why I went with the feel of the track, and it took quite a while to work out what chords to put in. Obviously the melody is the melody, but you can put different chords onto it to give it a slightly different flavour. I tried lots of different combinations of chord progressions under there. Also, it is such an old-school sounding tune, the original, and I didn’t want it to sound daggy! So to add that modern flair, but keep that original tune was a bit of a challenge, but I was really happy with the end result.’
What about the music that features in the episodes
Messenger has been working on Neighbours since 2018, composing all the incidental music and selecting/placing all the source music tracks you hear in the background of scenes. The show had a famously gruelling schedule when it was on five days a week, and it was a full on task, as he explained.
‘I was employed for 50 hours a week. I got five episodes on Monday morning and by the end of the day on Friday they had to be full of music and ready to be passed on for the next Monday. Each episode is about 23 minutes – when you take out the ads and everything – and there’s sometimes about 15 minutes of music. That will include the background music, like in Harold’s café or The Waterhole. My score might be five or six minutes in some episodes, but others might have 15 minutes of score. If it’s more out on location, with big drama and action and stuff, that often required a lot more score.’
The reboot on Amazon saw one episode less per week, but Messenger still has his work cut out. With so much music to create in such a short space of time, he revealed he had to be organised and have pieces he could draw on swiftly.
‘The most important thing for me was to build up a library of tracks that I could reuse,’ he says. ‘I guess the hardest thing was working out how I was going to categorise them, and I actually ended up with a numbering system of folders from one to nine – one being all the light-hearted comedy, easy-going tracks and nine being the harrowing, crazy tracks. So the higher the number the more intense the drama, and that gave a bit of a general idea of where to find a track that might suit a scene. I’ve got a whole bunch of folders… one of them is called ‘Personal Pain, Grief, Internal Struggle’ and another one is ‘Disappointed, Not Going to Plan, Stressed’.
The show’s final ever Channel 5 episode aired in the UK and Australia in July 2022, and the moment was been bittersweet for Messenger, who – when we spoke – was still working on final adjustments for the finale.
‘It felt very strange,’ he told me, ‘normally every week we’ve got the current week’s episodes, plus the fix-ups from previous weeks, and then we’re looking at the next week’s episodes and getting ready. But in the last week it was just the five episodes that needed finishing off and there was nothing more coming. It was very strange, and quite sad.’
Suffice to say it will be a case of déja vu for the composer, and fans, when Neighbours comes to an end in December.
Neighbours is streamed four days a week on Amazon Prime in the UK and around the world, while Australian viewers can watch on Channel 10.
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