Alyn Ainsworth

Biography
As a boy, Alyn Ainsworth proved his talent as a singer; when his voice broke, he learnt to play the guitar and played in dance bands. He was an instrumentalist as well as an arranger for the orchestras of Oscar Rabin and Geraldo, before becoming the staff arranger for the BBC Northern Variety Orchestra. Later, Ainsworth became the ensemble’s conductor. In 1960, Ainsworth left the BBC and was signed up by Granada TV as the presenter of ‘Spot the tune’. As a freelance musician, Ainsworth frequently conducted TV shows for the BBC and ITV. Moreover, he worked as a studio arranger, orchestrating songs for Vince Hill and Kathy Kirby; he wrote the arrangement to Shirley Bassey’s hit record ‘Big spender’ in 1967. Ainsworth released several instrumental recordings, amongst which ‘The entertainer’ in 1976.

Alyn Ainsworth was the musical director of ‘A song for Europe’, the UK Eurovision heats, in 1975, 1976, 1978, and 1979 and – with the exception of the last-mentioned year – accompanied the winners of these competitions to the Eurovision Song Contest: ‘Let me be the one’ by The Shadows (1975), Eurovision winner ‘Save your kisses for me’ by Brotherhood of Man (1976), and ‘The bad old days’ by CoCo (1978). In ’79, Ken Jones replaced Ainsworth for the international final. In 1977, when the contest was held in London and both the preselection and the contest itself were supervised by BBC’s own musical director, Ronnie Hazlehurst, Alyn Ainsworth helped out the Belgian delegation by conducting ‘A million in 1, 2, 3’ for Dream Express, which came seventh. In 1990, only a couple of months before he passed away, Ainsworth returned to the contest, conducting the UK entry ‘Give a little love back to the world’, composed by Paul Curtis and sung by Emma.

In due course, a more extensive biography of Alyn Ainsworth will be published on this website