After nine-year quest to track dow the rights and the recordings

Every song committed to vinyl by the Goodies is set to be released on CD after a nine-year mission to secure all the rights.

The project, from sound engineer Richard Moore, will also include all the recordings made by Bill Oddie between 1963 and 1986.

Most of the tracks have been unavailable for more than 40 years, but a crowdfunding campaign to release the comprehensive collection is more than 80 per cent of the way to its target.

Writing on that Kickstarter page, Moore said: ‘Way back in 2017, I had a thought. Why are most of the Goodies' and Bill Oddie's commercial recordings not available? I’d always wanted to start my own record label and thought this would be a great first release. 

‘That was nearly 10 years ago, and to say that it’s been difficult to get this all together is an understatement.’

He said Universal Music could not license recordings put out by their Polydor and Decca labels as they no longer owned the rights. ‘I asked, "Who did?" They had no idea,’ Moore said: ‘A little further digging uncovered that no paperwork existed to show who owned the recordings, so I decided to look at claiming them for the Goodies themselves. No easy task, but never one to give up easily, I ploughed on.’

He spoke to all the Goodies backstage at the Slapstick Festival in Bristol in 2020, explaining what he wanted to do. ‘Graeme [Garden] and Tim [Brooke-Taylor] were lovely and said it sounded like a great idea,’ Moore recalls, but Oddie ‘was a little grumpy – I later found out he was not well’ but took the information away.

Brooke-Taylor died soon afterwards but his estate was supportive of the project. Eventually Oddie came round to the idea, too, and Moore said: ‘He was well aware of what I wanted to do, and I'm sad that all permissions finally came through after he had passed away [in July this year]. This set is therefore dedicated to both Bill and Tim.’

Separate Goodies albums released on the Bradley’s label were easily licensed from music giant BMG. But, Moore says: ‘Only one problem. The master tapes for ALL the Goodies (and most other artists on the Bradley’s label) had vanished. The label had passed through so many hands over the years.’

Eventually Moore tracked down all the recordings and rights – a saga recounted in detail on the Kickstarter page – and he is now ready to release a collection of 99 tracks.

He was also keen to stress these were not the soundtracks of The Goodies TV series. The surviving tapes of those recordings were released as the Cricklewood Tapes, by Network in 2018.

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Published: 14 Sep 2026