Halloween Song: The Hollies - “Lullaby To Tim”

The Hollies surrounded by spooky stage props. Photo from The Hollies Official Facebook page.

Now that my wife Pam and I are back from vacation, it’s time to resume the Halloween song profiles. This one ran for the first time on BHT last October.

The Hollies are often regarded as “a singles band” and while they did notch a number of Top 40 hits (more so in England than America), some of my all-time favorite songs by them are deep cuts from their albums. “Lullaby To Tim” isn’t one of those top favorites, but it’s certainly pleasant and just barely qualifies as a Halloween song. It appeared on the group’s surprisingly psychedelic 1967 album Evolution, which was sandwiched between two other excellent LPs, Stop Stop Stop and Dear Eloise/King Midas In Reverse (For Certain Because and Butterfly respectively in the U.K.). If you want proof that The Hollies were capable of creating superb album material, check out these three releases.

The magical imagery on “Lullaby To Tim” kicks off with the very first lines, “Would you like to slide down a rainbow?/Catch a falling star in your hand?/Chase a moonbeam, ride by your window?” The secret to attaining these adventures couldn’t be more simple: go to sleep. And that’s just the start of the fun things to entice a child to hit the sack “while the moon is peeping.” We hear about dragons, castles, and kisses changing frogs into princes. The kid can also see “witches fly on their broomsticks, stirring cauldrons, casting their spells,” which strays somewhat into nightmare territory.

“Lullaby To Tim” has a slow, almost acoustic arrangement that blooms into a full orchestra at the midway point. But its most noticeable aspect is that Graham Nash seems to be singing in a bath tub. Beneath the water. In his fascinating book on track . . . The Hollies every album, every song, author Andrew Darlington describes this vocal approach as phasing. “It is achieved by running two identical tapes together, but slightly out of synch, or in-and-out-of-synch to create a fuzzy distortion.” I thought the effect was cool when I first bought Evolution in 1967 and I’m still okay with it, but some critics have found it over-the-top.

Darlington suspects “Lullaby To Tim” is an homage to “LSD-guru” Timothy Leary. However, in an interview with The Strange Brew website in 2014, Hollies lead vocalist Allan Clarke told writer Jason Barnard that he (Clarke) wrote the song for his son.