I discovered this song in a collection of videos by Dutch video disk jockey DJ Pierre Noll, who has spent countless hours generating music video compilations. (If you like old music videos - anything from the 1950s to the 1980s and later - these are worth checking out.) It's an instrumental that has an eccentric English music-hall feel to it and I love it to bits.
Lieutenant Pigeon were from Coventry in England and featured Rob Woodward on various instruments and his mother, Hilda Woodward, on honky-tonk piano. "Mouldy Old Dough", after a slow start, reached #1 on the UK Singles Chart in 1972 and sold 790,000 copies. It was the second-best selling single in the UK that year, trailing only the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards' version of "Amazing Grace".
The song also reached #1 in Ireland, Belgium, and New Zealand. It was in the top ten in many other places, including Canada, where it reached #8 nationally. It didn't chart in the US, though, and it did not receive airplay in Toronto, so I didn't hear it when I was growing up.
Lieutenant Pigeon followed this up with "Desperate Dan", which sounded quite similar to its predecessor; it reached #17 in the UK but didn't do well elsewhere. They also charted in Australia in 1974 with "I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen".
The band stopped performing together in 1978. Various group members have toured and recorded under this name and under the name "Stavely Makepeace". Hilda Woodward passed away in 1999 at the age of 85; her piano now resides in the Coventry Music Museum.
Created August 24, 2026.