IF you went to school on the Sunshine Coast during the past two decades, you may remember singing along to the classic children’s tune ‘Secret Agent Magpie’.
The brainchild of former Glass House Mountains State School music teacher Ian Ross Williams, the song has now been revamped and the remixed version premiered on YouTube late last month.
Ian said he now had his sights set on ‘Baby Shark’, YouTube’s current most popular children’s song with more than nine billion views.
“I believe that musically and visually ‘Secret Agent Magpie’ (remix) is a better children’s song and a far superior production than ‘Baby Shark’,” he said.
“I am under no illusions about actually making money out of this but I do want my songs to reach a wider global audience.”
The original idea for ‘Secret Agent Magpie’ came to Ian in 1997, composing the tune within just two weeks of moving to the region.
Ian and his children often made jokes about magpie secret agents spying on them in the caravan park where they were staying while waiting to be resettled.
“Returning to the caravan park after a day’s house-hunting, we’d often catch a sight of a magpie or two walking about in the van park grounds but then they’d surreptitiously disappear behind a tree or somewhere,” he said.
Ian taught in plenty of Sunshine Coast primary schools over the past 20 years, with the original ‘Secret Agent Magpie’ gaining traction not only in the classroom but on YouTube as well.
Now retired from teaching, Ian decided to team up with local maestro and GC&M News columnist Dr Michael Whiticker and animation wizard Grant Harding to bring a visual artist’s fresh eyes to his most popular song.
“I decided to use more commercial instrumentation, added an up-tempo shuffle-dance riff, new sound effects, including spy talk voice-overs, as well as tweaking a few lyrics,” he said.
“Importantly, I was lucky enough to be able to employ the services of Grant Harding, from Channel 9, to do the animation.”
However, one thing is for sure, if Ian wants his songs to reach the heights of ‘Baby Shark’, he’s certainly got a few views to go.
You can play your part by checking out the remixed version at https://youtu.be/iE999P66NDA