In 1975, British pop-rock band Jigsaw had their first and only Top 10 hit song in the U.S. with “Sky High.” The song, which was written by bandmates Clive Scott and Des Dyer and featured an orchestral arrangement by conductor Richard Hewson, climbed the charts in the fall of 1975 and peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 on December 6, 1975.
But the success was a long time coming. It took a movie called The Man From Hong Kong (also known in the U.S. as The Dragon Flies) to get Jigsaw’s music noticed internationally nearly a decade after the band first formed. “Sky High” served as the opening theme for the 1975 martial-arts action movie starring one-time James Bond actor George Lazenby.
In an interview published by Record Mirror & Disc, Scott revealed Jigsaw’s Cinderella story regarding the soundtrack song.
“It’s quite a story how we came to record the theme music,” the Jigsaw founding member said in the interview. “The film had been completed, but the distributors had wanted a pop single to go with the picture to help publicize it, and MCA didn’t think the existing theme music was strong enough.”
“Both David Essex and The Four Tops were approached, but due to contractual difficulties, they couldn’t do it, and it was nearing the time for the film’s release,” Scott shared. “We were asked to write and record the music, and we had only three days to get it all together. We made demos of two songs and the next day recorded ‘Sky High.’”
Jigsaw had been together for years before they had a hit with ‘Sky High’
In 2022, Dyer, who was the drummer for Jigsaw as well as the lead vocalist on “Sky High,” told Spiderhands Productions that the band chugged along for a long time before scoring international fame with the movie hit.
“We were going for years …kept putting records out and then finally we got a big hit called ‘Sky High,’ which was number one in the Antipodes,” he said in the interview. “And then we packed up in ‘81 … and that was it.”
Dyer previously shared that it meant everything to get that one big hit before Jigsaw’s split in 1981.
“Though we just finished our fifth album and have been together since 1968, you would be surprised what one hit single can do,” he said in the vintage Record Mirror & Disc interview. “It doesn’t matter how long you have been around. Without getting that elusive hit, you’ve never made it.”
Fifty years after “Sky High,” Dyer became part of the musical duo Fingers ‘N’ Fumbs with Steve Fearn. Scott died in 2009.
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