Unmasked
Andrew Lloyd Webber
“You have the luck of Croesus on stilts (as my Auntie Vi would have said) if you’ve had the sort of career, ups and downs, warts and all that I have in that wondrous little corner of show business called musical theatre.”One of the most successful and distinguished artists of our time, Andrew Lloyd Webber has reigned over the musical theatre world for nearly five decades. The winner of numerous awards, including multiple Tonys and an Oscar, Lloyd Webber has enchanted millions worldwide with his music and numerous hit shows, including Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, Cats, The Phantom of the Opera—Broadway’s longest running show—and most recently, School of Rock. In Unmasked, written in his own inimitable, quirky voice, the revered, award-winning composer takes stock of his achievements, the twists of fate and circumstance which brought him both success and disappointment, and the passions that inspire and sustain him.The son of a music professor and a piano teacher, Lloyd Webber reveals his artistic influences, from his idols Rodgers and Hammerstein and the perfection of South Pacific’s ‘Some Enchanted Evening,’ to the pop and rock music of the 1960s and Puccini’s Tosca, to P. G. Wodehouse and T. S. Eliot. Lloyd Webber recalls his bohemian London youth, reminiscing about the happiest place of his childhood, his homemade Harrington Pavilion—a make-believe world of musical theatre in which he created his earliest entertainments.A record of several exciting and turbulent decades of British and American musical theatre and the transformation of popular music itself, Unmasked is ultimately a chronicle of artistic creation. Lloyd Webber looks back at the development of some of his most famous works and illuminates his collaborations with luminaries such as Tim Rice, Robert Stigwood, Harold Prince, Cameron Mackintosh, and Trevor Nunn. Taking us behind the scenes of his productions, Lloyd Webber reveals fascinating details about each show, including the rich cast of characters involved with making them, and the creative and logistical challenges and artistic political battles that ensued.Lloyd Webber shares his recollections of the works that have become cultural touchstones for generations of fans: writings songs for a school production that would become his first hit, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat; finding the coterie of performers for his classic rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar; developing his first mega-hit, Evita, which would win seven Tonys Awards, including Best Musical; staking his reputation and fortune on the groundbreaking Cats; and making history with the dazzling The Phantom of the Opera.Reflecting a life that included many passions (from architecture to Turkish Swimming Cats), full of witty and revealing anecdotes, and featuring cameo appearances by numerous celebrities—Elaine Paige, Sarah Brightman, David Frost, Julie Covington, Judi Dench, Richard Branson, A.R. Rahman, Mandy Patinkin, Patti LuPone, Richard Rodgers, Norman Jewison, Milos Forman, Plácido Domingo, Barbra Streisand, Michael Crawford, Gillian Lynne, Betty Buckley, and more—Unmasked at last reveals the true face of the extraordinary man beneath the storied legend.
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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018
FIRST EDITION
© Andrew Lloyd Webber 2018
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Excerpts from ‘That’s My Story’ – Lyrics by Tim Rice, published by EMI Music Publishing Mills Music Limited and reproduced with the kind permission of Sir Tim Rice. Excerpts from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat – Lyrics by Tim Rice © The Really Useful Group Limited. Excerpts from ‘Come Back Richard Your Country Needs You’ – Lyrics by Tim Rice, published by Novello and Company Ltd and reproduced with the kind permission of Sir Tim Rice. Excerpts from Jesus Christ Superstar – Lyrics by Tim Rice © The Really Useful Group Limited. Excerpts from Evita – Lyrics by Tim Rice © Evita Music Limited/Universal. Extracts taken from ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, The Poems of T.S. Eliot Volume I: Collected and Uncollected Poems and ‘The Naming of Cats’, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot © Set Copyrights Ltd and reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber. Excerpts from Aspects of Love – Lyrics by Don Black & Charles Hart © The Really Useful Group Limited. Excerpts from The Phantom of the Opera – Lyrics by Charles Hart, Additional Lyrics by Richard Stilgoe © The Really Useful Group Limited.
Title page art courtesy of Bob King Creative Ltd.
While every effort has been made to obtain permission from the photographers and copyright holders of the pictures used in this book, the author and publishers apologise to anyone who has not been contacted in advance or credited.
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Source ISBN 9780008237592
Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780008237622
Version 2018-07-09
For my fabulously un-PC Auntie Vi, most of whose
sayings I could not possibly share in 2018.
CONTENTS
Cover (#ua702ee80-033c-53cf-89a7-bc556a53f99a)
Title Page (#u20b71556-4aa2-57cc-b4fd-d04d4507dd38)
Copyright (#u3629f0e2-b8c4-5a23-8db0-0d1e86494a65)
Prologue (#u138fa24b-b6b2-5401-af83-0a9de9b1d3f7)
Overture and Beginners (#u790334b5-43e5-5fbe-befe-a8dd011e2388)
1. Perseus & Co. (#u0b117db4-322f-56bd-b4df-4f3280d805b2)
2. Some Enchanted Ruin (#u0cb37f9c-d442-5749-ab84-616fd7a7246d)
3. Auntie Vi (#u7e6a4728-3a16-5552-aff5-924e3723dc70)
4. A Whiter Shade of Something That Didn’t Taste Very Nice in the First Place (#u84108b7f-0bce-5337-b806-13540e82e4ce)
5. “Mr Lloyd Webber, Do You Like Cats?” (#uebe512eb-2517-594c-ba8c-641cd32f1110)
6. Enter Timothy Miles Bindon Rice (#ue473d66b-bee3-5453-879d-55afb821442e)
7. Teenage Operas, Pop Cantatas (#u7add7e51-c0e6-53e4-9bec-e5d50ca7a759)
8. Elvis with Mellotron and Tambourines (#ufd802260-3344-597d-881c-c15b5ff2a2d8)
9. Any Dream Won’t Do (#udbeb4fc1-0c71-5250-b4cf-e03698edb75c)
10. “Did Judas Iscariot Have God on His Side?” (#u2eab2399-517a-5739-a47b-f3df76d9cd2b)
11. Love Changes Everything, But . . . (#u2f27e932-960a-5071-8d9c-66951c57c89a)
12. JCS Meets RSO (#litres_trial_promo)
13. Jesus Goes to Broadway (#litres_trial_promo)
14. A Bad Case of the Edward Woodwards (#litres_trial_promo)
15. Suddenly There’s a Valet (#litres_trial_promo)
16. Syd (#litres_trial_promo)
17. Driverless Juggernauts Hurtling Down a Hill (#litres_trial_promo)
18. Eva and Juan (#litres_trial_promo)
19. The Long Hot Summer and the Sound of a Paraguayan Harp (#litres_trial_promo)
20. The Song that Cleared the Dance Floors (#litres_trial_promo)
21. Imogen and Niccolò (#litres_trial_promo)
22. Variations (#litres_trial_promo)
23. Really Useful (#litres_trial_promo)
24. Tell Me on a Sunday (#litres_trial_promo)
25. “This Artfully Produced Monument to Human Indecency” (#litres_trial_promo)
26. Shaddap and Take That Look Off Your Face (#litres_trial_promo)
27. Mr Mackintosh (#litres_trial_promo)
28. “All the Characters Must Be Cats” (#litres_trial_promo)
29. Growltiger’s Last Stand (#litres_trial_promo)
30. Body Stockings, Leg Warmers and Meat Cleavers (#litres_trial_promo)
31. Song and Dance, and Sleep (#litres_trial_promo)
32. “The Most Obnoxious Form of ‘Music’ Ever Invented” (#litres_trial_promo)
33. Miss Sarah Brightman (#litres_trial_promo)
34. “Brrrohahaha!!!” (#litres_trial_promo)
35. Requiem (#litres_trial_promo)
36. Epiphany (#litres_trial_promo)
37. “Big Change from Book” (#litres_trial_promo)
38. Year of the Phantom (#litres_trial_promo)
39. In Another Part of the West End Forest . . . (#litres_trial_promo)
40. Mr Crawford (#litres_trial_promo)
41. “Let Your Soul Take You Where You Want to Be!” (#litres_trial_promo)
Playout Music (#litres_trial_promo)
Picture Section (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Appendix (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ua656de99-a461-5b66-a30a-10e6ca97eedb)
I have long resisted writing an autobiography. Autobiographies are by definition self-serving and mine is no exception. It is the result of my nearest and dearest, aided and abetted by the late great literary agent Ed Victor, moaning at me “to tell your story your way.” I meekly agreed, primarily to shut them up. Consequently this tome is not my fault.
I intended to write my memoirs in one volume and I have failed spectacularly. Even as things are you’ll find very little about my love of art which, along with architecture and musical theatre, is one of my great passions. I decided the saga of how I built my rather unfashionable Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian art collection belongs elsewhere. The dodgy art dealers who tried to screw me can sleep peacefully – at least for the moment.
This medium sized doorstop judders to a halt at the first night of The Phantom of the Opera. Quite how I have been able to be so verbose about the most boring person I have ever written about eludes me. At one point I had a stab at shoehorning my career highlights into a taut tight chapter, rather like Wagner brilliantly packs his top tunes into his operas’ overtures. This was a dismal failure. The only thing I have in common with Wagner is length.
So here is part one of my saga. If you are a glutton for this sort of thing, dive in, at least for a bit. If you aren’t, I leave you with this thought. You are lucky if you know what you want to do in life. You are incredibly lucky if you are able to have a career in it. You have the luck of Croesus on stilts (as my Auntie Vi would have said) if you’ve had the sort of career, ups and downs, warts and all that I have in that wondrous little corner of show business called musical theatre.
Andrew Lloyd Webber
OVERTURE AND BEGINNERS (#ua656de99-a461-5b66-a30a-10e6ca97eedb)
Before me there was Mimi.
Mimi was a monkey. She was given to my mother Jean by a Gibraltan tenor with a limp that Mum had taken a shine to in the summer of 1946. Mimi and Mother must have seemed a really odd couple as they meandered through the grey bomb damaged streets of ration-gripped London’s South Kensington. “South Ken” was where my Granny Molly rented a flat that Hitler’s Luftwaffe had somehow missed which she shared with Mimi, Mum and Dad.
My dear Granny Molly came from the Hemans family, one of whom, Felicia, wrote the poem “The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck,” a dirge which every British schoolchild was force-fed a century ago. Granny was an interesting lady, not least for her strange political views. She was a founder member of the Christian Communist Party, a short lived organization that arguably was rather a contradiction in terms. She had a sister, Great-Aunt Ella, who married a minor Bloomsbury Set artist and ran, I kid you not, a transport cafe for truck drivers on the A4 outside Reading in which she kept hens.
Granny had got married to some army tosser and divorced him asap, which was not what a girl did every day in the 1920s. She told me that she threw her wedding ring down the lavatory on her honeymoon night. But the military deserter must have lurked around enough to sire Molly’s three kids Alastair, Viola and finally my mother Jean. Eventually he remarried some émigré Russian wannabe Princess Anastasia and that’s all I know about him.
Unquestionably Granny had a raw deal. Her only son Alastair drowned in a boating accident near Swanage in Dorset after he had just left school at eighteen. I have a photo of the man who would have been my uncle on my desk as I write. It affected Granny hugely but it particularly traumatized my mother. Mum had a complete fixation on Alastair and was forever proclaiming psychic contact with him. Curiously I think she did have contact with him, although her promise to “get hold of me when she discovered how” made in a letter just before she died has so far failed to deliver.
In 1938 Granny found herself bereft of her beloved son and a single mum supporting two daughters. The army tosser had never properly supported her so she was forced to sell a big house on Harrow Hill and move to the South Kensington rented flat on Harrington Road, SW7. When Mum met a plumber’s son named William Lloyd Webber, a young scholarship boy white hope of the pre-war Royal College of Music, love blossomed. Soon, despite the Second World War, nuptials could not be put on hold. Dad had close to zero income. That’s why he, Mum, Granny and Mimi shacked up under one roof.
A mere two years after VE Day, this postwar ménage à quatre came to an abrupt end. Mum got pregnant. Mimi became horrendously distressed and violently attacked my mother’s stomach with bloodcurdling cries. In short, Mimi was the first person to take a dislike to Andrew Lloyd Webber.
A decision was taken that Mimi had to ankle out of the South Kensington ménage on the urgent side of asap. On March 22, 1948, I brought the number of residents up to four again.
CUT FORWARD TO THE 1960s and 10 Harrington Court, Harrington Road redefined the “B” in bohemian. At its 1967 occupational peak it housed Granny Molly, Mum, Dad, plus his huge electronic church organ, Tchaikovsky Prize–winning pianist John Lill, Tim Rice, my cellist brother Julian and me. No. 10 was on the top floor of one of those Victorian mansion blocks where the lift occasionally worked but most of the time you used the stairs. The traffic noise was deafening but I doubt if the neighbours heard it, such were the sounds of music emanating from our household.
One afternoon, Tim Rice and I were descending the stairs out of the menagerie. Julian was practising the cello. A bloke from the flat below leapt out and accosted us.
“I don’t mind about the pianist,” he rankled. “It’s that oboe player I can’t stand.”
However, as bizarrely bohemian as 10 Harrington Court may have been, I couldn’t wait to get out of it, particularly as Mum from time to time threatened my brother and me with jumping out of the fourth-floor window. This got boring after a bit, so enter into this narrative my aunt – my impossibly, adorably, unrepeatably politically incorrect Auntie Vi, Granny’s eldest daughter. She was married to a slightly pompous doctor called George Crosby for whom Granny had worked as a secretary when she was really down on her uppers. Vi had a brief career as an actress. She was hilariously funny and a great cook with several serious recipe books to her name. She knew a few glamorous names in theatre. She was everything my family wasn’t and I adored her. She was my escape valve. Fifty years later I still daren’t print her sayings. In the 1960s she was the author of the first gay cookbook. A chapter monikered “Coq & Game Meat” is headlined:
Too Many Cocks Spoil the Breath.
FRANKLY I WAS FALSELY CITED as the cause of Mimi the monkey’s behavioural setbacks. Surely 10 Harrington Court was no place for a simian bent on swinging around the community? However, my mother stood by her initial stance. Ten years later she took brother Julian and me to Chessington Zoo. On entering the monkey house she let out a great cry of “Mimi!” more than worthy of her limping tenor. The simian turned its head, puzzled.
“Look, she recognizes me. It’s Mimi,” said Mum triumphantly as the monkey leapt across its cage and climbed the wire in aggressive fashion uttering the most fearsome sounds.
“I told you it was Mimi.” Mum looked at me pointedly. “She always hated the thought of you, now she’s seeing you for real.” The story of my life? Maybe this is as good a place to start as any.
1 Perseus & Co. (#ua656de99-a461-5b66-a30a-10e6ca97eedb)
I was born on March 22, 1948 in Westminster Hospital with a huge birthmark on my forehead that Mum said was cured courtesy of a faith healer. Others said it faded of its own accord, but Mum’s graphic details had me convinced that it might recur at any time if I was a bad child. My first memory is of being in hospital aged three with acute appendicitis. This Mother told me was undiagnosed until it was just about to burst. My case was presided over by Uncle George, now Auntie Vi’s “partner” (they hadn’t married yet) who had undiagnosed the appendicitis in the first place. As my relationship with dearest Auntie Vi bloomed whilst I staggered into my teens, the saga of the undiagnosed appendicitis would be often recounted to me in increasingly distended detail. Mother also had a serious footnote about my being chucked out of hospital way too early due to my screaming which Uncle George found embarrassing to his standing in the medical profession. Mother was seriously pregnant with Julian at the time, so the saga must have been a pain to her to put it mildly.
Being told that I had a brother is memory number two. It was a bright spring day and I was playing in Thurloe Square gardens, to which my family had a key. I remember not quite understanding what having a brother meant, but here my memory goes blank. I can’t remember anything about Julian as a baby at all, perhaps because Julian’s popping onto the planet also saw the arrival of Perseus the cat. Perseus was a wonderful square faced, seal-pointed Siamese boy, not one of those angular faced jobs so beloved of today’s breeders. I fell in love with Perseus instantly. Dad was also completely devoted to him. But I realize now that the family really shouldn’t have had an animal like that cooped up in a flat. His incessant cries to get out still give me nightmares.
Such was Perseus’s deafening low Siamese miaowing that when I was around seven I asked if I could take him on a lead to Thurloe Square when I wasn’t at school. Both Mum and Granny said yes. How trusting parents were in those days. You wouldn’t let a kid loose with a cat on a lead around South Kensington today – unless you were after a million hits on YouTube. So I became a regular spectacle walking Perseus like a dog across the old zebra crossing that led to the train station and the only bit of greenery Julian and I knew, at least in school termtime. One day Perseus escaped. Five hours later he was found among the pedestrians on the zebra crossing returning from the only piece of greenery that he, too, knew. Percy’s kerb drill was impeccable.
Years later I had the job of looking after Percy when he was dying. The old cat raised himself tortuously from his basket and started miaowing in a manner all too reminiscent of his incarcerated cries. The poor old boy scrabbled at the front door as if there were a rabbit to catch outside. So I put his lead on. He didn’t want to walk so he sat on my shoulder, a mode of transport which he always liked.
A year or two earlier the traffic at South Kensington had been reorganized into a fearsome one-way system. At the time it was claimed to feature the most complicated set of traffic lights in Europe. Perseus never mastered the new system but it was clear that the old cat wanted to pad back to the gardens that he used to freely wander to before its advent.
We got to the site of the old zebra crossing. Percy tried to get off my shoulder and I put him down. He sat for a few seconds, looked out at the new traffic lights and hissed. Then on his own he turned, lead trailing behind him, back to our flat. Next day he died. I owe Cats not only to Mummy’s bedtime reading of T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, but also to Perseus.
My third memory of 1951 is so shocking that it might also account for my not remembering anything of baby Julian. It concerns my appearance on the cover of a magazine called Nursery World. Mum hired a photographer, thrust a violin and a bow upon my person and thus created a nauseous picture on the front of the grisly publication that haunts me still. It speaks volumes about Mother. For Mum was so ambitious for her offspring that she would have given Gypsy Rose Lee’s famous showbiz mum a fair old run in the Great Child Prodigy Handicap Stakes. Sadly I was no such thing. Pushy mothers of the world beware. Offsprings rebel. Just as Gypsy Rose Lee took a career path her mother hadn’t intended for her, so did I. Not as a stripper, though, at least not in public.
Mum was an ace children’s piano teacher. Although she died in 1994 she is still a bit of legend among the great and the not so good who inhabit the leafier parts of southwest London. In 1950 Mother co-founded a pre-prep school called the Wetherby with a couple called Mr and Mrs Russell, the former being interested in bare bottom spanking. I was one of the first tots through the door. The place was a roaring success. Over the years luminaries from Princes William and Harry to Hugh Grant have joined the ranks of short-trousered ones who crossed Wetherby’s threshold.
My mother had a big hand in the school’s birth pangs. In those days parents from most walks of life wanted their kids to learn the piano. My mother’s brilliance and patience in that department assured the Wetherby’s swift ascendancy. Anyone who has ever sat beside a child while it plonks away at ghastly ditties with titles like “El Wiggly” or “Honk That Horn” will bear out that to do so you either need to be a saint or tone deaf, or most probably both. Mum’s patience might well redefine canonization. I reckon she must have given at least 100,000 piano lessons to beginners in her lifetime. Further, she really cared about her charges. There was a time when this confirmed, yet confused, socialist claimed to have taught a fair wedge of the Tory party.
I confess that her piano lessons gave me a head start in the basics of music. The trouble was that there were so many of them. And there was that wretched violin. Mum’s general idea was that I would emerge on the international concert stage as some Yehudi Menuhin-style violin toting child prodigy. Her hopes didn’t last long.
The next instrument out of the closet was the french horn. I was rather better at blowing than scratching. Indeed I rather enjoyed playing this overdeveloped hunting instrument until I was twelve. It was then that a crisis occurred. Mum’s quest to have me garner serious music grades brought me full frontal with Hindemith’s horn sonata. I have read somewhere that Hindemith developed a load of theories about the importance of amateurs to music. My theory is that some of his compositions were designed to make average instrumentalists like me abandon music for once and for all. He achieved a resounding success in my case. After attempting to play his epic I chucked my french horn in its case where it remains to this day.
Clearly Mum was transferring her ambitions from my father to me but to grasp why you have to know something about him. Billy Lloyd Webber was a mild man who feared authority in any form. He once hid in a cupboard because he had mistakenly called out the fire brigade. It transpired that Granny had left a chicken in the oven and smoked the flat out. He was convinced he was going to get a stretch in the slammer for abusing the emergency services.
Billy’s family was solid working class. His father was a plumber by trade but also a keen amateur musician. Like so many of my grandfather’s contemporaries, Billy’s father had sung in various church choirs. So Dad was steeped in the late High Church nineteenth-century choral tradition beloved by the Anglo-Catholic “smells and bells” establishments where Grandpa exercised the larynx. As a child Dad got music scholarships all over the shop. At an unprecedentedly youthful age he won a gong to the Royal College of Music. He also became the youngest person ever to become organist and choirmaster at St Cyprian’s Clarence Gate, a splendid “Arts and Crafts” church by Sir Ninian Comper. But for all his talent Dad wouldn’t say boo to a goose. All he wanted was a nice quiet routine.
By the time I was ten, Dad was increasingly content in his academic roles such as Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music. In 1959 he became boss of the London College of Music which seemingly sealed the end of his composing aspirations. He felt his writing was out of step with its time and increasingly wrote “light music” under pen names or music for amateur church choirs. Mum found his lack of ambition infuriating. Still, she was very particular about taking me to listen to his cantatas and anthems, especially first performances. Even Julian, who was barely old enough, was dragged along to hear them but soon new compositions seemed to dry up – or so we all thought. After my father’s death, Julian discovered a cache of compositions that had never been performed. Some of them were as good as anything he ever wrote.
2 Some Enchanted Ruin (#ua656de99-a461-5b66-a30a-10e6ca97eedb)
The three great passions that were to shape my life – art, musical theatre and architecture – surfaced early. My love of architecture kicked off with a weird romantic obsession with ruined castles and abbeys which began as early as I can remember. By my teens this led to a full-blown love of architecture of all sorts. Quite where this came from is a mystery; the visual arts don’t feature in the Lloyd Webber family DNA.
In the case of theatre and pop music, it is easy to explain why. My family had an annual Christmas outing to the London Palladium pantomime.
Everything captivated me. In those days the Palladium was synonymous with popular variety theatre. All the big names played there. The pantomime was a combination of big names, big sets and contemporary pop songs that must have been a heady mix to this five-year- old. One such pantomime, Aladdin, contained a line that I still cherish:
Aladdin rubs lamp. Up pops genie.
“What is your wish, sir?”
“To hear Alma Cogan singing ‘Sugar in the Morning.’ ”
Curtain parts to reveal Alma Cogan singing “Sugar in the Morning.”
Very soon I had built my first toy theatre. This was first a well loved adapted version of a Pollock’s toy theatre but eventually became a vast construction made out of play bricks baptized the Harrington Pavilion. Over the years its technical ambitions grew to such an extent that its stage acquired a revolve made from an old gramophone turntable. That revolve was a direct result of my aping the famous closing scene of TV’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium. All the stars used to line up on the legendary Palladium revolve waving good night to millions in Britain for whom that show was the television show of the late 1950s and early ’60s. To Britain it was as big as The Ed Sullivan Show in the USA. I pinch myself every morning knowing that today I own the theatre that turned me on to theatre.
London Palladium inspired pantomime and variety seasons at the Harrington Pavilion were short lived. Christmas holidays 1958 brought me full frontal with musicals for the first time. It was a baptism and a half. I saw My Fair Lady and West Side Story plus the movies of Gigi and South Pacific all in the space of four game-changing weeks. 1958 also coincided with the arrival of Harrington Court’s first long-playing gramophone. With it came an LP of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite. Unfortunately for Dad the other side was Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges Suite whose gloriously dissonant chaotic start much appealed to Julian and me. The famous march had us dancing on our bed with joy. Thus started my lifelong love of Prokofiev, in my opinion one of the greatest melodists of the twentieth century.
My Fair Lady was the talk of London throughout 1958. The legendary musical based on Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion had opened on Broadway two years earlier to ecstatic reviews, apart from one Alan Jay Lerner told me about in Variety that said there were no memorable songs. The producers did a brilliant hyping job in Britain by banning the music from being heard or performed until just before the London production opened with the result that the Broadway cast album was the ultimate in chic contraband. Naturally Auntie Vi had one so by the time I saw the show I knew the score backwards and had long pondered whether Rex Harrison’s semi-spoken song delivery had a place at the Harrington Pavilion. London’s lather foamed even further as the three Broadway leads, Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews and Stanley Holloway, repeated their starring roles at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane and I was lucky enough to have a ticket to see all three – actually two because Stanley Holloway was off. It’s funny how a disappointment like that stays with you forever. In my case that and the rustling front cloth depicting the exterior of Wimpole Street as Freddy Eynsford-Hill warbled “On the Street Where You Live” are what I remember most about that December Saturday matinee – apart from my showing off by singing along with the songs to show I knew them.
My love of the score took me to the movie of Gigi, the now impossibly un-PC story about a girl being groomed as a courtesan. Can you imagine what would happen if you pitched a Hollywood studio today a song sung by an old man entitled “Thank Heaven for Little Girls”? Thank heaven I was young enough only to agree and even today the overture from Gigi is something I relish hearing.
Curiously it was Granny Molly who banged on about West Side Story and it was she who took me to it. The American cast’s dancing was like nothing I’d seen before. That two stage musicals could be so different yet equally spellbinding had me in a tailspin. Granny bought me the Broadway cast album for Christmas and pretty soon it was my favourite of the two. I related to Bernstein’s score much as I did to Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges.
However what completely pulverized me was the film of South Pacific. I went with Mum and Dad and I remember the afternoon I saw it as vividly as the legendary colour filters that would have clobbered a lesser score. I had to wait until my birthday the following March for the soundtrack album. I still treasure my battered worn copy – incidentally it is the only album to have been No. 1 in the UK charts for a whole calendar year. By Christmas 1961 I knew the scores of Carousel, The King and I and Oklahoma! and had seen the South Pacific movie four times. But there was one other movie. It only had a few songs but it grabbed me nonetheless. Elvis in Jailhouse Rock. The “Jailhouse Rock” sequence had me standing on my seat. I still have the worn-out 45 rpm single that drove my parents to distraction.
Musicals were soon the staple diet of the Harrington Pavilion. I wrote tons of dreadful ones. An audience of bored parents and friends, relatives and anyone I could find would gather for the latest offering with Julian and me on vocals, and me alternating as pianist and scene-shifter. At its zenith the theatre’s stage, were it to have been built lifesize, would have dwarfed that of the new Paris opera house at the Bastille. Subjects included everything from The Importance of Being Earnest to The Queen of Sheba. A whole fantasy town developed around the theatre. Everyone in this town was somehow dependent upon the theatre’s well-being. The Harrington Pavilion had a box office through which the townspeople booked tickets. Hits or turkeys were assessed by the reaction of the audience of bored parents and friends.
I developed with Julian a complete world in which I could hide and where I was truly happy, a make-believe world with one common denominator, musical theatre. There were stars who came and went, made comebacks or passed into oblivion with billing to match. There were pretend directors, designers and programmes, even souvenir brochures, for I was very impressed by the stiff-covered job that went with My Fair Lady. There were special train services that ferried audiences from the fantasy town to the theatre on show nights and, when I was given my first tape recorder, original cast albums were quick to follow.
Praise be to the good Lord that the tape recorder in question was incompatible with any other. For some reason it had its own peculiar tape speed. Thus my prepubescent warblings, along with the gismo that recorded them, are mercifully lost to posterity. However I own up that two of the tunes survive in other guises. From Ernest! billed modestly as “A Musical of Gigantic Importance,” one became “Chained and Bound” in Joseph. The main melody of “Chanson d’Enfance,” appropriately titled under the circumstances, in Aspects of Love also came from this show. Quite how the latter could possibly have made sense dramatically in a musical based on Wilde’s timeless comedy eludes me.
However my burgeoning love of medieval cathedrals, ruins and churches affected me equally as deeply. I built a vast play-brick Gothic cathedral (dedicated to St Elvis) at the other end of the nursery to cope with the Harrington Pavilion theatregoers’ spiritual needs. St Elvis’s Cathedral fell victim to the wrecker’s ball and chain, i.e. Julian in a fit of rage knocked it down. But for many years the Harrington Pavilion, being glued together, survived unscathed. In the Sixties when I left home, my toy theatre was carefully dismantled and stored. But sadly it went missing when I moved house in 1974. All I have now are a very few photographs.
WITH THE TOY THEATRE shows came an increasing interest in me from Auntie Vi. Mum, frankly, whilst not disapproving of my puerile jingles, didn’t exactly approve either. She had transferred her ambition for a classical musician of a son onto three-year- old Julian, for whom she had bought a baby-sized cello. Dad, however, was starting to show an interest in what I was up to. When I was ten he took some of my tunes, arranged them very simply for the piano, and had them published under my name in a magazine called The Music Teacher with the title “The Toy Theatre.” Every now and again when I was experimenting away at the piano he’d come in and ask me how I had discovered some chord or another. I suppose that wasn’t surprising: my father, for all his grand title of Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music, truly loved melody. In fact he was the most open bloke about melody there could be.
Thus in addition to hearing all the current musicals, specially when I went to visit Auntie Vi, my father would play me music of all sorts, albeit with a heavy leaning towards Rachmaninov. Dad’s taste in “serious” music did not embrace the modernists. He did, however, admire Benjamin Britten’s orchestrations, though he would wave his cocktail-shaker in anger that Britten left for America in the Second World War as a conscientious objector. Dad repeatedly moaned that Britten thus gained a massive unfair advantage over composers like himself who stayed in bomb blitzed London and did their bit for the war effort.
In 1958 Dad decided to hit the organ keyboards again. He had given up his post at All Saints Margaret Street after the war to teach composition at the Royal College of Music. Now, a decade later, he was appointed musical director of the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster. The Central Hall services were polar opposite to the High Church trappings of All Saints. I gather his move caused quite a stir in circles where incense is a key conduit to God. But Mum was delighted. She distrusted Catholics. Catholics believe animals have no souls. The truth was that the Central Hall had one of the finest organs in Britain, and Dad was itching to play publicly again. My cellist brother Julian tells me that performing was where Dad showed a steely side. Early in his career Julian asked Dad how he could overcome his pre-performance nerves. Dad rounded on him, saying if he had prepared himself properly he wouldn’t be nervous.
Apart from the occasional blood and thunder sermon or rousing free-church hymn, the ray of sunshine in the colourless services that Julian and I were now dragged to every Sunday was the moment Dad goosed up proceedings with one of his organ improvisations. Of course Methodists are teetotallers so I hope nobody examined the mineral water bottle Dad had beside him in his organ console and which, after a swig, miraculously transported him to ever greater inspirational freedom.
2014 saw the centenary of my father’s birth and there has been a welcome flurry of interest in him as a composer. This has been much encouraged by Julian’s discovery of many pieces he wrote but kept under wraps because he openly felt his music was out of step with the contemporary serious music world. It was. But, rather as late Victorian painters continued in sub Pre-Raphaelite style long after the advent of Impressionism, Cubism and the like, today we see these artists still had something to offer even if it was out of its time. I feel the same way about Dad’s music. He could have been a fantastic film composer. His work is crammed with wonderful big melodies, quite alien of course to anything in contemporary classical music, but of a scale and dramatic breadth equal to many of the famous twentieth-century film composers. I believe he knew it but couldn’t bring himself to consider going down that road.
First, in the 1930s it would have seemed like a heinous case of letting the side down for a working-class boy who had won every sort of academic gong to demean himself in the world of “commercial” music.
Secondly, he loved a fixed routine. He could never have coped with overnight rewrites demanded by a temperamental director who wanted a musical rethink like yesterday. But listen to Dad’s orchestral tone poem Aurora. I played it once for the movie director Ken Russell, who pronounced it an erotic, supercharged mini-masterpiece. The director of Women in Love should know.
I have one very vivid memory of Dad. Before we went to the movie of South Pacific he played me the Mario Lanza recording of “Some Enchanted Evening.” Three times he played it, tears streaming from his eyes. The third time around he muttered something about how Richard Rodgers’ publisher told him that this song would kick off the postwar baby boom.
When the record finally stopped he looked me straight in the face.
“Andrew,” he said, “if you ever write a tune half as good as this I shall be very, very proud of you.”
On that evening my love affair with Richard Rodgers’s music began. I went to bed heady with melody. Sadly, however, Dad never raised the issue of whether in my later career I’d come even halfway to equalling “Some Enchanted Evening.”
MUM, MEANWHILE, WAS DETERMINED that I should be a prodigy in something or other. So when I went to the junior department of Westminster School, known as the Under School, my mother’s eagle-eye supervision of my homework meant that I rose through the school far too fast. By the time I was eleven I was in a grade where some of the class were nearly two years older than me.
Considering I was smaller than the other boys, useless at sport, still played classical music and was the school swot, it’s not surprising that I was bullied. I needed a big idea. It came about in an unlikely way. Westminster Under School was in those days in a square that was walkable from Victoria station, two stops down the underground from “South Ken” station. Heaven knows what today’s parents would think of a journey to school involving packed trains, a walk past a shop selling “Iron Jelloids” and the Biograph, London’s first gay movie house, but that’s the journey I took twice daily. On the morning in question a saddo tried to fondle me undercover of the tight standing crush on the underground train. I was too shocked to make a fuss. But I was furious, so furious that it gave me an idea that maybe was big enough to call an epiphany. Whatever, it changed my schoolboy life.
That afternoon was the end of term concert. I was slated to play some boring piano piece by Haydn. It was time to ring the changes. I ascended the stage to a deafening yawn and announced a change of programme. There was a small flicker of interest.
“Today,” I announced, “I am going to play some tunes I have written that describe every master in the school.”
The flicker of interest was now a flame – on the small side, but a flame nonetheless. So I dedicated to each master one of the tunes I had written for the Harrington Pavilion. After the first there was baffled applause. After the second it was heading towards strongish. During the fourth song the school was clapping along and when, before the sixth, I turned to the headmaster and said, “This one is for you,” even the other masters applauded.
At the end there was uproar. Boys were shouting “Lloydy, Lloydy!”
I was no longer the little school swot. I was Andrew. And I had become Andrew through music.
IT WOULD GREATLY SIMPLIFY writing this tome were I to claim that this was the moment I knew my destiny was to write music. But the truth is, it wasn’t. Music was an increasingly important part of my life, my safety valve in fact, but it wasn’t my overriding passion. Equal first was still architecture, with art a close third.
My love of ruined castles and abbeys must have started very young because I have a scrapbook put together when I can’t have been more than six. It is stuffed with guidebooks and postcards and very childish writing about the abbeys and castles around Southampton and Portsmouth. This figures, because my father’s sister Marley lived around these parts in one of those twentieth-century houses which, like most of the sprawl on the English south coast, should be demolished forthwith.
I am pretty sure that my passion for architecture kicked off at Westminster Abbey. A few years ago I was invited to a meeting about some very exciting plans for the Abbey’s future. The Dean of Westminster produced a letter that the Abbey archivist had found which he proceeded to read. It was from me aged seven offering my pocket money to the Abbey fabric fund. “Precocious brat” was written all over the faces around the table. I have had many discussions about getting involved with the Abbey subsequently but they always stall over my insistence that the utterly inappropriate chandeliers that were hung in the church in the 1960s are sold to a hotel in Vegas.
I shall forever have a debt to my parents for indulging my childhood obsession. Every family holiday was somewhere in Britain where there were buildings I wanted to see. One summer the family found itself in a rented house near the massive steelworks of Port Talbot in Wales because I wanted to be near a place called Margam Abbey –which, by the way, has a great orangery. The best holiday was in Yorkshire. You have to be made of Yorkshire granite not to be moved by the stunning evocative ruins of Fountains Abbey. My favourite was Rievaulx. What did the abbey look like before Henry VIII’s minions did an ISIS job on this medieval masterpiece? The imagination runs riot. The vistas to the abbey from the glorious mid-eighteenth- century park on the hill above Rievaulx are England at its Arcadian best.
What emphatically was not Arcadian was an incident still embedded irrevocably in my skull. My parents took me and Perseus the cat to Richmond Castle. The place was pretty empty, so Mum let Perseus off his dog lead. Out of the blue a bunch of cadets from the local army camp tramped into the castle courtyard as noisily as their boots would allow, caught sight of our terrified cat and chased him up the spiral staircase of one of the towers. Dad, of course, ran for cover. Even today I have a real paranoia of the army. Certainly it fuelled my childhood fear of conscription, which was still in action in Britain at that time, and ten years later heightened my sympathy with the pressganged US conscripts of the Vietnam War. That incident and the constant fearmongering headlines in the press about war over the Suez Canal throughout that hot 1955 summer led me to the dark thought that forces I could never control would some day destroy me and my little world of theatre and medieval buildings. It was during that otherwise idyllic holiday that I first prayed at bedtime.
VERY SOON THEATRES JOINED the list of abbeys, cathedrals, country houses and the like that so dominated my childhood. The 1950s saw the arrival of television. Soon the variety theatres that were so much a part of pre-war British life became sad, redundant, twitching corpses. Theatre after theatre succumbed to the wrecker’s ball. I found their plight irresistible. Some theatres literally had become ruins. I remember prising my way into the derelict Bedford Theatre in London’s Camden Town, a theatre memorably made famous by the early twentieth-century artist Walter Sickert who painted it brimming full of vibrant life. Rain was pouring through a gaping hole in the roof. Two years later it was a memory.
Some of the lucky ones had a stay of execution by being turned into TV studios. The Chelsea Palace was one such. I was taken to a transmission of a then massive TV comedy series, The Army Game. The stalls had been raised to the level of the stage to create a huge flat floor on which the dinosaur TV cameras ducked and dived around teeny little sets. In the late 1950s that sort of show was broadcast live. For a brief period, the Harrington Pavilion was turned into a TV studio with a similar flat floor, but mercifully common sense prevailed and live theatrical performances resumed PDQ with a massive hit musical called The Weird Sisters based on Macbeth. Now the Chelsea Palace is yet another Kings Road shopping centre. What would a theatre producer give for such a wonderful building in that location now?
HOWEVER THE TV PROGRAMME that really game-changingly gripped me was a Saturday night rock’n’roll show called Oh Boy! It thrillingly made a virtue of being filmed in a theatre, a wonderful old variety house called the Hackney Empire, which intriguingly was designed by the same architect as the London Palladium, Frank Matcham. It was directed by Jack Good who went on to helm Catch My Soul, the rock Othello. He used the auditorium as if it were part of the set. Cameras swooped onto the stage over hysterical girls screaming at Brit male stars who all had surnames like Wilde, Eager or Fury. Equally great was the backing band Lord Rockingham’s XI with their intriguing choreographed instrument moves. I moaned to my mother that Brahms would be much enhanced if classical orchestras would only do this sort of thing. Years later Cliff Richard confirmed to me just how staged each show was and how he had been directed down to the last camera eyeball.
Oh Boy! made a most profound impression on me. From then on the words rock’n’roll were synonymous with musical theatre and the Harrington Pavilion was soon ablaze with rock shows.
BY THE TIME I hit double figures my brother Julian was becoming a star on his half-size cello. The word “prodigy” was bellowed above the traffic din at 10 Harrington Court and unsurprisingly Mum’s main interest switched to my younger sibling. Notwithstanding this, we both entered the Saturday morning junior school at the Royal College of Music, me toting my shiny french horn.
But, as far as Mum was concerned, I was at best a conundrum and so she gave up on my academic career and, buoyed by events at the school concert, I gave up on it too. Thoughts of my being the youngest ever Queen’s Scholar at Westminster Great (i.e. senior) School evaporated. I wasn’t even entered for the scholarship exam called “the Challenge.” Mum’s sole consolation prize was that I entered Westminster aged twelve, a full year earlier than usual. Meantime I was getting closer and closer to my deliciously naughty Aunt Vi.
1. A uniquely British theatre entertainment for families that goes back to the nineteenth century, its appeal is wholly inexplicable to non-Brits.
2. Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Williamson Music was represented by Teddy Holmes at Chappell’s. As well as being Rodgers and Hammerstein’s publisher, he was also my father’s.
3 Auntie Vi (#ua656de99-a461-5b66-a30a-10e6ca97eedb)
A quick reminder. Auntie Vi was mother Jean’s elder sister. She married Dr George Crosby, the dumpy somewhat pompous doctor for whom Granny Molly had once worked as a secretary. Vi called him “Potto” which was really rather appropriate. That glorious word “panjandrum” could have been invented for him. Vi and George plus a marmalade cat named Cooper lived in a top-floor flat in Weymouth Street above his medical practice, close enough to the centre of London’s medical hub Harley Street, but the location was cheaper and actually rather nicer. I used to escape there as often as possible. The flat or maisonette, as George puffed it up – seemed impossibly glamorous (my aunt would have said “chi-chi”) after the seldom cleaned haven for traffic noise addicts that was Harrington Court.
There was an upstairs drawing room which had been knocked into the room next door by means of an ever so “chi-chi” arch. Therein lurked a stereo record player on which Auntie played those Fifties Latin American records which showed off the marvels of stereo with question-and- answer bongo solos panned left and right only. There was a dining room with a bar underneath and a wine rack containing George’s collection of Barolo. Up to that time the only wine bottles I had seen had candles in them. There was Vi’s kitchen where there were herbs, onions, garlic and wine and where she cooked her recipes for the modern woman. In 1956 she had written and had published a hit recipe book The Hostess Cooks, under her maiden name Viola Johnstone. Its premise was that in the Fifties no one could afford home help any more. The recipes were designed so that our hostess could emerge from the stoves, mascara intact, to entertain out front as if an army of sous chefs had been slaving since dawn and she had had a decent post-lunch siesta. It was a far cry from the over-boiled brussels sprouts of Harrington Court.
Then there were Vi’s friends. There was Tony Hancock of TV’s iconic Hancock’s Half Hour sitcom. Vi introduced me to him in his flat where he was teaching a parrot to say “Fuck Mrs Warren.” Mrs Warren was his cleaner – whom he loathed – so he had embarked on a strategy to get her to quit. She didn’t. Auntie told me that one day the parrot mysteriously cried, “Hancock has no bollocks.”
There was film director Ronald Neame who had been David Lean’s legendary cameraman on classic British movies like Great Expectations. One day I was to work with him on The Odessa File. There was Val Guest and his glamorous actress wife Yolande Donlan. I was in total awe of her as she was the lead in the movie Expresso Bongo with Cliff Richard. Ballet nuts might be intrigued to know that the rock’n’roll sequences in this epic were choreographed by Sir Kenneth MacMillan, another name who would cross my professional path. A few years later, Val discovered Raquel Welch in the movie One Million Years B.C. It was Val who created the iconic image of Miss Welch in a doe-skin bikini which he used as his Christmas card. I’ve still got mine.
Finally there was Vida Hope, the theatre director who had a huge hit with The Boy Friend, one of the few Fifties British musicals to hoof it to Broadway. Julie Andrews was the young lead and it was in The Boy Friend that she was headhunted for My Fair Lady. I remember Vida railing passionately against a Broadway musical she had just seen. “A nauseating show with a fifty-five-year-old woman pretending to be an eighteen-year-old nun, plus a load of saccharin cute children.” She was referring, of course, to Mary Martin in The Sound of Music.
It’s hard today to understand just how low the reputation of Rodgers and Hammerstein had sunk in the eyes of the British intelligentsia. I still remember the father of a school friend thinking I was a congenital idiot for loving the “sentimental twaddle” called Carousel. He collected cuttings of ghastly reviews and with great pleasure showed me one by John Barber describing the show as “treacle.” Of course I was taken to The Boy Friend and frankly I’m still agnostic about it. It was yet another nostalgic British musical burying itself in the sand against the tide of rock’n’roll. However it was a lot better than Salad Days. I was dragged to this concoction by my godmother Mabel, who disowned me after Perseus the cat destroyed a fox fur stole she left in my care when she was dining with Granny. I remember thinking that if ever I worked in the theatre Salad Days was the sort of show I had to eliminate.
THE ATMOSPHERE AT 28 Weymouth Street was everything home wasn’t. Aunt Vi had a real eye for interior design, two words my parents hadn’t heard of. And it was Vi who taught me to cook. In the process I learned a few choice bon mots that hardly any boys of my age knew, let alone understood. However what really forced me into Auntie Vi’s not inconsiderable bosom was Mum’s latest obsession which affected the family deeply. Certainly the family was never the same again. Its name was John Lill.
John Lill was sixteen years old and Julian only nine when they met at the Saturday junior school of the Royal College of Music. John Lill was the school’s star concert pianist and destined to be the first Brit to win the Tchaikovsky Prize in Moscow. Although Julian was seven years John’s junior, somehow they had become friendly enough for Julian to ask him back to Harrington Court where John met Mum. It was a meeting that was to change all our lives. It’s easy to understand why John plus his back story so grabbed Mum. John Lill was born into a working-class family who lived in the then run-down deprived northeast London suburb of Leyton in one of those slum houses that today sell for hundreds of thousands of pounds, such is London’s housing crisis. John was selected for the local grammar school but it was at the piano that he excelled. He won a scholarship to the junior Royal College and scraped together his train fares there by playing pub piano in one of the East End’s tougher bars. The owner would introduce John with gems like:
“Do you know your balls are hanging out?”
To which John would reply, “No, but sing the tune and I’ll vamp.”
At last here was the young musical genius Mum had been looking for. Better still, from a background that salved Mum’s conscience big time about hours spent teaching privileged brats at the Wetherby School. Soon Mum was driving John back to Leyton from college and had befriended his parents. Before long Julian and I found ourselves in Leyton to see for ourselves John’s family terraced house “in the slums” as Mum unmincingly chose her words.
There was another life-changing consequence to all this. Whilst Mum was up to good deeds, Julian and I were let loose on the streets of Leyton and we soon discovered the local football team, London’s “Cinderella” soccer club Leyton Orient. Although for one brief season the O’s did reach English soccer’s top flight, we Orient supporters are a small bunch unsullied by success, principally because there’s never been any. However once you have pledged allegiance to a soccer club, that’s that. Julian and I support the O’s to this day, although tragically as I write this, the club has gone out of the Football League.
Years later, it was at the O’s that I was given some truly sage advice. Around the time the “Jesus Christ Superstar” single came out in the UK, I was invited to lunch in the O’s boardroom by the club’s then chairman Bernard Delfont. Bernie, later Lord, Delfont was half-brother to Lew and Leslie Grade. Between the three of them they controlled British show business. Bernie owned the theatres, Lew owned the top film and TV outlets and Leslie was agent to the stars. It was what is today called a 360 degree arrangement. So I was pretty overawed to be asked to watch a home game by the most powerful man in British theatre. Leyton Orient lost of course. But it’s the conversation after the debacle that I recall most.
“My boy, can I give you some advice?” said Bernie, drawing me to one side.
“Of course, Mr Delfont.”
“Just call me Bernie.”
“Yes, Bernie.”
“I’ve heard that song of yours, I’ve got this feeling you could go far. I’ve got some advice for you, my boy. You’re not Jewish are you?”
“No I’m afraid not, I’m . . .”
“You’re not one of the tribe?”
“No, I er . . .”
“Never mind, I’ll give it to you anyway.” He paused. “Never, my boy, never buy a football club.”
From that day onwards Bernie became a friend I could always count on. It was Bernie who years later came to the rescue of Cameron Mackintosh and me when we couldn’t get the theatre we needed for Cats.
NOT VERY GRADUALLY MUM imported John into the family. There were plusses here too. As John increasingly practised chez Harrington Court, I sometimes turned the pages of his piano scores and discovered a huge amount of music I would never have known otherwise and John’s technical ability was inspiring to witness. But there were three boys going on the summer family holiday now. I am sure it must have been very awkward for John too but he seemed to accept everything Mum threw at him. Whatever Julian and I felt, we had acquired an elder brother. We had no choice in the matter. Nor did Dad. He admired John and recognized his exceptional gifts, particularly as an interpreter of Beethoven. But it must have been hard for this quiet, reserved man to stomach that his wife’s attentions and ambitions were focused on someone else.
THE JOHN LILL SAGA was still in its embryo when, in the autumn of 1960, aged twelve and a half – a year younger than my contemporaries and frightened out of my skull – I started my first term at Westminster School. The school, circa 1960–65, was a bit like me, a curious mixture of rebellion, tradition, bloody-mindedness and neurosis, glued together by academic excellence, although the latter was arguably not strictly applicable in my case. It is supposed to have been founded by Queen Elizabeth I in 1560. In fact the school long predated the throne’s most famous redhead. It was Henry VIII who did one of his rare decent deeds, apart from allegedly writing Greensleeves, by sorting out a chaotic Abbey school. After he annexed and plundered the monasteries in 1536 he found himself in a quandary about Westminster Abbey because this was where the monarch was crowned. Its destruction would have made the operation awkward. So the school became part of his Westminster scheme of things.
The school’s location greatly defines its character. Westminster is at the epicentre of British tradition. It’s where the monarch is crowned. The Queen’s Scholars are by statute the first voices to shout “God Save Whoever” the moment after he or she is crowned. Westminster scholars are to this day allowed to attend debates in the mother of Parliaments. If you were a Scholar in my time you could have skipped the queues at Winston Churchill’s lying in state, witnessed the vote that legalized gay sex and watched the Profumo Affair bring down the Macmillan government.
On arrival, new boys had to choose two special subjects to top up the usual diet of Maths, French etc. Annoyingly history was not an option. Westminster kids did not take the lower history grades as the senior history master rightly considered them useless. So I wound up doing Ancient Greek which I hated and biology (you had to choose a science-based subject) which was Greek to me.
For your first two weeks at the new emporium you were allocated a boy a year older than you, who was tasked with sympathetically demonstrating the niceties of the institution in which you were to spend the next few years. In fact you were regaled with tales of the headmaster’s legendary beatings and the sadistic antics of the gym master, Stuart Murray. I was familiar with this bastard. He had practised minor versions of his craft at the Under School and drilled into me a loathing of exercise and sport that was only partially sorted out by a Californian swimming instructress called Mimosa in the 1970s. I don’t think I’m vindictive by nature but when I read in the school magazine one morning years later that Mr Murray had died, I wrote two tunes and had a bottle of wine for lunch.
I LAY LOW FOR my first term but a plan hatched when I saw the house Christmas pantomime. This struck me as awesomely sophisticated stuff. But none of the music was original. I let the following Easter term pass by but come the summer it was time to strike. I played the card that I had played before. A highlight of the summer term was the annual house concert. I put myself down to play the piano, programme to be announced.
As the end of pre-Beatle days drew nigh, the British charts were home to a few local curiosities, none more so than Russ Conway. Mr Conway was a rather good-looking gay guy. He played pub piano on TV with a fixed grin, despite having lost two digits in an incident in the Royal Navy which need not detain us. He also wrote several chart-topping instrumentals, most famously “Side Saddle.” John Lill featured a few of these in his pub gigs.
My offering at the annual house concert was a tune I had knocked up in his style. It had the desired effect. After two encores the housemaster declared that it would make everyone’s fortunes. Next morning I was summoned to see the Head of House. He told me that another senior boy was writing next term’s annual pantomime. He needed some songs. Would I like to meet him? That’s how I met my first lyricist and came to compose my first-ever performed musical. Its name was Cinderella up the Beanstalk and his name was Robin Barrow.
Any cockiness I acquired was short lived. Buoyed by my belief that I was God’s gift to melody I wrote a fan letter to none other than Richard Rodgers, courtesy of my father’s publisher Teddy Holmes at Chappell Music. Rodgers actually received it and, to my amazement, invited me to the London opening of The Sound of Music at the Palace Theatre. So on May 19, 1961 I found myself at my first premiere. On my own in a back row of the upper circle, I was overwhelmed by the melodies. However, arrogant little sod that I was, I wrote on my programme, “Not as good as ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ ” beside “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” in the songlist. Even so, I knew I was hearing melodies that would become evergreen from a genius at the top of his game.
Unfortunately my marvel at this first night tunefest was not shared by the London critics. This was rammed home to me by my so-called school friends when I pitched up the following morning. They had considerately laid out all the reviews for me on the common-room table. “Look what they’ve done to your idol, Lloydy,” they crowed. That’s when I first experienced a feeling that’s taken the shine off many an opening night. But at least I learned my first lesson in creative advertising. One of the reviews read, “If you are a diabetic craving extra sickly sweet things inject an extra large dose of insulin and you will not fail to thrill to ‘The Sound of Music.’”
“You Will Not Fail To Thrill To The Sound Of Music” adorned the front of the Palace Theatre for eight poetic justice infused years.
NEXT TERM REHEARSALS FOR Cinderella began. I found myself a junior boy rehearsing the seniors in a show with words written by a school prefect. Unsurprisingly, the first two rehearsals were daunting. In those days the seniority code at any school was quite something. But it was amazing how once we got into the swing of things all this was forgotten. Melodies were offered up, criticized, rewritten, discussed. Songs were tried out, cut, reinstated and cut again. It turned out that the Head of House had a rather good voice, so creepily I gave him a couple of wannabe showstoppers. For the first time I was where I was to discover I am happiest – working on a musical. We did three shows. I played the piano backstage and every night I took a proud little bow.
Two incidents dominated Christmas. The first was news from Italy that Auntie Vi had been slung out of Pisa Cathedral for showing her tits to a sacristan who had said her dress showed too much of her shoulders. The second happened on Christmas day. Mum had propelled Julian and me towards the morning Christmas service at the Central Hall, Westminster, unwisely leaving Granny Molly in charge of the Christmas turkey. I suggested that I manned the stoves and that Molly went to hear Dad and his choir strut their stuff, but this suggestion fell on deaf ears. Throughout the service I was gravely concerned about the fate of the turkey and keen to get back to Harrington Court as soon as decently possible. So Mum volunteered to drive me home, leaving Dad and Julian to cadge a lift with a neighbour after the post-service teabag and packet mince-pie party.
Mum turned on the car radio and out of the tinny mono speaker came music that catapulted thought of the turkey into the middle distance. Mum had tuned in five minutes after the start of Puccini’s Tosca. I was completely and utterly captivated. I couldn’t understand a word of it (probably a good thing as the more you understand the plot of Tosca the more unpleasant it is) but I had never heard such theatrical, gloriously melodic music in my life. Mum did explain what was going on when we got to the Act 1 closer, the “Te Deum,” as she parked in the mews by the French Lycée. I realize now why that “Te Deum” hit every nerve in my body. My love of Victorian church architecture equalled an affinity with High Church decadence and if ever a piece of theatre is that, surely it’s the Tosca “Te Deum.” To this day it remains the only piece of theatre I secretly would love to direct. Just that bit though. Sadly, you probably wouldn’t see much of my directorial debut due to excess incense clouds.
Unfortunately Mum clocked Dad and Julian being dropped off home across the road and opined that, Tosca or not, it was time for Christmas presents. I begged her to let me stay in the car. She said something like, “I suppose music is more important than Christmas” and told me to lock the car door after I had finished with the keys which she left in the ignition. With that she ankled towards the family festivities. I listened spellbound to the second act, as the car got colder and colder, and I went as cold as the outside air when I heard what I later discovered to be “Vissi d’arte.” By the time the third-act bells of Rome were chiming I was totally wiped out. This was truly theatre music that I never dreamed possible. And there were no words! It was then that my reverie was interrupted by ferocious banging on the car windscreen.
You have to think of things from the police officer’s point of view. Here was a thirteen-year- old boy in floods of tears at 2 pm on a freezing cold Christmas Day seemingly in charge of a car and listening to opera on the radio at full volume, not everyday stuff for a police officer, let alone on Christmas Day. Furthermore the thirteen-year- old boy seemed extremely indignant, even aggressive at being asked to turn the music off and explain himself. Eventually the policeman sort of accepted my story with an “I suppose I’ll believe you this time because it’s Christmas,” and let me go on condition that he walked me to the flat front door.
A week later Dad gave me a highlights album of Tosca. I resolved to save every penny of my pocket money so that one day I could buy a boxed set of the whole score.
I SAID WORKING ON a musical is when I am happiest, but that Christmas a present proved once again that this isn’t quite true. I was given a book about ruined abbeys and once more I was off into my world of history and architecture. From then onwards every school half term was taken up with a train ride to somewhere I wanted to see. Without this stabilizing passion my life could have been very different.
Easter 1962 found me on my one and only school holiday trip. A bunch of us, including my new-found lyricist Robin Barrow, were taken to Athens and Rome, where we duly marvelled at the antiquities. I added a diet of churches. It was in Rome that the misreading of a street map led me to a building that truly changed me. With hindsight I suspect the essay I wrote when I got home, which cogently argued that the American Church in Rome with its mosaics by the great Victorian artist Sir Edward Burne-Jones was Rome’s finest building, may have been my first written attempt at being provocative. If so, it had its desired effect.
My art master was furious. “How can you write such garbage?” he screamed. “Don’t you realize that church is full of Victorian tat?”
It must have been galling for a 1960s art teacher to think he’d hauled a troop of teenagers around the marvels of ancient Greece and Rome only to find one of them had fallen in love with Victorian art.
THE FOLLOWING SUMMER TERM was the occasion for the annual Westminster scholarship exam called the Challenge. Eight boys are chosen to enter College, the house reserved only for scholars. This was the exam that was deemed pointless for me to try when I was at the Under School. However I was still young enough to have a crack at it. So I did. The first few papers, Greek, Maths etc., suggested that my decision to have a go was extremely unwise. History was the last paper and, secure in the knowledge that everything I had done so far reinvented the pig’s ear, there was nothing for it but to let rip. My paper was a eulogy to medieval Britain, with the added thrust that the Gothic Revival improved it. I argued that, superb as the medieval glass in the clerestory of Westminster Abbey is, the glass by a Victorian named Kempe in the south transept eclipses the lot.
I sauntered out of the exam room that bright summer’s day certain that I wouldn’t be hearing more from the powers behind the Challenge. Next day I was summoned to an interview. Behind a desk was the bursar, the headmaster and the senior history teacher, a wonderful man called Charles Keeley. For some reason it was the bursar who asked the questions. Curiously we got onto the subject of the castles of the Welsh borders. Quite why I talked about Clun Castle escapes me but, if ever you find yourself stuck on this subject, the thing to remember is that Oliver Cromwell blew up its “keep” or main tower which duly slipped intact down the hill it stood on. I mentioned this. It transpired the bursar’s family came from Clun.
That night I was told I had won a Queen’s Scholarship to Westminster.
4 A Whiter Shade of Something That Didn’t Taste Very Nice in the First Place (#ua656de99-a461-5b66-a30a-10e6ca97eedb)
If, like me, you think that a story of adolescent angst, depression, unrequited you-name- it and general hormone imbalance is best consigned to a lovelorn teenager’s chat site, skip the next bit. Frankly I nearly did. In a nutshell I was pretty confused and unhappy for the next two years, partly because I was now away from home at boarding school, even if it was only three stops on the underground from Harrington Court. And yes, as was the case for so many public schools at that time, there was a master whose activities today would result in a medium-scale sojourn in one of Her Majesty’s less salubrious addresses.
But the bottom line, appropriate words in the circumstances, was that I emerged from Westminster wiser in the ways of the world and having encountered some of the finest and kindest teachers any boy could have wished for. Top of the list were my housemaster in College Jim Woodhouse and the history chief Charles Keeley. It was Charles who went out on a limb to get me my scholarship and up until the last minute I singularly failed to repay the faith he showed in me.
The skippable bit starts in the summer of 1962, a summer I shall ever associate with Brian Hyland’s bittersweet “Sealed with a Kiss.” Auntie Vi and George the Panjandrum sold up their Weymouth Street flat and moved to a house they had built on the Italian Riviera just over the French border in a village called La Mortola, famed for the Hanbury Gardens. Even now they remain my favourite spot on the Mediterranean. George had reached retirement age and the promise of sun and cheap booze had proved irresistible. At a stroke I had lost my London escape hole, although I soon found I had gained an outside plus. At La Mortola I got to touch the last golden autumn days of the bohemian Côte d’Azur that has vanished now into a sea of oligarchs and eurotrash.
The family holiday that year was in the north Norfolk village of Burnham Market. I chose it because Norfolk oozes churches. The problem was that John Lill came too and an upright piano was added to our cottage’s rental bill. It was obvious that things were also beginning to weigh on Julian. One afternoon we were on an open-top bus. It was brilliantly sunny and I had forced my brother to join me on a church crawl. I vividly remember him asking me how we were ever going to get Mum to see what she was doing to the family.
Actually we both liked John. That holiday he was learning the fiendishly difficult last movement of Prokofiev’s seventh piano sonata, a bravura tour de force in 7/8 time. I turned the pages for him. I became obsessed with the mesmeric possibilities of that oddball time signature . . . try counting in seven, here’s a tip: count one two three, one two, one two in a row without a break. Next try counting one two, one two three, one two and vary it from there. You’ll be popular in the subway. Every musical I have written has a section in 7/8 time. There’s even a joke about it in Phantom which, so far as I know, has only been laughed at once – by the conductor Lorin Maazel who found it hilarious.
I suspect John would laugh at it too. He and I share a similar sense of musical humour. A few years later we went to a concert of unusual instruments in St Pancras Town Hall. The big draw was Vaughan Williams’s Tuba Concerto. Unfortunately it was preceded by Vivaldi’s Concerto for Sopranino and Orchestra. A huge man with the biggest hands I have ever seen ascended the stage with no visible instrument in sight. The conductor raised his baton. The goliath raised his chubby palms mouthwards from which emanated a sound so piercing and high that every dog and bat in the vicinity must have been begging scalpers for front row seats. To make things worse Vivaldi was, put it this way, not on peak form when he knocked up this particular epic. John and I got the giggles which ended in my getting hiccups when a serious woman with glasses in front of us who was deeply studying a music score turned round and said “It may be funny but it’s not that funny.” When next up a diminutive chap staggered onto the stage dwarfed by an enormous tuba, an usher less than politely suggested that we left. Was this the first and only time a Tchaikovsky Prize winner has been ejected from a classical concert? On another occasion John told me that he once by mistake turned over a page twice when he was premiering a Philip Glass piano epic. After his performance, Glass congratulated him on his fabulous interpretation. In short I grew to like John very much. With hindsight, my problem was never with John. It was with my mother’s obsession with him.
I can’t speak for Dad but I suspect that he felt the same way too. Back in that summer of 1962 things must have become way too much for him. To everyone’s amazement he announced that he was going to stay with Vi and George in Italy. Dad had never been “abroad” in his life. Mum had no intention of tagging on and a plan was hatched that he would spend a week with my aunt and uncle while I was to fly out a few days later.
My first memory of Nice Côte d’Azur Airport is of my father being freighted through the departure lounge, his speech slurred, his pale skin frazzled and peeling, giggling hysterically about girls’ bottoms. Clearly the sun and the local brews had made an impression on him. My first memory of La Promenade des Anglais is that Dad’s argument had a lot going for it. In those days bikinis hadn’t had much of an outing in the dank mists of Britain. Soon we were motoring past the grand villas on the Bas Corniche and past Cap Ferrat through a then low-rise Monaco to the French border and a world of scents and colours, actors and wine, parmigiano and olive oil, famous film directors, David Niven and his pool built in metres when he had specified feet, artists and their partners who were always the same people but in different combinations every holiday, Aunt Vi’s azur-painted piano and her plumbago-covered terrace with the purple bougainvillea etched against the deep blue of the Mediterranean Sea, La Punta, the dreamy little fish restaurant on the shore which you could only reach on foot, the Hanbury Gardens and La Mortola restaurant where Winston Churchill had a celebration lunch after Germany surrendered . . . I could go on forever about a now vanished world that totally infused my life.
FROM THEN ONWARDS VI’S house became my second home. It’s not surprising therefore that pitching up to board at Westminster on a grey autumn afternoon was a shock to the system. Worse, because of the way boys in my new house were grouped by age, I lost a whole year of privileges. Because I was so young when I had arrived at the school I had been at the school for two years, the same length of time as the boys grouped above me. I protested to deaf ears. It seemed terribly unfair. All this paled into total insignificance a few weeks later. October 1962 was the month of the Cuban Missile Crisis. For several nights we would look out of our dormitory window onto the Houses of Parliament and wonder whether that would be the last time we’d see them. There wasn’t one of us who truthfully didn’t want a hug from our parents at thirteen successive bedtimes. The one thing that consoled us was that our Westminster address meant our end would be swift.
My demotion caused a big problem with rehearsals. The first consequent crisis erupted over rehearsals for my old house’s Christmas pantomime. This had already become a musical called Socrates Swings and the partnership of Robin Barrow and Lloyd Webber had much to live up to. Just because I’d changed houses, I couldn’t let the old side down. The issue was that rehearsals mainly took place after junior boys’ bedtime and I was now a junior again. Robin, being a prefect himself, sorted matters out with his opposite number in my new house who reluctantly went along with my extended bedtime but subsequently got the opportunity to make me pay for it by beating me horrendously hard for something I didn’t do. Thus I accompanied our Socrates Swings atop a three-inch cushion. Mum and Dad came to a performance and I think it was then the penny dropped that I was not going to be a model history scholar.
A couple of weeks before the world premiere of Socrates Swings, the London premiere of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem was given at Westminster Abbey. A few Queen’s Scholars were chosen to be ushers and I was one of them. It was a thick “peasouper” foggy night and it was impossible to see more than a few feet, even inside the Abbey, so how the performers followed the conductor was a miracle. How anyone got to the Abbey was even more so, proving how in those pre-air-pollution-control days Londoners were inured to massive fogs.
The performance made a profound impression on me. The War Requiem is a piece of breathtaking theatricality with its juxtaposition of Wilfred Owen war poems and the Latin Requiem Mass. As ever with Britten his orchestrations are a master class, perhaps never more so than here since he uses three elements – a full orchestra, a chamber orchestra and a “positive” organ (an organ used by early Baroque composers like Purcell with a very particular sound) to accompany his detached, ethereal boys’ choir. It was that performance that led me to Britten’s operas, Peter Grimes and The Turn of the Screw. Britten’s use of a single brushstroke on a snare drum to describe the sound of a tug in Death in Venice is genius personified.
AT THE END OF the same week as the War Requiem’s London premiere, another debut occurred. That Christmas a song called “Love Me Do” by a relatively unknown Liverpool band named The Beatles entered the pop charts. It only got to No. 17 but it was the harbinger of 1963, the year when The Beatles had the first of their seemingly infinite run of No. 1 hits and pop music was changed forever. Liverpool’s Mersey Sound erupted and Swinging London was born. Westminster was right in London’s epicentre, only a walk away from the music publishers of Tin Pan Alley
and the clubs and concert venues where everything was happening. All I wanted was to be a part of this new music scene and there it was, a mere hop and a skip from my enforced cloistered doorstep via a short cut through the Abbey. I was desperate to prove that I too, not just John Lill, could be a success.
Maybe because my father had seen my Christmas 1962 two-performance smash Socrates Swings and thought I needed help, or perhaps because we had found something in common re La Promenade des Anglais in Nice, in the spring of 1963 he decided to send me part-time to a specialist music college in the school holidays. The “college” actually was a place that taught musically illiterate songwriters how to put their efforts on paper. It was run by a guy who, it transpired, Dad had known in student days called Eric Gilder and Dad thought I’d pick up a few practical tips. Indeed Mr Gilder did show me a rather nifty key change trick which I occasionally still use. It makes a change from the usual half-step upwards. The most valuable thing Gilder taught me was how to prepare the piano score of a musical. The guinea pig was a show I had started based upon one of the worst ideas ever conceived for the stage short of a musical about the humanitarian work of Genghis Khan. It was called Westonia! and was a sort of send-up of the Ruritanian concoctions much beloved by Ivor Novello. Nearly 60 years later my embarrassment is such that nobody – not even my dearest or closest – knows where I have hidden the score.
Westonia! came about because I was desperate. Robin Barrow was now university bound and there were no other budding lyricists lurking in the Westminster cloisters. The meteoric rise of the Fab Four had sent my contemporaries’ interest in musicals plummeting from zero to minus ratings. The only person I could find to write lyrics to my juvenilia was a brassy Australian ex-actress friend of my aunt’s called Joan Colmore. Thus Westonia! was born.
Thanks to Mr Gilder, the score of this horror was presented in a rather professional way. So when I sent it to the top West End producer Harold Fielding, accompanied by a letter stressing I was fourteen, it got noticed. The producer of Half a Sixpence and Ziegfeld let it be known that he thought the music was promising. Somehow word spread enough for a couple of agents to enquire of Dad whether I needed representing. Naturally I thought a West End opening was imminent and my skiving off school to meet publishers and the like reached fever pitch.
Eventually I got a sweet letter from Harold Fielding saying that I should press on with the music but in no way was Westonia! headed for the West End any time soon. Along the way I had a short stint represented by a top agency the Noel Gay Organisation, who promptly dropped me once Fielding put me back in my box. I came down to earth with a mega bump. Musicals, I decided, were dead ducks – especially if top producers couldn’t see the obvious quality of cutting-edge works like Westonia! It was time to be a pop songwriter. But firmly in the way was the inescapable fact that I was stuck in a boarding school that I was less than partial to and the Lill saga dominated home life.
Towards the close of the Easter holidays I was deeply depressed. Mum’s John Lill obsession was making her increasingly moody and erratic. Home was a cauldron of overwrought emotion and jealousy, fuelled increasingly in Dad’s case by alcohol. Another term at boarding school loomed like a grey sledgehammer. My adolescent hormones told me I’d had enough.
One morning I stole some Veganin tablets out of the bathroom cupboard, went to the post office and withdrew my savings – all £7 of them. Then I bought aspirin from two different South Ken chemists and headed for the underground station. In those days the “underground” penetrated as far as Ongar in the then deep Essex countryside. I bought a one-way ticket. When I hit the end of the line I wandered into the town, bought some more aspirin and a bottle of Lucozade and headed for the bus station. I planned to take the first bus, get off somewhere remote and swallow my arsenal of pills behind a convenient hedgerow.
I saw a bus with “Lavenham” on its front. Something told me to take it – the name rang an architectural bell. The ancient bus trundled through the Essex countryside and as we hit Suffolk the sun came out. By the time we arrived at Lavenham an overcast morning had turned into a glorious spring day.
Lavenham! I’d never seen such an unspoilt English village before. But it was the church that did it. All I remember now is sitting inside for what must have been two hours and saying “thank God for Lavenham.” I headed back to the bus stop and London thinking things weren’t so bad after all. But I kept the pills.
It would be elasticating the truth if I claimed that my Westminster days didn’t have plusses. First, Westminster kicked off my burgeoning love of Victorian architecture. One of the College prefects was a guy called John House, who sadly died in 2014, having had a distinguished career as an art curator and becoming Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University. John was the first person to introduce me to the great Victorian architects and, together with my increasingly inseparable friend Gray Watson, I began combing Britain for Victorian churches.
By my second year in College there were few parts of London I didn’t know. My architectural crawls took me to parts of Britain’s cities that I suspect very few of my Westminster contemporaries saw. Most of the finest Victorian churches were built as mission bases from which to scupper Satan’s enticements to the defenceless poor. So I got into some near misses with local youths who did not take kindly to an effeminate boy in a smart school suit clutching poncy architectural guidebooks. As a result of this I discovered I wasn’t totally unathletic. I could run.
By the time I left school I had a pretty fair knowledge of at least a dozen British cities. This was the era of mass demolition of housing deemed uninhabitable, for which read housing of a human scale. It was the 1960s that saw the brutal creation of urban roads that swathed through Britain’s town centres thanks to the new planning mantra that separated pedestrians from God the car. Everywhere there was an orgy of government-inspired destruction that ripped the heart out of Britain’s cities far more effectively than Hitler’s Luftwaffe ever did. Of course Victorian buildings, being considered the runt of all architecture, were top of the list for the wrecker’s ball, theatres being particular targets. I remember lying down in Pall Mall with a group of my aunt’s friends in vain protest at the demolition of London’s gorgeous St James Theatre. The preservation of Britain’s most vulnerable architecture became a lifelong passion.
The other plus was the arguments with Granny. Gray Watson and a group of us College boys salivated over hopping on the underground to Harrington Court where we berated the co-founder of the Christian Communist Party with our ever more right-wing, ludicrously politically incorrect views. She secretly loved it, of course. I began to discover increasing depths to this remarkable woman. She confided about her bohemian open house in Harrow and that her sister Ella’s greasy spoon for truck drivers was called Jock’s Box. Was she beginning to see in me a glimmer of her own son so tragically taken from her when he had barely left school?
However there was one thing she didn’t notice. Harrington Court was becoming so dirty and scruffy that it was becoming embarrassing to ask friends home.
IN THE WINTER OF 1963 my new-found role as ace pop songwriter paid off big time. Or so I thought. A publisher at United Artists Music had sent a fistful of my efforts to an A&R chief at Decca Records called Charles Blackwell. Blackwell was a big cheese who steered top artists like P.J. Proby, the singer who provocatively split his trousers whilst performing in a cinema in Walthamstow to much tabloid shock horror. I witnessed this minor piece of rock history, having sneaked out of school one Saturday night. Unfortunately a photo of Proby, split trousers and audience with me in it (now lost), got into one of the rags but thankfully nobody at school saw it.
Blackwell decided to record one of my songs with a singer called Wes Sands. Wesley (real name Clive Sarstedt) was the brother of pre-Beatles- era singer Eden Kane (Richard Sarstedt) and of Peter Sarstedt who one day was to have a huge hit with “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?,” a song Tim Rice at the time rechristened “Where Do You Go to My Ugly,” but now says he rather likes. Sarstedt, rather than Kane/Sands, was the real family name. The song Blackwell chose was called “Make Believe Love.” To top it all, I had written the lyrics. Modesty and common sense prohibit my reproducing the lyrics here. Suffice it to say I was certain that my career was off and running. I acquired a new agent, a thirtyish very camp publisher called Desmond Elliott. I was invited to the recording session. I could oversee the creation of my first runaway hit!
Unfortunately the new commander of the Westminster School Combined Cadet Force had other ideas. In those days kids at schools like Westminster were forced to become cadets in the army, navy or airforce. My military career started inauspiciously when I failed the army basic test. I was hauled up in front of the commander for sowing the seeds of mutiny. The basis for this false accusation was my answer to a question about what you did when under enemy fire and confronted by a closed gate. I opined that I would open it and proceed through it asap. This was apparently not what a cadet was supposed to do. It seemed you either burrowed underneath or vaulted over said gate. I pointed out that neither option would work in my case. In reply to the suggestion that I was unpatriotic and disloyal to Her Majesty the Queen, School and Country, I countered by suggesting that I composed a school cadet corps march that would kick “Land of Hope and Glory” into the long grass.
The commander either believed me or feared that my presence on the parade ground was fatally disruptive, even if hard to prove. For a year I got permission to swan around listening to military bands and inadvertently learned a lot about writing for brass instruments in the process. However the new school year yielded a new CCF commander and he was having none of this. Having heard, I think, on the school grapevine that I was having a song recorded, he ordered me away on an army field trip. I pleaded with him that this recording session was my big chance and he replied that school was not about being a pop songwriter. A taste of the army assault course at Aldershot was what I needed.
I was totally distraught. I was – I still am – paranoiac about the army and I was terrified out of my skull. I found my stock of aspirin and took an overdose. I woke to find a doctor’s face pressed close to mine demanding what the hell was I doing frightening my parents like this. I can’t tell you if it was a cry for help or whether I meant it. I don’t know.
A psychiatrist concluded that my paranoia about the army was genuine and, if not exactly an illness, mirrored a problem that also bedevilled my father. Apparently he had frozen during a military assessment when he was conscripted in the war. I will never know what else the report about me said but I do know it found that I had vertigo. I could have told them that. I once seized up completely when I was very small and made to stand on a box as a punishment. These days I get vertigo if I just stand up.
So my army days came to an inglorious halt. I got a dire warning from the Commanding Officer that the incident would go on my permanent record at MI5, thus scuppering any chance of a career in public life. But my wonderful housemaster Jim Woodhouse was sympathetic. So the end of 1963 saw me still hanging on to Westminster life, not kicked out as a misfit as a lot of schools would have done. The year end was a yawn. Robin Barrow had left so there was no Christmas show to compose. I got a few offers to be a pretty boy pianist at Desmond Elliott’s publisher friends’ Christmas parties and earned a few quid and the sort of tweak of the bottom that might aggravate Taylor Swift. 1963 may well have been the year The Beatles saw and conquered, but for me it was like the French wine vintage. A whiter shade of something that didn’t taste very nice in the first place.
IT WAS WINE THAT ushered in my 1964 with a cock-up that could have put paid to my Westminster career big time. Auntie Vi knew a wine merchant and I was allowed to coat-tail onto a tasting of 1961 clarets. 1963 may have been for both French wine growers and myself an “année de pissoir” but 1961 was hailed as the reason people bother to grow grapes. The wine tasted and looked like ink to me but I was firmly told that in 50 years’ time things would be different and that the ink would probably outlive me. So with my Christmas party earnings I forked out on a couple of cases of Château Palmer. This apparently was the bargain of the vintage, a wine from a lesser-known château that had punched beyond its weight. Wine bores will confirm that Vi’s wine merchant knew what he was salivating about.
The snag was that instead of delivering the stuff to my parents’ flat it somehow got delivered to Westminster School. Since alcohol and smoking were offences punishable by expulsion I assumed that my teatime summons to the study of John Carleton the headmaster meant the end was nigh. I explained what had happened: that no sane person would drink this wine for decades and it had simply gone to the wrong place. The headmaster asked me rather too pointedly if I liked wine. I couldn’t lie. I simply said that my uncle collected Italian wine and, yes, I had tasted the odd glass of his best and, yes, I did like it. The headmaster thought for a moment and then ordered me to come back and see him in a couple of hours. These I spent agonizing about the even more agonizing two minutes that almost certainly awaited me if he had decided that those two hours were not my Westminster swansong. But instead of a scowling HM clasping his infamous six foot cane he stood there beaming. A small table had been laid with a decanter and two glasses.
“I have a small dinner party tonight and I am serving a 1945 Château Léoville Barton,” declared the man the school nicknamed Coote. “I thought you might like to taste it with me.”
Thus began my friendship with the headmaster. I valued my time with him, even if it did sometimes mean sitting very close to him on his sofa.
1. The nickname for Denmark Street in Soho.
5 “Mr Lloyd Webber, Do You Like Cats?” (#ua656de99-a461-5b66-a30a-10e6ca97eedb)
Come 1964 Swinging London was really taking off. I had a bit more freedom at school now. Carnaby Street spewed out “mod” clothes. Beatlemania and Beatle boots lurked everywhere. Even big American pop stars were making desperate attempts to sound hip in Britain. Two Yanks in England was the latest Everly Brothers album offering. Even Bobby Vee experimented with The New Sounds from England, albeit with an occasional Buddy Holly hiccup.
In January I somehow got a ticket in the cheap seats for the theatrical event of the year – for me perhaps of all time – the opening performance of Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Tosca with Maria Callas and Tito Gobbi. So much has been written about the few legendary performances they gave that all I will say is that it was life-changing for me. I saw just how much two world-class opera performers at the top of their game can bring to an all too familiar work.
It certainly opened the eyes of many opera critics. Because Puccini was the commercial backstop of every opera company he had become devalued as a composer. To serious opera buffs his stock was similar to the Sixties intelligentsia’s view of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Every time an opera house needed bums on seats they wheeled out a tired old production of La Bohème, Tosca or Madame Butterfly played by a disinterested orchestra and regarded by the management as a necessary ill to pay for the real stuff of opera which unfortunately the ignorant public had no desire to see.
Everyone had a Tosca story, e.g. the fat soprano who threw herself off the rooftop of the Castel Sant’Angelo only to bounce up over the ramparts from the trampoline stationed beneath. Tosca had been called a “shabby little shocker.” The Oxford Companion to Music (Seventh Edition by Percy Scholes) had this condescending entry – about a third the length of Bartók’s – about Puccini. It speaks volumes.
The music is essentially Italian in its easyflowing melody . . . his harmonies just original enough to rouse the attention of the conventional opera goer . . . he employs not so much his own system harmony as that of his immediate predecessors served up with new condiments.
Here at last was a production that took the music seriously, gave it first-class production values and proved what a master theatre composer he was. Parenthetically, much as I love Tosca the only other Puccini opera I know well is La Bohème. For some reason, I have never got to grips with Madame Butterfly or Manon Lescaut. In fact my knowledge of opera is not as deep as all that. One of my problems is that I can’t hear the words. It’s worse when they’re unintelligible and supposed to be being sung in English.
IN FEBRUARY 1964 TWO ex-Westminster boys joined the Swinging London party. Peter Asher and Gordon Waller were both prefects during my early days at school. Gordon had fronted various Elvis-type school acts and had definitely been the school’s hot dude. Little then did I think that only a few years later he would play Pharaoh in the first stage production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
Peter’s claim to fame was that his sister Jane was Paul McCartney’s girlfriend. This was helpful as far as Peter and Gordon’s debut single was concerned since Paul wrote it. “A World Without Love” went to No. 1 on both sides of the Atlantic. It was the first time anyone from a British public school had done such a thing. I thought Westminster needed to commemorate this momentous feat. I booked up to see Headmaster John Carleton who heartily agreed that once again Westminster was ahead of the curve.
Not only did he give me complete use of the school theatre but he allowed the whole school a special holiday to see my celebration. My enterprise was much abetted by Desmond Elliott. Whether he or I came up with the abominable title Play the Fool, I can’t remember so I’ll blame him. What I do remember is that the invites were sent out to random key people whose addresses I stole in envelopes that looked like writs. The response was astonishing. Soon people who hadn’t been invited were clamouring for tickets to this happening under the nose of Westminster Abbey.
There wasn’t much musical content from me apart from a showstopping bid with my Wes Sands song “Make Believe Love” which completely failed. It was much upstaged by an outfit called Twinkle and the Trekkers, Twinkle being a rather posh girl in a wafty dress who had been drafted in by one of the boys to front his house band. She had written a death motorcycle epic called “Terry” with incisive lyrics like: “He rode into the night / Accelerated his motorbike / I cried to him in fright / Don’t do it, / Don’t do it.” A motorbike was an essential part of the staging but we couldn’t find one. Nonetheless “Terry” went fine. Shortly afterwards Twinkle had a big UK hit with it on Decca Records. I think somewhere along the line Tim Rice had a short association with Twinkle but I may be misinformed.
A huge array of lower echelon radio and TV producers turned out to see the first show I had masterminded and so it was as a producer rather than composer that these guys first heard of me. Nothing like this had happened at Westminster before and I was very proud of it.
Even masters mouthed “Well done.” I had promoted the show, cast it, found the technicians, found someone to light it, sorted the sound system, chosen the music and created a decent running order out of a ragtag potpourri of bands who ranged from hormonal teenage girl sulkbags to a rough North London mob oddly named Peter and the Wolves who wanted to smash the Merseyside boys. Their songs were pretty dire but their cover versions had the whole school rocking and Compline (evening prayers) was abandoned in St Faith’s that night. All those episodes of Jack Good’s Oh Boy! had rubbed off on me. Soon, I presumed, someone would take me on as an apprentice at a TV company and I could leave Westminster just like that! It’s nice to dream.
THE SUMMER TERM WAS when we took A levels. The results of these determined whether you tried for a university. At Westminster there were a series of “closed” places to Oxford and Cambridge, i.e. scholarships and the like which are charitably funded and only open to Westminster boys. I don’t know if this monstrously unfair system applies today but in my day these “closed” places siphoned off the best Westminster talent. Rarely did a Westminster boy enter the “open” exams that pitted you against all comers.
My A-level results were appalling. I had only two passes, a D grade in History and E in English; the worst ever result by any Westminster Scholar. My songwriting and producing activities had finally caught up with me. I sat the Christ Church exam along with everyone else, but knew I had no hope of getting a place. I went to the interview like a zombie. Needless to say, I was told to try again next year. Suddenly it hit me. All my friends would be leaving for Oxford and I would be left skulking behind, trapped in a school I was bursting to get out of. Now all my friends seemed to be talking in groups about what would happen when they left. Should they travel round Europe together? What about a trip to New York before Oxford term starts? They were talking about New York, the home of musicals! And they were talking without me. I had blown it big time and it was all my fault.
There was only one tenuous hope. Talk about Last Gasp Saloon time but I realized that the “open” exam for entrance to all the Oxford colleges took place a fortnight later and there was still time for me to enter. Dear Jim Woodhouse took pity on me and the entry forms were signed and dispatched but not without a resigned look from both Jim and my history master Charles Keeley. I resolved to take myself on a kamikaze crash course of the medieval history I loved and to pray that I got an exam paper with the right questions for me to heroically bluff my way through.
It was coming up to the end of term and the other boys were already university bound so lessons were token. I asked permission to skip them. I threw myself into book after book for twelve hours a day and spent the remaining hours dreaming up historical theories that were so ludicrously at odds to accepted academic thinking that at least I might interest an examiner. Perhaps if I backed my outrageous ideas up with enough facts, I might stand a chance of blagging my way into one of the smaller colleges. But it all depended on the questions in the exam paper and whether I could twist them my way.
The college you chose as a preference was another major consideration. I chose Magdalen College as my number one. I knew a lot about its architecture, it had a Pre-Raphaelite connection through Holman Hunt and its Senior History professor was the medievalist K.B. McFarlane whose books I had read. My number two choice was Brasenose College because I liked its name.
IT WAS MID-NOVEMBER WHEN I sat the exam, all alone as I was the only Westminster boy to enter the “open” exam. The paper was a dream. I waffled on about how Edward II was a far better king than Edward I, how the Victorian additions improve the medieval original at Cardiff Castle (I can personally vouch that this view is not shared by HM The Queen), that Keble College, for years wrongly considered a red brick Victorian eyesore, is in the top three of Oxford’s best buildings; that the classicist Christopher Wren had advised that Westminster Abbey’s tower be finished in the Gothic style (it is still an unfinished ugly stump by the way), etc. I doubt if such an outpouring of muddled factual diarrhoea has ever hit an examiner. At least I had given it my best shot.
Three days later I got a letter from Magdalen inviting me for an interview. It said that I might need to have a second one and to come prepared to stay overnight at the college. I pitched up late morning at the porter’s lodge and was shown to a rather nice Victorian bedroom and told my interview would be at 3 pm. I didn’t know Oxford that well but I had time to check out that I was right about Keble College and, importantly, that Gene Pitney was top of the bill at the Oxford New Theatre that night. That was my evening sorted out.
After lunch with a lot of nervous young men who for some reason didn’t want to make conversation about Gene Pitney’s “Town Without Pity,” I joined a small group of the about to be interviewed outside a sort of common room and took a seat. It was then I noticed the Siamese cat. Or to be accurate, the Siamese cat noticed me. Now it takes two to know one and the cat was in no doubt. It jumped on my knee, purring loudly, and butted against my fist whilst engaging in the sort of intelligent conversation and occasional rub against the face that only proper Siamese cats do. After a while it settled down and kneaded my leg for Thailand.
When the door opened and someone said, “Mr Lloyd Webber, will you come in please?” I obviously couldn’t put the cat down. So I carried it in. I was invited to sit down and my new best friend settled contentedly on my knee. Facing me across the centre of a medium sized dining table was Professor McFarlane, flanked by various dons one of whom asked an easily answered trick question about the date of the nave of Westminster Abbey. I am to this day a genuine fan of McFarlane’s books and it was actually a joy to be interviewed by this great medievalist. It took a while but eventually he got around to serious questioning.
“Mr Lloyd Webber, do you like cats?”
I didn’t reply “how long have you got?” but the nub of my answer caused him to end the interview by saying that that would be all and that I didn’t need to stay overnight for another interview.
I was a bit alarmed, but on balance I thought things had gone pretty well. I bade farewell to the cat who followed me back to the little room I had been given. The big issue now was that I was told I wasn’t needed the next day and I wanted to see Gene Pitney. What if they wanted the room for some poor blighter who had to go through the hoop a second time? I decided to wing it. That night I heard “I’m Gonna Be Strong” for the first time.
I took the train next morning and went straight to my parents’ flat. Granny really wanted to know how I had got on. I explained about the cat. She looked exasperated and muttered something about how one day cats would be my undoing. I naturally took a different view. But I was masking huge jitters about the outcome of my interview. It wasn’t exactly textbook. So I phoned Magdalen College and asked if there was by any chance a list yet of new undergraduates for next year. Eventually I got through to a very important-sounding woman who said she was the bursar’s secretary. I asked her if the list of next year’s undergraduates was ready yet.
“I am afraid we only have the list of scholarship winners but the list of the names of the new undergraduates will be published in two days’ time.”
Two days was a long time to wait. “By the way to whom am I talking?”
I mumbled my name.
“Oh wait a second,” she said, “you are Mr Lloyd Webber, just let me see. Ah yes. Mr Lloyd Webber, congratulations. You have won a History exhibition.
We so look forward to seeing you at Magdalen next year.”
I was speechless. Granny blinked back a tear. Here was I, a boy who had wasted a complete year at Westminster and I had won the only open award Westminster had to Oxford that year. I said goodbye to Granny, ran to South Kensington station where the train to Westminster took an eternity to arrive. I ran down Tothill Street into Dean’s Yard and to my long-suffering history master’s classroom. He had just finished a lesson. I told him the news and he went ashen. All he said was “Bless you, my boy.”
It was then that I realized just how far he had stuck his neck out to get me a scholarship to Westminster and how terribly I had betrayed his trust. I spent the rest of the day contemplating the ineffable powers of the cat.
1. Magdalen College’s terminology for a junior scholarship.
6 Enter Timothy Miles Bindon Rice (#ua656de99-a461-5b66-a30a-10e6ca97eedb)
It was just before Christmas when my agent Desmond Elliott unleashed a project that was to dominate the next two years. Desmond ran a small publishing company called Arlington Books which specialized in niche areas such as cookbooks. He also represented Leslie Thomas, an author who a year later had a huge success with his novel The Virgin Soldiers. Leslie was a “Barnardo Boy,” in other words an orphan raised in a Barnardo home. These “homes” were founded by a Victorian philanthropist Dr Thomas Barnardo. He had witnessed the plight of orphaned children in London’s Dickensian East End and, future wife on arm, started a rescue home that mushroomed into one of the world’s leading charities for homeless kids.
Desmond immediately divined in the Barnardo story a massive post-Oliver! musical. Kids, jolly cockneys, Dickensian locations, a hero who nearly lost the love of his life in his crusade against the Victorian establishment – this, Desmond decided, was stuff that would make Oliver! look like Salad Days. Leslie was supposed to come up with a storyline and I was to knock up a few tunes so Desmond could stitch up a producer. It was to be called The Likes of Us. Connoisseurs of musical theatre disasters will already have twitching noses. Years later a musical about Dr Barnardo (not mine) did reach the West End. Tom Lehrer was in the audience and was heard to mutter “a terminal case for abortion.”
There was a minor snag to creativity. I was still at school. Nowadays nobody would dream of having pupils who had outlived a school’s usefulness hanging disruptively around the cloisters. But January 1965 saw me back in College one more time. I simply had to get out. So I invented a story that I had been offered a part-time job by an antiquarian bookseller. It was an elegant solution for all. In February I was free and I wanted to start work on the musical. The trouble was there was not a lot of input from Leslie Thomas. With hindsight I wonder how much he knew about it. Leslie is a novelist not a scriptwriter.
IT WAS A WEIRD feeling suddenly having time on my hands, waking up not knowing how to fill the day. When you are old you fill blank days by doing pointless things like writing autobiographies, but that wasn’t on my radar at the time and Oxford was months away. So I spent the early part of the year looking at buildings. It was then that I cemented my knowledge of Britain’s inner cities.
Today there’s much talk about the new generation looking forward to a worse future than their parents. Based on some of the things I saw in 1965, it would have been hard for the new generation not to have had a better future than their forebears. It was common for four families to be stuffed into a clapped-out small terraced house sharing one toilet at the back of a stinking misnomer of a garden. If the era of Rachman, whose name was so toxic that “Rachmanism” entered the Oxford English Dictionary, was supposed to have been over I didn’t notice it. He was the notorious British slum landlord who bought run-down properties in rough neighbourhoods and packed them with immigrants before in 1962 he did something unusual, i.e. not for profit – he dropped dead.
Coming from a protected, albeit bohemian environment, I admit to being shocked and not a little frightened by how quickly large city areas were changing character out of recognition. Once I was backed onto the rickety railings of one of the terraced houses that surrounded St Mary Magdalene in Paddington by a not particularly threatening, if extremely large, Jamaican guy pushing me “de weed.” A gang of three passing white yobs surrounded us, opining articulate bon mots such as “He may be a fucking poncy posh nancy-boy but he’s white and you take your fucking black hands off him.” Something told me this was not the moment to engage in conversation about High Victorian Gothic. Today the houses around St Mary’s are long gone. It’s odd to reflect that those that survive in Notting Hill and Paddington now sell for millions of pounds.
I SPENT EASTER WITH Auntie Vi at La Mortola which was in full Mediterranean flower mode. She was spending a lot of time in the kitchen from which emanated cries like “God bugger the Pope,” followed by a lot of meticulous writing up of recipes in a notebook. I tinkled away dreaming up tunes for the Barnardo show on her blue piano while I gazed at the virulent purple bougainvillea that had flowered early on her terrace that spring. But still there was no story outline from Leslie Thomas and I began to concoct one myself. Back in London, out of the blue I received the following letter.
11 GUNTER GROVE LONDON SW10
April 21, 1965
Dear Andrew
I have been given your address by Desmond Elliott of Arlington Books, who I believe has also told you of my existence.
Mr Elliott told me you “were looking for a ‘with it’ writer” of lyrics for your songs, and as I have been writing pop songs for a short while now and particularly enjoy writing the lyrics I wondered if you consider it worth your while meeting me. I may fall far short of your requirements, but anyway it would be interesting to meet up – I hope!
Would you be able to get in touch with me shortly, either at FLA 1822 in the evenings, or at WEL 2261 in the day time (Pettit and Westlake, solicitors are the owner of the latter number).
Hoping to hear from you,
Yours,
Tim Rice
Naturally I was intrigued. I thought it might be unwise to call his work number so I dialled the FLAxman. In those days all phone numbers were prefixed by abbreviations in letters of names or towns. The numerical equivalents still survive, for example in London 235 is short for the “BEL” of BELgravia. A school friend’s uncle had a 235 phone line which until his death in the noughties he answered with “BELgravia whatever the-number-was.” He also referred to Heathrow Airport by its 1938 title the London Aviation Station and pronounced the Alps “the Oorlps.” Once he moaned to me that a sojourn in his country house had been upset by his company holding a board meeting on a Wednesday. “It will ruin two weekends!” he fumed. But I digress.
A very well-spoken young man answered and explained that he did write pop lyrics – in fact he had also written some “three-chord tunes,” as he put it, to go with them. He had done a course at La Sorbonne in Paris and was now 22, working as an articled clerk in a firm of solicitors and was bored out of his skull. The Desmond Elliott connection was that he had an idea for a compilation book based on the pop charts. He thought Desmond might publish it. Apparently Desmond had declined this opus (Tim was later to resurrect it as The Guinness Book of British Hit Singles). Clearly Desmond had thrown me into his rejection letter as a sop. We arranged to meet one evening after Tim got off work.
I spent some of the in-between time pondering what a “with it” aspiring pop lyricist with a public school accent who had been to La Sorbonne looked like. Somehow I imagined a stocky bloke with long sideburns and a Beatle jacket, possibly sporting granny glasses. Consequently I was unprepared for what hit me when I answered the Harrington Court doorbell three days later. Silhouetted against the decaying lift was a six foot something, thin as a rake, blond bombshell of an adonis. Granny, who had shuffled down the corridor after me, seemed to go unusually weak in the knees. I felt, how shall I put this, decidedly small. Awestruck might be a better way of describing my first encounter with Timothy Miles Bindon Rice.
VERY SOON IT DAWNED on me that Tim’s real ambition was to be a heartthrob rock star. I learned that he had been to Lancing College in Sussex, that he was born in 1944 and was therefore nearly four years older than me, that his father worked for Hawker Siddeley Aviation and his mother wrote children’s stories. He brought a disc with him of a song he had written and sung himself. Apparently there was tons of interest in it and also in Tim as a solo pop god answer to Peter and Gordon. I was wondering where on earth I could fit into this saga of impending stardom.
So the first song and lyric I heard by Tim Rice was “That’s My Story.” It was a catchy, very appealing demo with Tim singing his three-chord tune in a laid-back, folksy way, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar. But it instantly struck me that the simple, happy, hooky melody seemed at odds with the rather bittersweet lyric about a guy dumping his girlfriend except the story was a charade. The guy had been dumped by his girlfriend. The punchline was “That’s my story but, oh Lord, it isn’t true.”
Anyway, I thought it would make Tim a huge star by the end of the year. I reckoned that it would be nice to say I had met him before he was world famous and that was about it. I somewhat diffidently broached that although I loved pop and rock, my real love was musicals. To my surprise Tim said he’d been brought up on his parents’ cast albums and he actually liked theatre songs. I didn’t sense that he had an overpowering passion for musicals but he certainly didn’t rubbish them like most of my friends. I don’t think I mentioned the Dr Barnardo project and The Likes of Us but after he had met my parents, who were both charmed by him, we arranged to meet each other again.
I really liked Tim. He had a laconic turn of phrase and a quick wit I had never found in anyone before. He met my school friends who liked him too, particularly the gay ones. Eventually I tentatively broached Desmond Elliott’s Dr Barnardo musical and played him two tunes. Tim seemed quite taken. All I had was the rough synopsis I concocted in the absence of anything from Leslie Thomas but at least it was a start. One melody was meant for two teenage cockney lovebirds who were the basis of a subplot. The other was for an auction told in song. In it Dr Barnardo, after a few fun lots to set things up, saw off all bidders and bought the Edinburgh Castle Gin Palace in London’s cockney epicentre, the Mile End Road. This he would turn into a temperance centre for general do-gooding. It was that sort of show.
A few days later Tim showed up with two lyrics. The first was the auction song which he had called “Going, Going, Gone!” The first lot to go under the gavel was a parrot. The first couplet I read by my future collaborator went thus:
Here I have a lovely parrot, sound in wind and limb
I can guarantee that there is nothing wrong with him.
How could I not smile? To this day only Rice would come up with a parrot sound in wind and limb. The quirkiness and simplicity of Tim’s turn of phrase grabbed me immediately. By some strange osmosis with “Going, Going, Gone!” we had written a plot driven song that was a harbinger of the dialogue free style of our three best-known shows. Tim titled the other song for the lovestruck subplotters “Love Is Here.” The first verse went:
I ain’t got no gifts to bring
It ain’t Paris, it ain’t Spring
No pearls for you to wear
Painters they have missed it too
Writers haven’t got a clue
They can’t see love is here.
Desmond Elliott however was not best pleased when I broke the news that I had decided that Tim should be my writing partner for The Likes of Us. A with it pop lyricist should stick to with it pop lyrics, was his opinion. That was, until I played Desmond the songs. Very shortly Tim too was managed by Desmond Elliott of Arlington Books.
DESPITE THERE BEING STILL no plot outline from Leslie Thomas, Tim made some song suggestions and we started writing. Desmond co-opted a “producer” who was in fact another book publisher, Ernest Hecht of Souvenir Press. Ernest Hecht was a Kindertransport émigré from Nazi Germany who once told me that a publisher’s first duty to an author is to remain solvent. He had dabbled in theatre and in 1967 presented the farceur Brian Rix in Uproar in the House. What qualified him in 1965 to present a musical is anyone’s guess. But it was Desmond’s gig and I presumed he knew best.
Meantime I acquired a music publisher. During my skiving off school days I had got to meet some of the guys at Southern Music, an American-owned publisher with a big country and western catalogue and a very active London office in Tin Pan Alley. Soon I was taken under the wing of the CEO, a guy called Bob Kingston. Bob was later to give me one of the greatest pieces of advice of my career, thanks to which quite a few people have made a considerable fortune. He spotted that I was an oddball seventeen-year-old with a curious appetite for musical theatre – the pariah of my generation – and that my passion just might rub off on other people. So he did a deal with Desmond to publish The Likes of Us.
Bob was very enthusiastic about our embryonic score but felt we lacked a killer ballad. He kept banging on about another “As Long as He Needs Me.” The consequence was a string of tunes, all with three long notes, as per the “he needs me” bit of Lionel Bart’s mega hit. Proof, if needed, that it is unwise to create songs by formula can be found in “How Am I to Know” which made it through to the recording of The Likes of Us at the Sydmonton Festival many years later. I suppose it got included because Tim and I thought it the best of many attempts to emulate Bart’s classic. It would have exited were the show to have made it to rehearsal because it had been usurped as pole position banker by another putative winner “A Man on His Own.” Guess what? The tune was “Make Believe Love” (the song that failed to launch my career as a lyricist). Bob pronounced we had a smash hit on our hands and the score was complete.
A demo recording with bass, drums and a very ancient pianist was made featuring a couple of session singers and Tim and I filling in gaps. The ancient pianist had only one style, stride piano. Even the big ballads acquired a honky-tonk sheen. The sound engineer had an addiction to his new echo machine. So bits of the demo were helpful, others emphatically less so. All of them sounded as if they had been recorded in Penn Station at three in the morning. No matter. Back home I was able to render friends soporific with my first show LP. Surely the West End was a matter of months away.
The summer of 1965 wasn’t exclusively taken up with The Likes of Us. I toured Italy with a group of school friends and spent loads of time with Vi and George at La Mortola. It was that summer that I properly met Vi’s friend, the film director Ronnie Neame. Ronnie had recently directed Judy Garland in a movie called I Could Go on Singing. This was also the title song. It had an unfortunate lyric since it continued “till the cows come home” which prompted a version on That Was The Week That Was in which the singer was stampeded by a herd of rampant bovines. I had the cheek to play Ronnie a tune I thought better that I had wanted to send him when he was making the movie but Vi had stopped me. He said it sounded a bit “classical.” It later surfaced as “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.”
Ronnie had been David Lean’s cameraman and producing partner on classic movies like Great Expectations. I was enthralled when he told me how, in an emotional scene with co-star Dirk Bogarde, Judy Garland had without warning veered totally off script into a supercharged autobiographical monologue. Ronnie feared the cameraman might stop shooting this unrehearsed pure gold so he eased the guy off his camera and took over himself. Ronnie tightened the shot and, by inching the camera slowly back on its track, lured Garland to keep monologuing her way forward into his retreating lens. Thus he created a seminal Garland moment in a not particularly special movie.
Also that summer I met Tim’s parents for the first time. I had just failed my driving test so Tim drove me in a pre-World War Two Austin car that his parents lent him to their converted farmhouse near Hatfield, about 20 miles north of London. Joan and Hugh were very kind and asked me a lot of questions about my family and what my ambitions were. They asked me quite a bit about Oxford and I, maybe wrongly, thought there was a question too many in front of Tim on the subject of university. I didn’t tell them of the role of Professor McFarlane’s cat in my academic achievements.
There are songs you vividly remember when and where you first heard them. I first heard Richard Rodgers’ “Something Good” at the home of John Goodbody, an aptly named Westminster boy as he was Britain’s junior weightlifting champion, not necessarily the first achievement you would think of in a Westminster boy. John was a trainee journalist and during his long career in newspapers he became the highly respected Sports Editor of the London Times. He shared my huge love of the Everly Brothers and it was at his parents’ house in North London that I turned up one Saturday night clutching my unplayed newly purchased soundtrack LP of The Sound of Music film. John’s friends were slightly older and more cynical than I, so they doubtless shared the view of the New York Times that The Sound of Music was “romantic nonsense and sentiment.”
I wonder if they noticed me turn colder than your average Austrian ski slope during my first encounter with the stupendous overture. Out of the glorious modulation at the end of “My Favorite Things” burst one of Richard Rodgers’s most brilliant and characteristic melodies. And it was new! Rodgers hadn’t written anything to touch it for at least five years. “Something Good” is right up there with his very best, complete with his “Bali Hai” tritone,
the halfway note in the scale that hits the word “Hai” and is there in some of his most typical greats. Hearing this melody for the first time is as vivid a memory as my debut encounter with Sgt. Pepper.
THE CLOCK TICKED TOWARDS October and my first Oxford term. However any qualms that I had over the daunting prospect were somewhat hijacked by another of Mum’s domestic dramas. This time she burst into my bedroom at four in the morning, proclaiming that something terrible had happened to John Lill and that she could feel his pain. Later in the morning it transpired he had fallen off his motor scooter. Maybe there was something in Mum’s psychic claims or, perish the thought, John had phoned her after the accident and I hadn’t heard the phone because I was asleep – although I am inclined to believe the former, since Mum was long on psychic contacts. There were two consequences of this bizarre affair: (1) I decided I would find a way to move out of Harrington Court asap and that Oxford was not a bad stepping stone. (2) Mum decided John Lill needed to move into Harrington Court as living in Leyton subjected him to too many hazardous road journeys.
Despite all this it was John who drove me to Oxford on a chilly October night to begin the Michaelmas term at Magdalen, one of those journeys where you wish the distances between villages were just that little bit longer. I had been tipped off that it was wise to get in first and ask in advance if there was a room in the “New Building.” I got one. But I was unprepared for what hit me. After Harrington Court my room wasn’t a room. Today it would be called the Presidential Suite in a country house hotel – a bit of a run-down one maybe, but I never say no to faded grandeur. The New Building was constructed in 1733 and, despite being a mental Victorian Gothic man, I had no objection to a massive panelled drawing room plus bedroom, kitchen and bathroom overlooking Magdalen’s famous meadow, home of a load of deer and Snake’s-head Fritillary, the latter being an extremely rare flower, not a heavy metal band. One gripe. It was a bit on the cold side. And there was no piano.
In the weeks before I went “up” to Magdalen, I mooted to Desmond the idea of getting our show staged by one of the Oxford University dramatic societies, OUDS being the mainstream one, the other the Experimental Theatre Company or the ETC. This was an extremely arrogant thought for a seventeen-year- old freshman. Both societies were widely recognized in the theatre and appeared outside Oxford frequently, sometimes internationally. Desmond was rather sniffy but he didn’t entirely perish the thought. So I rented a tinny upright piano from Blackwell’s in Oxford High Street. Nobody in the college minded. Next I wrote a letter of introduction to the presidents of the two drama societies, fairly crawling stuff, I recall, but tinged with a faint hint that I was God’s next gift to the West End and they would be wise to meet me whilst they still could.
Lady Luck dealt me a great card at my first lunch in Magdalen’s pleasingly Gothic hall. I found myself sitting next to a fellow freshman law student called David Marks. His ambition was to be an actor. He turned out to be no ordinary hopeful. After winning every acting prize Oxford offered he went on to become President of OUDS. Less than a year after we met he premiered the role of Rosencrantz in the first production of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. David never pursued a career as an actor and became a successful barrister, saying he found acting too repetitive. He also agreed to be the first person to play the role of Dr Thomas John Barnardo.
Very soon I had met all the student top brass. OUDS was headed by Bob, now Sir Bob Scott who was to become the arts and sports czar of Manchester. David Wood honchoed the ETC. David has had a successful career as actor, writer and lyricist and it was the ETC that became the most likely home for The Likes of Us. We had several meetings and it was even mooted that as he could sing he might usurp David Marks and play Dr Barnardo. A plan developed that it could be staged after summer term 1966 in the Oxford Playhouse. There was, however, one outsized snag. There was still no script. As it was Desmond’s project I obviously couldn’t suggest he ditched his best-selling novelist Leslie Thomas for some unknown budding dramatist Oxford student.
Thus The Likes of Us was in remarkably different shape to a play that was the big talk of Oxford. Written by a second year undergraduate, When Did You Last See My Mother? was staged by OUDS and a production in London quickly followed. It rendered its author the youngest to have a play produced in the West End. The author’s name was Christopher Hampton, he had been to the same school as Tim Rice and the play is said to have been influenced by homosexual activities at Lancing College. This is a subject I have not raised with Sir Tim as I sense that he might be exceptionally unqualified to contribute to this topic. Chris is a couple of years older than me but clearly The Likes of Us couldn’t hang about if I was to grab the “Youngest Author in West End” title myself. I didn’t of course, but 25 years later Chris and I would get Tony Awards for Sunset Boulevard.
Meantime word was dribbling through Oxford’s dramatic community that there was a socially awkward seventeen-year- old with an outsize room overlooking Magdalen meadow and a piano in it to boot. So, aside from The Likes of Us, I met with several budding writers and lyricists, some of whom have subsequently had respectable theatre careers. But I quickly became rather too aware that absolutely none of them had Tim’s rhyming dexterity and, more importantly, his highly individual turn of phrase. Years later I sometimes notice a similar turn of phrase in Chris Hampton’s work. I wish I had met their Lancing College English master.
1965 was decades before mobile phones and the only contact with the outside world was a coin phone box outside the porter’s lodge which invariably had a big queue. I started to make too many day trips to London. I was already a little fearful that Tim would forget about his junior Oxford collaborator. I simply wasn’t allocating my time properly and I was trying too hard to do too many things. My History tutor asked to see me. He said I had been admitted to Oxford a year too early at seventeen. I should take the rest of the academic year off. He really couldn’t have been kinder and even offered to look after some of my things if I couldn’t take them home. I immediately thought how was I to get The Likes of Us on in Oxford if I wasn’t there, but my attempts to say I really could cope were greeted with the reply “See you next October.”
1. A tritone is a musical interval composed of three adjacent whole tones.
7 Teenage Operas, Pop Cantatas (#ua656de99-a461-5b66-a30a-10e6ca97eedb)
My unanticipated time off from Oxford equalled a newly blank diary until October when I was supposed to restart at university afresh. Clearly with me based in London again, The Likes of Us was unlikely to happen that summer in the Oxford Playhouse. The songs had been demoed. There was still no script. My father arranged for me to have a few lessons at the Royal College of Music. I made several trips to Vi and George in Italy and got taken to the Sanremo Song Festival by Southern Music’s American owner where I met Gene Pitney. I hung out with old school friends, revisited David Marks in Oxford, saw Tim a bit who was still working at Pettit and Westlake, got my driving test at the third attempt, dropped my brother to school, that’s about it, i.e. not the sort of stuff to grip reader or publisher apart from possibly one anecdote which I have many times told elsewhere. The problem is that all these years I’ve been disseminating fake news.
The story as previously told goes as follows. Back in 1966 I used to frequent a shop in the nether regions of the Fulham Road which sold cheap copies of current LPs that somehow had fallen off the back of a lorry. Nearby was a bric-a-brac shop. One day I saw a filthy dirty canvas in its window which looked remarkably like Lord Leighton’s Flaming June, probably one of the most famous of all Victorian paintings. Even though Victorian pictures were still considered nearly worthless, the £50 that the shop owner was asking for it seemed cheap to me. (Today £890.) So I begged Granny to let me borrow the money. When she asked what it was for she opined that she wasn’t going to have Victorian rubbish in her flat.
The way I have been telling the story is that it was bought by the pioneering Victorian picture dealer Jeremy Maas. He then sold it to a Puerto Rican cement baron called Luis A. Ferré who was starting a museum in Ponce, his home town on the south of the island. Apparently Ferré had a policy of never paying more than $5000 for anything. In those days you could buy several acres of Victorian canvases for $5000 and consequently Mr Ferré hoovered up some great paintings such as Burne-Jones’s masterpiece Arthur in Avalon. It is ironic that such important “aesthetic movement” paintings created in the pursuit of beauty should have found their home in an island so cruelly treated by nature. Today Flaming June is billed as “The Mona Lisa of the Southern Hemisphere,” has been in the Tate Gallery, the Frick, you name it, and is worth millions. Thus Granny denied me a Victorian masterpiece. I’ve been writing and dining out on this for decades.
Unfortunately I was wrong. I recently learned that Jeremy Maas bought the real thing from his barber a few years earlier. So I take this opportunity to grovel with apology for a falsehood that I even perpetuated in a Royal Academy exhibition catalogue and revel in the fact that I didn’t lose out on a great deal after all.
IT WAS AROUND EASTER when Bob Kingston, boss of the London office of Southern Music, called me into his office. I am not the only one who should be eternally grateful for what he told me. Everyone from Tim Rice to all those who made tons of money out of our early shows should erect a monument to him. Without it the rest of this book would be completely different, not to mention the rest of my life – and probably that of countless others. Bob Kingston was the first person to tell me about Grand Rights. The meeting came about because either Desmond Elliott or Ernest Hecht had had a faintly encouraging response from Harry Secombe’s management to The Likes of Us demo disc. Harry Secombe was a very successful British comic who was unusual in that he had a more than OK, if slightly strangulated, tenor voice. This propelled him into occasional flights of light opera and the title role in an Oliver! influenced musical called Pickwick which had opened in London in mid-1963, directed by Peter Coe and designed by Sean Kenny, repeating a partnership they had begun with Lionel Bart’s classic. Both these had, of course, also been approached about our epic.
Based on an over optimistic chat with the excitable Desmond, Bob felt it was time to sit me down and explain the music business facts of life. In those days income from songwriting came from three sources. First was record sales. Second were fees from performances on radio, TV and public places. Third was “sheet music” sales, i.e. printed song copies. The publisher split the income from the first two categories 50/50 with the writers and doled out 10% of the proceeds from the third. Income from international sources was split 50/50 based on what the local publisher remitted to the UK publisher. Naturally all the major publishers set up their own local firms who skimmed off a big cut of a song’s income with the result that the publisher in practice could end up with a far bigger share of the income than the authors. For example, a song earns $100 in the US. The US publisher (owned by the UK publisher) takes a 50% cut, remits 50% to the British publisher who splits that 50/50 with the writers. Thus many writers at that time only received 25% of the gross international income. This practice has long since been challenged but it was the norm in 1966. Bob explained that these three income streams are called Small Rights.
What Bob then spelt out was that there is another rights category, Grand Rights. He told me that Tin Pan Alley publishers rarely understood what they were. Grand Rights are the royalties that arise whenever an entire dramatic work is performed on the stage or on film. Bob felt it was not morally right for a pop music publisher to participate in this income. The agreement Tim and I had been given for The Likes of Us was a standard contract whose wording implied that we had signed away absolutely everything to Southern Music. Bob proposed giving us back our Grand Rights. The Likes of Us was never to earn a penny but the advice Bob gave me that morning was unquestionably the most precious of my entire career.
THAT MAY TIM’S BOSSES at the law firm Pettit and Westlake told him to destroy some highly sensitive legal documents. Unfortunately he shredded the wrong ones. This caused Tim’s law career to come into question and so his father Hugh lent on some contacts he had at electronic giant EMI with the result that in June Tim joined EMI Records as a management trainee. Almost immediately Tim was assigned to the A&R department, A&R standing for artists and repertoire, the department responsible for finding artists, choosing their songs and overseeing their recording careers.
Today the initials EMI mean little even in the music business. But in 1966 EMI was the undisputed giant of the record industry. It owned a vast litany of artists headed by The Beatles, an unequalled roster of classical musicians, a huge manufacturing base not only of the software but the hardware of the music business, plus the world’s most famous recording studio complex at Abbey Road. It is hard to believe that today this once proud company’s initials survive only in the names Sony/ATV/EMI Publishing and Virgin/EMI Records. In 2012 the then owners, venture capitalists Terra Firma, became infamously infirm as the giant turned into a munchkin. After complex shenanigans, Japanese giant Sony acquired the music publishing and the record division was swallowed up by Universal Music, who merged it with the Virgin label.
At almost exactly the same time as Tim started at EMI I got a letter from Magdalen. It got straight to the point. The college bigwigs had heard that I was working on a musical. They wished me luck but hoped I realized that when I returned I was expected to concentrate on my studies. If I wanted I could discuss changing the course I was reading but if I returned they expected me to live up to my exhibitioner status.
Reality had caught up with me big time. I thought about switching from History to Music. My father knew Dr Bernard Rose, the highly regarded director of Magdalen College’s fabled choir. But Dad was hugely against my studying music. He felt that the Oxford course would be far too academic for me. So my only future at Oxford was to return and read history seriously. Even give or take a little bit, realistically I would have to take a three-year break from musical theatre or at least from attempting any professional involvement.
Meantime Tim, nearly four years older than me and understandably ambitious for his own future, was starting a job in the creative department of the world’s top record company. Even if Tim was at the bottom of the ladder, he had his foot in the door. Tim could easily have a hit on his own or with another writer. He might easily lose interest in a younger hopeful whose real interest was theatre, a world far away from chart-obsessed EMI and the white-hot heat of Swinging London. Furthermore I knew full well that Oxford offered nobody who could hold a candle to his lyrics.
Should I go back to Oxford or leave? It was the biggest decision of my life and there was nobody I felt I could turn to for advice. My family would point to two dismal A-level results as my only academic qualifications. I had the odd music grade but no way was I a performer so there was no hope down that alley. The most anyone could say about me was that I wrote tunes, had an oddball love of musicals and a bizarre love of architecture and medieval history. I knew that my family would be appalled if I chucked in the lifeline that Magdalen had offered me.
I took myself away to agonize. What if musicals were on the way out? What if I was no good at them anyway? I knew I was no lyricist. So was it not lunacy to try a career where my music was greatly dependent on the words that went with it and stories that might be lousy? What if the writer of those words, in this case Tim, no longer wanted to work with me? What if that writer didn’t come up with the goods? Most musicals are flops. Why should mine be any different? That is, if I ever got one on.
I went over and over in my head what an Oxford degree would mean for me. I couldn’t imagine a career I’d enjoy where it would do me any good. But my family had no money; they didn’t even own the Harrington Court flat. I would have to make a living somehow, someday. But with or without a degree at what? At least staying at Oxford would stave off a career decision for three years. True I would have to knuckle down and work to get a decent class of degree. But on the flip side of the coin I fretted that I was an exhibitioner who was taking up a college subsidized place that would probably have gone to someone far worthier than I had it not been for Professor McFarlane’s cat. Should I not let that worthier someone have my place?
However, there was the certainty of what a decision to leave would do to the family. Granny Molly would be consumed with anxiety. Aunt Vi and Uncle George would be livid. Mum might just take it on the chin but I couldn’t tell what Dad would make of it. Of all the family I was closest to Molly. I strongly sensed that my increasingly frail Granny would regard my leaving Oxford as an insane, suicidal move. Could it somehow rekindle in her a myriad of associations with the loss of her son Alastair? She cared that much about me. But what if I lost Tim? The thought went round and round in my head and drilled into it like an unmelodic earworm. Finally I made my decision. On July 17, 1966 I wrote to Thomas Boase, Magdalen College’s admission tutor, informing him that I did not want to continue as a History exhibitioner.
I thought my bombshell was received pretty well; a few long faces, a bit of muttering, as far as I was concerned that was about it. I took three school friends to stay at Vi and George’s. They seemed on the sombre side of OK but pretty soon Vi and I were experimenting with olive-oil recipes in her glorious seaview kitchen. It’s only recently that I learned things were not quite as I thought. First my brother Julian remembered that he had never witnessed such a family row as happened after I told Mum and Dad of my decision. Then I discovered among some of Mum’s papers the outline of her autobiography. It seems I was dead right about Granny equating what I was doing with the loss of Alastair. In her view I was throwing my life away and she felt appalled that Dad was doing nothing to stop it. Vi and George were safely out of the way in Italy. It was difficult and costly in 1966 to make international phone calls, you had to book them via the operator, but they made their views patently clear in letters that were kept from me.
Years later, according to Mum, I was staggered to learn that it was Dad who not only defended me but supported my decision. Apparently he strongly argued that in all his experience with students at the Royal and London Colleges of Music he had not come across anyone with such determination to succeed and that it would be completely counter-productive to put roadblocks in my way. With hindsight this is borne out by a conversation that Dad and I had before I took off with my school friends to Italy. First he reiterated that he would not support my trying for the Royal College of Music. I remember his reason, “it would educate the music out of you,” quite a statement from the senior Professor of Composition at the Royal College and the head of the London College of Music to boot.
Secondly he strongly felt that I should take a course in orchestration. The orchestra, he opined, provided the richest palette of colours in music if you knew how to use it. I was thrilled when Dad said he would fix for me to take a part-time course at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. I was fascinated by the tone colours of composers like Britten and how a high romantic like Richard Strauss could take the orchestra to ever more overripe extremes. I remember thinking that learning orchestration is like learning the basics of cooking: just as I knew from Vi how to make a soufflé or a mayonnaise, now I would learn how to make my orchestral ideas a reality. That Guildhall course has stood me in good stead. It is the only academic course I have taken seriously.
MEANTIME TIM WAS SETTLING in at EMI. I suspect he was too busy finding his feet to worry about my decision and I often wonder if he realized just how big a factor he was in my making it. But the fact that he had a toe in the door of the world’s number one record company could open doors for both of us and I was keen to coat-tail. Tim was assigned to the department of one of EMI’s most successful old-time arranger/producers, Norrie Paramor.
Norrie was a supremo of the pre-Beatles old guard. He was the guiding light behind the legendary British pop star Cliff Richard who has the distinction of having a number one hit in five different decades. Norrie was still a very major force in the British record industry even if younger musical Turks had overtaken him. But come mid-1966 Norrie’s star at EMI was again in the ascendancy. This was because the cream of EMI’s top producers had left to form an independent company, disgusted by the low pay and derisory royalties (if any) they got in return for making EMI untold millions. Stars like Beatles guru George Martin had had enough.
This left good old reliable Norrie in pole position. And with artists like Sinatra again pulverizing the action with songs such as “My Way,” the top brass at EMI might have been forgiven for thinking they made the right call in letting go the George Martins of this world. So Tim was in the right place at the right time. I suspect that old-school Norrie Paramor saw in the contemporary pop ears of the very personable Tim Rice a presentable way into a young world that was no more his natural habitat. Furthermore Tim wrote lyrics. It wasn’t long before Tim was being allowed to produce acts that EMI wanted to drop but was obliged to record in order to see out their contracts.
Pop was changing fast in the last half of the 1960s. 1965 had ushered in “fusion,” the idea that any instrument could go with anything. As early as 1964, Sonny and Cher had featured an oboe on “I Got You Babe.” Paul McCartney sang “Yesterday” accompanied by a string quartet. In 1967 Sgt. Pepper took things still further, including adding the merest hint of a narrative structure. By the end of 1968 even the Rolling Stones were recording with the London Bach Choir. I was learning the rudiments of classical orchestration at exactly the time as its marriage with rock was romping all over the zeitgeist.
In that summer of 1966 the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” kicked off a genre that was to spawn perhaps the ultimate Sixties “fusion” single, Jimmy Webb’s six-minute “MacArthur Park” with Richard Harris. Then there was the concept single. The most successful was “Excerpt from ‘A Teenage Opera,’ ” a sort of mini-opera in itself with a kids’ choir. The “Teenage Opera” never was completed but the idea hugely caught the spirit of the moment. None of this passed me by.
THE UNWANTED ACTS TIM was assigned to humanely lay to rest were pretty dire – with one notable exception. This was a handsome 23-year-old singer called Murray Head. EMI had unsuccessfully tried to launch Murray and had put a fair bit of clout behind him. But now he was “de trop” and Tim was ordered by Norrie to cut his last contractual single. Murray had, however, been cast as one of the leads in a Roy Boulting movie titled The Family Way opposite John and Hayley Mills. Paul McCartney composed the soundtrack and Murray had written a song called “Someday Soon” that was supposed to feature in the film. This was the song Tim recorded.
Murray had a light tenor rock voice, really rather lyrical yet passionate and earthy when he wanted it to be. Tim was very good about letting me meet Murray who must have thought me highly curious. I was hopelessly out of place and felt very shy in his dope-filled flat. But he would often accompany himself on guitar. What struck me was his incredibly musical riffing. It was always melodic and always highly individual. I shared Tim’s belief that given the exposure Murray and the song would get from the movie, Tim might have produced his first hit. Unfortunately this was not to be. Most of “Someday Soon” ended up on the cutting-room floor. But I agreed with Tim. Murray was very special.
1967 dawned with still no Likes of Us script from Leslie Thomas, though I vaguely remember a synopsis appearing that had no relation whatsoever to what Tim and I had written. Hopes of a theatre production pretty much evaporated. I continued to take my orchestration lessons. Mum negotiated that we rented an additional flat at Harrington Court, primarily so she could move John Lill in. To be fair it also had a decent room for my increasingly arthritic granny. There was one spare room which Mum wanted to rent. I suggested offering it to Tim, who accepted, and at a stroke a ménage à trois was created to rival South Kensington’s weirdest. Add me and my turntable next door, Julian on cello and Dad on electronic organ and new meaning was given to the words “bohemian rhapsody.”
AT THE END OF February I got a letter from the music master of Colet Court School, the junior part of St Paul’s School in Hammersmith. His name was Alan Doggett. Alan had taught Julian at Westminster Under School and had become friendly with our parents. Alan was openly gay but not, he pointedly professed, a predator of little boys. Indeed Julian, who was not bad looking himself, knew of no such baggage at the Under School. But nonetheless Alan made no secret of having adult gay relationships. He also loved early classical music.
This caused Julian and me to have a private joke at his expense. There was a flat near ours in Onslow Gardens whose occupant left the window open in summer from which emanated hugely precious harpsichord music. You could see enough of the decor to know that it was not the home of a rugger ace. Julian and I used to call places like this doggett houses. Alan proposed that I compose a “pop cantata” for his charges. His choir had premiered and recorded two such epics already, The Daniel Jazz by Herbert Chappell and Jonah-Man Jazz by Michael Hurd. Their main attraction was telling a Bible story in light pop music, nothing too dangerous, just enough novelty to make parents smile and keep a class of unmusical kids out of detention. Lyrics were not their strong point. Apparently the educational publishers Novello and Co. had done very well with them. Novello published Dad’s church music and he confirmed that this was true. The Daniel Jazz was their top seller.
So on March 5, if an old diary doesn’t lie, I met with Alan for a drink. He explained that he wanted something for the whole school to sing but there must be a special role for the choir and school orchestra. There could be soloists too, but he reiterated that it was vital that there was something for everyone to perform, even the tone deaf. Skirting around why he thought I was the right bloke to compose for the latter, he suggested a collection of poems by American poet Vachel Lindsay called “The Congo” as ideal fodder for me to musicalize. One of them read like lyrics for the Eurovision Song Contest – I quote: “Rattle-rattle, rattle-rattle, / Bing. / Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM.” “The Congo” is full of similar nonsense words based on Congolese chants. Somehow I wondered if the poem would ring true in the hands of the very white pupils of a posh, fee-paying West London preparatory school, although I could see that kids could have a lot of fun making silly percussive noises with it. However I broached Alan’s offer with Tim.
Tim wasn’t instantly ecstatic at the thought of writing something for a bunch of 8–13-year-old school kids. It was a bit of a comedown from hopes of a West End premiere and the white-hot heat of EMI in the year that company launched Sgt. Pepper. But Tim had schoolday memories of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and Gilbert’s witty lyrics in particular. Also the notion of a “pop cantata” did chime with what was happening at the time. We liked the idea that there would be no script – not that we ever had experience of one, since Leslie Thomas had still failed to deliver anything for the increasingly dust-gathering The Likes of Us. So we tossed a few ideas around. At first we felt another Bible story wasn’t cool. Maybe something from English history? I don’t remember if the subject we subsequently toyed with, King Richard I and his minstrel Blondel, surfaced at the time. We certainly combed our history books but nothing grabbed us. A James Bond themed idea was temporarily our frontrunner but it was soon shown the egress as we thought it would date and anyway it needed a plot.
Salvation came in the form of The Wonder Book of Bible Stories. Books like these are excellent source material for musicals. They save a lot of reading time and effort. The plots are nicely condensed, the print is big and there are lots of pictures to bring important moments to life. Tim fell on the story of Joseph and his coat of many colours. I liked the idea. It had the primal ingredients of revenge and forgiveness. There could be humour, particularly if Joseph himself was made out to be a bit of an irritating prick who in the end turns out to be OK. And then there was Pharaoh. I wondered what would happen if we built and built Pharaoh’s entrance and he turned out to be Elvis. Plus there is a nice happy ending when Joseph is reunited with his dad and family. It seemed a natural.
At first Alan Doggett wasn’t convinced. This would be the third biblical cantata the school would have done. Couldn’t we think of something more original? But he melted when one evening I played him the opening two songs. He beamed at Tim’s turn of phrase:
And when Joseph tried it on
He knew his sheepskin days were gone
His astounding clothing took the biscuit
Quite the smoothest person in the district
It’s the use of everyday colloquialisms that makes Joseph’s lyrics so great. It was 1967, we were writing a “pop cantata” and who cared whether rhymes were perfect. Confirmed bachelor Alan melted still further when I introduced him to Tim. Soon Joseph was slated for the Colet Court End of Easter Term Concert, 1968. The work that launched our careers was under starter’s orders.
8 Elvis with Mellotron and Tambourines (#ua656de99-a461-5b66-a30a-10e6ca97eedb)
From Easter 1967 our pop cantata simmered leisurely on the back burner but with The Likes of Us in the deep freeze Tim and I started writing pop songs. The first Rice/Lloyd Webber song to be commercially released was “Down Thru’ Summer.” The artist was Ross Hannaman and the arranger/producer Mike Leander who had arranged “She’s Leaving Home” for The Beatles. Ross was a contestant in the London Evening Standard Girl of the Year, 1967 competition. Those were the days when such contests were only just beginning to be deemed un-PC. We had noticed in Ross’s blurb that she sang. Tim asked his bosses if he could sign her if she won the competition. Surprisingly the answer was yes. So we piled off to hear her sing in some club where we encountered a very pretty teenager with an OK folksy voice, very much in the Marianne Faithfull mould. Tim immediately fancied her but she had two blokes who managed her, one of whom was her boyfriend, so Tim was temporarily stymied.
You could vote as many times as you liked for your favourite Girl of the Year provided you voted on a coupon in your Evening Standard, presumably a marketing wheeze to sell more newspapers to the competitors’ nearest and dearest. Tim and Ross’s manager found a heap of unsold Standards that were about to be pulped and duly voted with the whole lot of them. Her resulting victory was so obviously false that Angus McGill, the witty veteran doyen of Fleet Street diarists who organized the competition, had to declare Ross a joint winner. He couldn’t disqualify her because the rules said you could vote as many times as you liked. But he hadn’t reckoned on someone hijacking the odd thousand unsold copies in a recycling plant. Actually Angus was amused. The contest was hardly serious and he liked the idea that one of the winners might become a pop star. I was introduced to Angus and soon we became real friends. I would often meet him in his Regent’s Park flat from where we would drive to his shop Knobs and Knockers which sold exactly what was on the ticket.
The tune I wrote for Ross was tailor-made for her wispy soprano, a wistful folk ballad that I heard in my head simply arranged for acoustic guitar and a small, sparely scored string section. Tim provided a suitably obtuse flower-powery lyric. “Down thru’ summer you would stay here and be mine.” It was the Summer of Love, after all. The recording session was not at Abbey Road but Olympic Studios, studio of choice for the Rolling Stones and in those days boasting one of the best sounding rooms for an orchestra in London. Little did I guess when I pitched up that morning what a huge part Olympic was to play in my life. Unfortunately Mike Leander’s perception of my little tune could not have been more different from mine. Instead of an acoustic guitar and chamber strings, Mike had arranged the song for a full out galumphing electric rhythm section plus a thrashing drummer whose unsubtle playing was so loud that it spilled over the microphones of the entire orchestra. Nothing could have been more at odds with how I heard my tune and I sat in the corner of the studio, disconsolate.
I thought the B-side, a sort of “Semi-Detached Suburban Mr James” rerun called “I’ll Give All My Love to Southend” (we were in the “Winchester Cathedral” era), fared rather better, even though Tim and I had a “beat group” in mind rather than a pretty folksy girl soprano. I always liked the tune of “Down Thru’ Summer” and reused it as the middle section of “Buenos Aires” in Evita. When the melody accompanies Eva’s premonition of her fatal illness in Act 2 the arrangement isn’t far from how I had heard Ross’s single.
Angus arranged various promotional stunts for Tim and me and the Evening Standard joint winners ranging from a day at Royal Ascot to a night in Mark Birley’s newly opened Annabel’s. This may have made good copy for the Standard but was hardly likely to ingratiate our hopeless single on the record-buying public. Amazingly Tim swung it that we got a second chance with Ross. The song was titled “1969” and the lyric was about someone having a trippy premonition – “ a Chinese band marched by in fours,” that sort of thing. The chorus went “Hey, I hate the picture, 1969.” Tim the soothsayer didn’t predict 1969 to be a bundle of laughs. This time the tune was only partially by me because we decided to make something out of Beethoven’s “Für Elise.” I added what I thought was a rather hooky chorus and a spooky descending tritone linking section. This time the arrangement by ex-Shadows drummer Tony Meehan was far closer to my intentions and I don’t find it totally unlistenable to today. The B-side, “Probably on Thursday,” had a really lovely wistful lyric even if, like so many of Tim’s songs, it told a pessimistic story: “You’re going to leave me, possibly on Wednesday, / Probably on Thursday.” Twenty years later I rewrote the melody of the verse and recorded the song with Sarah Brightman.
That summer we wrote a song for Joseph that we thought might just be a pop hit. Most pop lyrics emanating from the Summer of Love displayed a somewhat opaque side – witness that legendary pop-synth fusion album Days of Future Passed by the Moody Blues or any of Donovan’s hits. The song was “Any Dream Will Do” and the lyrics were no exception. But more of this anon.
A STOCK CHARACTER IN pop showbiz films is the record company postboy. Invariably this character delivers mail to the top executive brass and refuses to leave their offices until they listen to some act he’s discovered. Just to get him out of the door, the top brass reluctantly go to one of the act’s gigs. The act, after various cliffhanging story twists, turns out to be pop’s answer to the Second Coming. EMI had such a postboy. His name was Martin Wilcox. I don’t know if he ever blagged his way into the top honcho’s offices. But he did get as far as Tim Rice. The act he was peddling had a suitably psychedelic name, the Tales of Justine. Its guiding force was a teenager called David Daltrey, naturally presumed to be a distant relative of Roger Daltrey of The Who but I’ve never seen any proof. He lived in Potters Bar in Hertfordshire, not that far from Tim’s home in an area that by 1967 was a sprawling monotone London suburb. Maybe as an escape David had written songs with titles like “Albert (A Pet Sunflower).” He also had a pleasant singing voice and was friendly with an outfit called the Mixed Bag, who did competent cover performances of current hits.
Tim managed to get EMI to sign the Tales of Justine, “Albert (A Pet Sunflower)” was the first single and Tim winged it with his bosses that I arranged it. Albert owed a debt to British music hall, so I stuck a Sgt. Peppery brass band on top of the group which made the record rather fun. We all thought it was catchy enough to be big. Tim and I also signed the band up to ourselves as managers – we called ourselves Antim Management – and we added them to our roster of one, Ross Hannaman, who had ditched her previous team, possibly because she’d had a brief fling with Tim. Unfortunately Ross’s stay with Antim didn’t last long. She shacked up with the begetter of “Excerpt from ‘A Teenage Opera’ ” Mark Wirtz who immediately issued a press release informing the world that we would hear a new Ross Hannaman. In fact we heard nothing at all, the pair got married and were divorced two years later.
Antim Management was undeterred by Ross giving us the heave-ho. Being cutting-edge representatives of our clients, we now designed and printed up some psychedelic sleeves for the Tales of Justine’s “Albert.” One night after hours we inserted all the promotion copies into these sleeves. Our theory was that since no EMI single ever had special promotion covers radio producers and reviewers would think EMI’s entire might was behind this release.
Unfortunately the head of EMI’s promotion department, a thirtyish guy called Roy Featherstone, was extremely unimpressed as was the British public. Sales were zilch. Roy gave Tim a hell of a roasting. I was therefore pretty scared when I got a message from Granny at Harrington Court saying that a Mr Featherstone had called and wanted to see me in his office. I was unprepared for a smiling Roy Featherstone and the offer of a cup of coffee when I quivered into his office two weeks later. Tim had recorded quite a few songs with David Daltrey, and I had done all the arrangements. Mr Featherstone said he thought the songs were OK but the arrangements were terrific, particularly one called “Pathway” where I had experimented with all sorts of effects. He would like to help me get a few more arranging gigs with other artists. This was the first time anyone in a record company had noticed my music, even if it was only my orchestrations. The timing couldn’t have been better because Tim had just hit me with news that had left me axed as if by a pole.
Norrie Paramor announced that, like George Martin and the other top EMI producers before, he too was leaving EMI and setting up on his own. He wanted Tim to go with him as his key man. It was an offer Tim could not refuse. Nor should he have done but it was clear that Norrie, despite hints from Tim, did not envisage a role for me in his new venture. Furthermore he employed instead ex-Westminster boy Nick Ingman as arranger and composer, with whom Tim was to write B-sides and the like. Ironically Nick had been the lead singer of the group that performed “Make Believe Love” at my Westminster concert for Peter and Gordon.
I was very alarmed. Tim was turning 23, had a job with real prospects and entrees into songwriting. I was 19, had chucked up Oxford for Tim and a musical that was never going to be produced. At least Roy Featherstone had thrown me a sort of lifeline and in fact I was to have a great relationship with Roy. But it was not until ten years later. My only real lifeline was a Friday afternoon school concert.
FRIDAY, MARCH 1, 1968 was a grey, drab, drizzly day but not over-cold for the time of year. Around 2 pm a gaggle of two hundred or so parents, mostly mothers as it was a weekday afternoon, gathered with no particular sense of anticipation in the rather cramped entrance hall of Colet Court School. Conversation centred on their fervent hope that this special end-of-term concert of Joseph and His Amazing (Technicolour) Dreamcoat was short enough for them to drive their children home before the weekend rush hour. One young mum commented that Johnny Cash was marrying June Carter that afternoon, US time. They were probably surprised, after they were ushered onto those hard low chairs you only find in school halls, by what was on the stage.
Lloyd Webber and Rice had fielded the entire Antim Management artists’ roster. Stage centre was a pop group rig, drums and amplifiers manned by Potters Bar’s very own cover band, the Mixed Bag. Seated next to a mike stand was no less than Potters Bar’s star vocalist and songwriter, David Daltrey. There was an elephantine keyboard contraption looking like an electronic organ which I had badgered the school to hire called a Mellotron. These now long-extinct dinosaurs were a forerunner of the synthesizer and much loved by the Moody Blues. They didn’t generate their own sounds but used a cumbersome battery of pre-recorded tapes. Seated in serried ranks was the school orchestra, augmented by a few student mates from various colleges of music. Behind all this were two groups of boys. The first batch were the 30-strong school choir and the second the three hundred or so kids who couldn’t sing or were tone deaf or both. Some of these had tambourines. Lurking backstage was Tim, gearing up for an Elvis impression as Pharaoh. So there was a mildly curious buzz from the parents in between anxious glances at watches, hoping the whole thing would crack on and finish PDQ.
The headmaster, a suave traditional cove called Henry Collis, ascended the stage and made a brief speech which decidedly hedged its bets on the forthcoming entertainment. He then introduced Alan Doggett in a fashion that suggested that if things went tits up it was all Doggett’s fault and he needn’t turn up on Monday. Alan bounced on stage, sporting a natty bow tie, raised his conductor’s baton and off we went, straight into the story at bar one because the now signature trumpet fanfare introduction didn’t exist in those days.
Joseph and the Amazing (Technicolour) Dreamcoat (the word “Technicolour” included a “u” and was for some reason billed in brackets) was away to the races.
THE CONCERT WAS A total blast. The yummy mummies forgot about the weekend rush hour and virtually the whole 22-minute cantata was encored. Everyone loved Tim’s Elvis impression as Pharaoh but it was the piece as a whole that was the star. Some mothers clamoured for a repeat performance on another day so that their other halves could hear it. For the record, here is the hugely condensed plot of what we performed that afternoon.
Jacob had two wives and twelve sons. Joseph, his favourite and a dreamer, irritatingly predicts to his brothers that one day he will rise above the lot of them. When Jacob gives Joseph a coat of many colours it is the final straw. They decide to kill him. Luring Joseph into the desert, they encounter some roving Ishmaelites. A sudden twinge of remorse and a chance to make a shekel or two prompts them to sell Joseph as a slave to be taken to Egypt. They dip Joseph’s coat in goat’s blood, telling his grieving dad he was killed bravely fighting. Joseph gets chucked into gaol, presumably as an illegal alien, where he sings his big ballad “Close Every Door.” His interpretation of his cellmates’ dreams catches the attention of Pharaoh who is having nightmares. Joseph interprets these as signifying seven years of impending food glut, followed by seven of famine. Pharaoh makes Joseph boss of a rationing scheme to provide for the bad years. Joseph’s famine-stricken brothers pitch up in Egypt, begging for food. They don’t recognize their brother but he recognizes them and puts them to a test: he plants a cup in Benjamin, the youngest brother’s, food sack, accusing him of stealing. The brothers rally to his defence, offering themselves up for punishment instead. Realizing they are now responsible citizens, Joseph reveals to his astonished siblings who he is. Jacob is brought to Egypt to be reunited with the son he thought was dead. A happy ending is enjoyed by all.
This simple primal tale had everything. Tim had made a brilliant choice. I didn’t realize it at the time but in my attempt to write music that would never allow its kid performers to get bored, I was unwittingly creating what was to become my trademark, a “through-sung” musical, i.e. a score with little or no spoken dialogue where the musical structure, the musical key relationships, rhythms and use of time signatures, not just the melodies, are vital to its success. Nothing in Joseph was random. I wrote it by instinct as I had no experience. But the fact that there was no spoken dialogue meant that I was in the driving seat. Once Tim and I had agreed the essential elements of the plot and we had decided where the key songs would go, it was down to me to control the rhythm of the piece. Of course spoken dialogue can be invaluable – on many occasions it is by far the best way to express dramatic situations – but for me my through-composed shows are the most satisfying.
It is the strength of the heart of Joseph that allowed it to expand like Topsy into a stage musical with its various pastiche set pieces. This central core has its own, if naive, musical style and above all a real emotional centre. The only pastiche in the Colet Court version was “Song of the King” which turned Pharaoh into Elvis. I have to claim that as my idea. I thought we needed something to lighten the mood after Joseph’s “Close Every Door” in which Joseph sings that Children of Israel are never alone, one of the simple central messages of the piece. Unusually the title was also my idea, although hardly original. It was inspired by the Alan Price single “Simon Smith and His Amazing Dancing Bear.” “Technicolour” got added as it seemed a cool way of saying “many colours.” Moreover Technicolor dreams, with all their 1960s connotations were definitely the stuff of the moment.
Thrillingly, after the concert there was an on-the-spot offer of publication. Unbeknown to Tim and me, Alan Doggett had invited the team from Novello and Co., the top classical music publisher who had strayed highly successfully into the educational market with The Daniel Jazz. They also published much of my father’s church music and I wonder if he too had a hand in their giving up a Friday afternoon to hear our effort. Anyhow they wanted to sign Joseph there and then. We referred them to Desmond Elliott.
DESMOND HAD SHOWN SCANT interest in our pop cantata. In fact he had shown scant interest in anything I was doing. For a long while his attention had been more or less exclusively devoted to a school friend of Tim’s called Adam Diment. Adam was a novelist who had written a couple of alternative James Bond type books with titles like The Dolly Dolly Spy and The Bang Bang Birds featuring a character not unlike Austin Powers. Desmond persuaded Adam to grow his hair, got publishers Michael Joseph in such a tizzy about him that they paid him a massive advance and then fielded him on TV chat shows around the English-speaking world dressed in “mod” outfits. London bus sides proclaimed “If you can’t read Adam Diment love him.” For a brief while Adam made a heap of money and was quite a celebrity.
It was not surprising then that having a young, good looking male pop star author of his own creation under his belt so to speak, Desmond was no longer as enthused about me as he once was. So when he negotiated a £100 advance for both Tim and me out of Novello’s, peanuts to what he was earning from Adam Diment, he assumed my father (the legal age you could sign a contract in 1968 was 21) would ink the agreement immediately. (Today £1670.) Fortunately Bob Kingston’s homily echoed round my skull and I added the words “excluding Grand Rights” to the document I got Dad to initial as well as adding his moniker.
The resulting explosion in Desmond’s St James’s Street office could be heard above the teatime quartet in the palm court of the neighbouring Ritz Hotel. How could I be so stupid as to jeopardize this deal? I was wasting his time. Anyway there never would be Grand Rights involved with a 20-minute pop cantata. Nobody would perform it in a theatre. He ended a diatribe of a letter to my father with “enough is enough.” Tim stood back aloof from the fray, possibly savouring the saga. I stood my ground. I argued that Novello’s would hardly be bothered about Grand Rights income if there was never going to be any, so let’s leave the wording in, just in case. I was right: Novello’s didn’t even murmur. The contracts were signed excluding Grand Rights. My relationship with Desmond was never the same again.
The clamour for a repeat performance of Joseph simmered just enough for Tim, Alan and me to take it seriously. The problem was a venue. Here my father stepped in. He suggested a performance at the Central Hall, Westminster after the 6:30 pm Sunday service. There were two snags. The Central Hall, Westminster is big – three thousand or so seats. Could we fill it? Secondly Joseph was only 22 minutes long. There would have to be something else to go with it. Now my mother surfaced. The first half of the concert could be classical. Julian could do a bit, Dad could play the organ and John Lill would be the Act 1 closer. May 12 was fixed as the big night. There’s a strange coincidence in this. May 12 was also the date of the first public performance of Jesus Christ Superstar in Pittsburgh three years later.
Rehearsals went just about OK. The vastness of the Central Hall swallowed up the Mixed Bag and without a proper PA system I got very worried David Daltrey’s vocals would be lost. Alan Doggett had never conducted in a hall of this size and didn’t have the control that an experienced musical director would have had. I got so nervous that I wanted to cancel the performance and Tim’s laid-back approach to the issues wound me up still further, something not lost on him. I found the playing untogether and feared it was all going to be too amateurish for a performance open to the public.
I need not have been so stressed. Despite the classical first half being way, way overlong, the joy of Joseph and the infectious enthusiasm of its young performers carried all before it. Although it was past most of the kids’ bedtimes, there were once again several ecstatically received encores, a harbinger of what was to happen to Joseph in the future. Desmond Elliott at last showed some interest, although I don’t think he saw a future in Joseph beyond schools. We had made one alteration. In a quest to make what possibly could be a single on the lines of the hugely successful “Excerpt from ‘A Teenage Opera’ ” the previous summer, we lengthened the sequence in which Pharaoh makes Joseph his second in command. We also added a “teenage opera”-style hooky kids chorus. “Joseph how can we ever say all that we want to about you.” This has become one of the central themes of today’s Joseph, although we were soon to rework this whole section.
But thoughts like that were a million miles away after the huge reaction to the performance. I wanted that night to go on forever. Would there ever be another performance of Joseph like this?
9 Any Dream Won’t Do (#ua656de99-a461-5b66-a30a-10e6ca97eedb)
I woke on the morning of May 13 to the radio blasting that there were massive student riots in Paris and they were spreading all over France and already threatening Nice. This bothered me. I had anticipated post-Joseph cold turkey by booking a cheap night flight to Vi and George’s place, and the local airport to La Mortola is Nice Côte D’Azur. That lunchtime I got a telegram from Aunt Vi saying the airport was blockaded so I had to say arrivederci Nizza. I fixed up dinner with my school friend David Harington. David was and still is always good for a cheer up. He is also the father of Game of Thrones actor Kit Harington. David is, like me, a serious foodie.
One of the greater current myths purveyed by today’s food writers is that London was a gastronomic desert before they came on the scene. This is, as my Aunt Vi would have eloquently stated, clotted bollocks on stilts. Britain may not have heaved with top-notch cooking but it had many fine restaurants. One such was the restaurant David and I graced that night. It was called Carlo’s Place and was way down the Fulham Road next to a newsagent that sold reviewers’ copies of new LPs at half-price. The decor, all exposed pipes and brickwork, would look cutting edge today in New York’s Meatpacking District and the marinated pigeon breasts were to die for. Carlo’s Place was special to me. It was there that a year later I wrote what became the signature theme of Jesus Christ Superstar on a hastily summoned paper napkin.
It was just as well I had planned to meet David. That morning a review of Joseph appeared in the Times Educational Supplement. After a few gratuitous knocks at my father’s organ playing in the Wagnerian length Part 1, it opined that Joseph was pleasant enough but none of the tunes was outstanding, “being of the Christian pop crusading type,” and it was rhythmically based too much in “chugging 4/4 time.” This much upset me as I was very proud that the moment where Joseph accuses his brother of theft is in 7/8 time. I consoled myself that the combination of the Mixed Bag and the Central Hall’s acoustic could indeed have rendered this less than obvious to Meirion Bowen, the reviewer. However what really got to me was that he finally damned with faint praise saying that Joseph provided “abundant” evidence that I could one day “become a successful composer/arranger.”
Damn it, man, I wanted to be one now. If I’d stayed at Oxford I would have been a hugely employable graduate by the summer! Anyway the dinner with David perked me up, David having questioned the latter statement, and I took off to Brighton to mooch around Victorian churches and generally forget about things. Perhaps, I thought in the phenomenal brick nave (far taller even than Westminster Abbey) of the internationally important Victorian masterpiece St Bartholomew’s, I should contact Roy Featherstone at EMI and, armed with Mr Bowen’s prediction, remind him of what he had said about my arrangements of David Daltrey’s songs.
EVENTS TOOK A DECIDEDLY unexpected turn on Sunday. For in the Sunday Times under the rather insipid headline “Pop Goes Joseph” was the rave review every first-timer prays for. The only stricture that pop/rock critic Derek Jewell had was that “the snap, crackle and pop” of Joseph zipped along too fast. Where was Tim? Had he seen it? He had said he was going away on a “private” weekend which I assumed was with some girl or other. I couldn’t wait to get back to London, find Alan Doggett and buy him a drink. Tim eventually found me at Harrington Court and I detected a crack in his normal easy-going nothing-really- matters veneer. Tim was ecstatic. We had been hailed as having made a breakthrough for pop! Not lost on both of us, buried at the bottom of the review was a less than flattering appraisal of the new offerings from Norrie Paramor’s star artist Cliff Richard.
Next day the action started. Possibly riled by the Cliff Richard dig and possibly feeling that it would be no bad thing to be associated with “a breakthrough for pop,” especially since this alleged breakthrough was under his nose, the great legend Norrie Paramor decided to get behind Joseph. Very shortly he obtained an offer from Decca Records to make a Joseph album and not only that, Decca were happy that it should be with our original performers. This was great news, although it did cross our minds that it might just be that named artists would cost Decca and Norrie a lot more money.
There were two snags. Joseph was only the length of one side of an LP. The second was that Norrie wanted to publish it, i.e. cream off some of our potential income for himself. Joseph was already contracted to Novello’s, a genuine traditional publishing house, rather than Norrie who had had a rough time a few years previous when the TV show That Was The Week That Was uncharitably suggested that artistic reasons might not be the reason Norrie Paramor compositions just happened to crop up on the B-sides of the top artists he produced at EMI.
Norrie’s brother Alan was wheeled out as head of the so-called Paramor publishing division. Unbeknown at least to me, he had already contacted Novello’s about muscling in on their publishing deal. Novello’s, being a classical outfit, had signed Joseph on classical music terms not on the extortionate “50% of what the publisher chooses to account for” terms that were standard then in the pop world. And of course, thanks to Bob Kingston and no thanks to Desmond Elliott, they had zilch of the Grand Rights. What Alan Paramor proposed was that to accommodate Norrie the contract was redrawn on pop terms with the Grand Rights included. No agreement, no Decca record. Of course this was blackmail. Furthermore Tim was dependent on Norrie for his job and was in no position to battle. What happened next was the first of many times I got cast as the bad guy in negotiations. Yet all I was doing was trying to protect us both from being bullied into something manifestly unfair. I have no doubt that any wavering thoughts Norrie might have had of bringing me under his wing ended after a one-on- one tussle I had with his so-called publisher brother.
I pointed out that Tim was an employee of Norrie with a guaranteed income and I had no such support. Therefore why should I, frankly also Tim, give up potential earnings on a project Norrie had absolutely no involvement in developing? Alan was furious. He thought I would be a pushover. Eventually the Paramors, who obviously had also threatened out-of- their- depth classical publisher Novello’s with the same no deal, no record scenario, proposed upping the publisher share to 40% not the 50% of the standard rip-off pop publishing contract. But the Grand Rights had to be thrown in. I resisted. At another one-on- one with Alan, where he told me I was an ungrateful troublemaking upstart, he offered to leave control of the Grand Rights with us but he wanted 20% of them, or bye bye record. I was in no position to argue any more. It still seemed far fetched to think a 22-minute school cantata would have life in theatre and film. But even so, that meeting rankles with me to this day. At least I kept us 80% not 50% of our theatre and film income, despite having no idea of whether there would ever be any.
WITH THE PUBLISHING ISSUE decided, Tim and my next task was to expand Joseph to LP length, i.e. about 40 minutes. This was easy. Most of the songs had been deliberately kept very short lest the kids got bored and they needed expanding anyway. But we added two new songs. In the Colet Court version we had skipped the story of Egyptian mogul Potiphar and his wife who fancied Joseph. The new song “Potiphar” contained a typical Rice lyric:
Potiphar had very few cares
He was one of Egypt’s millionaires
Having made a fortune buying shares
In pyramids.
The second, “Go Go Go Joseph,” is an archetypical Sixties song that tells the story of Joseph’s dream-solving activities in gaol and is now the Act 1 closer in the theatre. Little did we premeditate that when we wrote it.
Norrie Paramor wanted to keep a watchful eye on what I was up to with the orchestrations so I did a lot of writing in his office. My stock with the great man got even worse when he opined that he had been to the opening night of Cabaret and that it had no hit songs and was an average musical at best. I had seen it in preview and, aside from the subplot with a boring song about pineapples, I thought it was great, flamboyantly directed by a name I banked – Hal Prince – and with sensational performances by Judi Dench as Sally Bowles and Barry Dennen as the MC. I told Norrie that I thought it was the best thing I’d seen on the London stage since Callas in Tosca. Even if that was absurdly comparing apples and oranges, Cabaret opened my eyes to a new seamless way of staging that chimed with my growing certainty that musicals could be through-composed.
Cabaret arguments notwithstanding, Norrie seemed pleased enough with my arrangements and the Decca recording was green lit. There was a minor hiccup, however. We got a letter from Technicolor demanding that we drop the word from our title as we were infringing a trademark. I replied saying that was fine by us as we were doing a deal with Eastmancolor who were keen to be associated with vibrant new cutting-edge stuff. Practically by return we got a letter saying we could use Technicolor provided we spelt it correctly. Naturally we had been spelling it the British way with a “u” in the colour bit.
When you write an orchestration it’s a bit like an artist with paint. You have musical colours in your head and the palette is infinite. The big difference is that an artist executes a picture himself. A composer relies on others to execute what he has written. I, like all composers who orchestrate, hear the complete work in my head as I want it to sound. Unfortunately the reality doesn’t always turn out that way. Come the Joseph recording, the delightful but very amateur playing of our Potters Bar stars was shown up hugely when combined with the hardened orchestral session musicians that Norrie hired for our day in Decca Records’ long-vanished North London recording studios. Alan Doggett, an amateur conductor himself, was way out of his comfort zone. I found the solo vocal performances under par. In short I was not the happiest bunny in the control room.
I worked myself up into such a lather that I didn’t stay till the bitter end. My lather foamed further when I heard the finished mixes. Some of the playing was so ragged that I wondered if the recording would even be released. The production values I had hoped for were zero. Lather turned to meltdown. Tim was scheduled to play the finished tapes to Norrie the next day. I told him we couldn’t play him such amateur night out stuff.
How wrong I was. Norrie loved it and so did Decca. The homespun quality of the pop group next door combined with the kids for whom Joseph was written exactly conveyed the irresistible joy that happens when people make music just for the fun of it. But as a recording to rival Sgt. Pepper or “MacArthur Park,” as I had hoped, Joseph didn’t stand a chance. The vocal performances were merely pleasant and not remotely charismatic enough for there to be a serious shot at a hit single. “Any Dream Will Do” had to wait over 20 years to chart when Jason Donovan’s recording went to No. 1 in Britain.
Parenthetically in 2002 “Any Dream Will Do” was sniped at from an unexpected quarter. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, chose the annual Dimbleby Lecture to challenge the lyric for suggesting “The personal goals recommended were simply activating your potential in any direction you happen to set your heart on.” He caused quite a stir and Tim was not best pleased. My quibble with the lyric is its pessimism, “May I return to the beginning / The light is dimming / And the dream is too. / The world and I / We are still waiting / Still hesitating / Any dream will do.” It is interesting that in the original Colet Court version the lyric read “My dream is dimming” rather than “the light.” I wonder how many of the school kids who have sung my jaunty tune over the years were aware that what Tim is saying is world weary – the lyrics aren’t jaunty at all.
Looking back, I realize that my angst in the studio was the first of many meltdowns I have had when faced with less than bullseye performances. Bad sound is one of my pet hates and even today I go to too many musicals where it seems the creative teams have cloth ears. My problem always has been, and still is, that I am a perfectionist. Any substandard performance drives me bonkers. I think I have got slightly better at controlling myself in my old age but only slightly. Anyway, shortly after Decca announced they were happy we were offered a performance of Joseph in St Paul’s Cathedral. But it was not until November. Furthermore Decca decided they would release Joseph in January 1969. The record company honchos figured it might get more noticed than if it was smothered by the Autumn/Christmas schedule. So I had an outsize hole in the summer. It was filled by the not inconsiderable bulk of darling Auntie Vi.
YOU MAY RECALL THAT I alluded earlier to the matter of Auntie Vi and too many cocks spoil the breath. This issue was about to percolate into my life in a major way. It began with a telegram that read thus:
GOD BUGGER THE POPE STOP ARRIVING IN UCL HOSPITAL
TOMORROW STOP SORRY HOLS OFF CALL STOP VI STOP
Just as well the postmistress in La Mortola has scant English, I thought, as I booked a call to find out what on earth had happened on the Costa Fiore.
The matter had two nubs. Nub one, my uncle George explained, was that poor Vi had very badly broken her leg in three places. She was being freighted back to England by air ambulance and would be ensconced in UCL Hospital in London. Since I was her favourite relative, I was expected to rise to the occasion. So far so good. Hospital visits to see Vi would doubtless be colourful and George, being a doctor, would see she got great treatment.
It was nub two that proved more troublesome. She had started writing a cookbook and wanted me to help her continue with it in her hour of need. The manuscript to date was in the post via registered mail. Had I received it? I hadn’t. No matter, first off after arrival her leg would have to be reset but George was sure Vi would be compos mentis fairly soon after the surgeons had strutted their stuff. Then she would need cheering up and help with the book was the prescribed tonic. None of this sounded unreasonable. I loved nattering food with Vi. Then the manuscript turned up. The title page of the draft in the registered brown envelope said it all.
THE QUEENS OWN COOKBOOK
Camp Cooking for Town Dwellers
by Rodney Spoke
Auntie, no doubt inspired by her many theatrical friends, and maybe Kenneth Williams on the BBC World Service, was writing a gay cookbook.
Before you say “what’s wrong with that?” you have to remember this was more than 50 years ago. London may have been swinging and recipes like Coq Up and her version of Spotted Dick might have hit my funny bone but away from the Kings Road things hadn’t swung far enough for mainstream publishers to embrace this volume wholeheartedly. I quote the introduction.
Running mascara, eye-lashes slipping, nose unpowdered, nails unvarnished and even a hint of stubble. There is no excuse for it. You can stop messing about in the kitchen and come out in the sitting room. Here at last is a cook book for the Bona Viveur.
It struck me there was only one publisher for Auntie. Desmond Elliott. I was right. Soon after Vi’s leg was reset she had a deal set with Desmond’s Arlington Books. Vi had broken her leg very badly and her stay in hospital through that hot summer was a long one. I enlisted my friend David Harington to help Vi concoct chapters like “Game Meat” and we did keep Vi merry as she created the character of Rodney Spoke, whose “graceful hand had been behind so many of London’s leading restaurateurs.” The book eventually was published in 1970 and I spent most of that year and a few years after praying that nobody discovered that Rodney was my aunt or that I had anything to do with it.
THE REVEREND MARTIN SULLIVAN, the New Zealand-born dean of Sir Christopher Wren’s masterpiece St Paul’s Cathedral, was not averse to publicity in the name of Jesus. He inaugurated a summer youth festival called Pop-In at St Paul’s by abseiling down the cathedral’s West Front. Traditionalists were not keen. There are historical connections between St Paul’s School in West London and the cathedral and Rev. Sullivan thought Joseph would be a perfect follow- up to his summer high jinks. Not a few eyebrows shot up at the announcement that a pop cantata was to be performed on November 9 in the church hailed as one of the better consequences of the Great Fire of London.
Unfortunately when Sir Christopher designed his iconic dome he did not have a rock drummer in mind. The St Paul’s Cathedral echo is a good twenty seconds long. And there’s more than one of them, as anyone who has climbed the steps to the Whispering Gallery at the rim of the dome will testify. In short St Paul’s Cathedral isn’t top of the venue list for a highly public performance of a piece which much depends on hearing the words. So there were a lot of heads buried in the words in the programme when the Joseph Consortium, as our massed forces were now named, gave the first performance of Joseph Mark 2.
The dome did a great job of masking the Joseph Consortium’s rhythmical deficiencies and once again the overwhelming feeling was joyous. There was a good review from Ray Connolly, the Evening Standard music critic whom we had come across when we were unsuccessfully trying to propel their Girl of the Year Ross Hannaman into the stratosphere. The sadly now defunct satirical Peter Simple column in the Daily Telegraph ran a story about a new pop cantata “Mr Moses and the Amazing 200ft Cybernetic Funcalf,” music by old Etonian Adrian Glass-Darkley, which neatly pulled the rug from under any serious thoughts of a sequel in this direction, at least for a bit. When we did fleetingly flirt with the Moses story we thought of starting it with the tune that I had scrawled on a table napkin in Carlo’s Place. What was to become the big Jesus Christ Superstar theme had first-draft words that went “Samuel, Samuel, this is the first book of Samuel.” We became friends of Martin Sullivan, who hugely encouraged us to choose another biblical story as our follow-up. In fact he was the first of many who suggested the story of Jesus, but for the moment the launch of the Joseph album blanked out thoughts of a follow-up.
DECCA’S DECISION TO RELEASE Joseph in the New Year meant that the run-up to Christmas churned through agonizingly slowly. I increasingly panicked that if Joseph didn’t strut the stuff I would have to get a job. It was time to make plans. My mother had got to know a feisty fun ex-model called Pam Richards who had a flat in the block next door. She lived on her own but seemed to have a bevy of friends of whom one of the younger was an aspiring heartthrob pop star called David Ballantyne. David’s singles were all over the pirate radio stations and I was intrigued to discover who was paying for them. He told me he was being supported by a property developer called Sefton Myers with a taste for dabbling in show business. My family became friendly with David and soon Julian and I met his very pretty sister Celia. Julian was very smitten – so much so that a few years later they got married. I noted Sefton Myers’s name.
The Joseph album finally lurched out in January 1969 to a few really exceptionally good reviews, several hailing it as genuinely groundbreaking. But that was about it. I pushed for one more performance to launch the album at the Central Hall and raised a bit of money to advertise it. It was a mistake. Now that Joseph was a major Decca Records release, the stakes were far higher. A third public performance proved to be one too many for the parents of Colet Court. Although we did get quite an audience the atmosphere was totally different. “Forensic” might be the word. Instead of anticipatory celebration the audience wanted to know what all the fuss was about.
The first problem was the playing. Our Decca album performers, bless them, were just what they were, a perfectly nice bunch of amateurs from Potters Bar. Since we could not afford professionals, we got students from the Royal College for our orchestra. They were simply not up to it and Alan Doggett was neither tough nor experienced enough to whip the disparate forces together. The teetotal Methodist Central Hall was not the ideal venue to launch an album that would supposedly transform pop. We were putting a square peg into a round hole big time. I knew it and wanted to cancel the whole thing which was utterly unprofessional as I had pushed for it in the first place.
The fallout didn’t take long. Tony Palmer, pop critic for the Observer, the rival newspaper to the Sunday Times, seized his moment. After castigating the out of tune playing, he concluded that “if Joseph is a new beginning for pop, it is the beginning of the end.” Frankly, based on that performance he had a point. Still 1969 saw Joseph bed down very nicely from Novello’s point of view, a gratifying number of schools performed it and a new piano score was commissioned to include the new songs on the LP. But it was hardly going to support me and both my family and I knew it. It was time to find out a bit more about Sefton Myers. A property man who dabbled in showbiz might just conceivably be a man with a lifeline.
David Ballantyne didn’t seem to know much about Myers other than that he was often seen around Variety Club events. That figured. The Variety Club of Great Britain was then, as it is now, an excellent charity that provides for disadvantaged and sick children through glamorous events where donors rub shoulders with British stars. In the 1960s its patrons were a Who’s Who of the showbiz establishment with a big Jewish contingent. I found out via a contact at the charity that Sefton was seriously stagestruck. So I knocked up a letter.
Throughout life I have found that the best way to get something you want from people is not to dangle your real carrot in front of their nose. Lob it into the mix in passing whilst pushing something else. That way, if you get a nibble, you can act all coy and say it’s not really up for discussion. It also saves you embarrassment on the 99% of occasions when your semi-hidden bait gets zero response. So I wrote to Sefton asking if he would back a museum of pop memorabilia and help find a property for it. Actually time has proved it was a good idea, except I would have been useless at running it. But I also enclosed the Joseph album and a few choice reviews. Two days later I got a letter telling me to call him and arrange a meeting.
We met at his offices in Charles Street, Mayfair, bang opposite the now sadly shadow of its former self Mark’s Club. There was another man at the meeting who remained silent throughout and was introduced as Myers’s show business advisor. His name was David Land. With hindsight this must be the only meeting ever when David Land remained silent. It went as I had hoped. There was no interest in my pop museum. But what was the story behind this Joseph album? Sefton’s show business pal David had been given it to check out and he had loved it. And who was this Tim Rice who had written the words? I made out that he was a cutting-edge record executive with Norrie Paramor and that I was busy on multiple musicals all destined for the West End. Sefton asked if I could come back for a second meeting in a few days’ time.
If you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor, next week the bacon came home to roost. Sefton offered me a management contract with a guaranteed three year income and an option to continue the arrangement for ten years, £2000 a year rising by £500 annually as an advance against a commission of 25% of our earnings. It was a whopping commission but £2000 per year was a lot of money in those days (today approximately £32,000). Furthermore there were no strings attached to what I could write. David Land was rather more vocal at this meeting pronouncing, “My boy, these are serious ackers you can’t refuse.”
There was just one condition. Tim had to agree to sign up too. I needed no persuading. This offer would provide me with three years of secure income and prove to my family that I hadn’t left Oxford in vain. But how best to persuade Tim to chuck up a seemingly safe career path with Norrie Paramor? It would be a tough ask. Tim didn’t seem a natural risk taker. This wouldn’t be easy and, boy, didn’t I know it.
1. Tim and I now own 100% of Joseph as a result of my company being offered the chance to buy the publishing rights years later.
10 “Did Judas Iscariot Have God on His Side?” (#ua656de99-a461-5b66-a30a-10e6ca97eedb)
Of course Tim took loads of convincing. After all he was more than three years older than me and, non-existent as that age gap feels now, then it seemed massive and thoughts of a secure future pressed even heavier on him than me. Tim admits to never having been as passionate about musicals as I am and the thought of giving up a seemingly much safer career path in the then all-powerful record industry must have been agonizing. I believe Tim even tried to persuade Norrie Paramor to take me in-house, but Norrie was having no truck with the long-haired troublemaker who had committed the mortal sin of loving Cabaret and burbled on about Hal Prince. We acquired a lawyer called Ian Rossdale, who negotiated that we each got a £500 advance and that our guaranteed weekly money was definitely non-returnable. (Today £7,950.) I think this was a real carrot for Tim. But most importantly I believe his parents advised him to take the plunge and if that’s true I owe a big posthumous hug to Hugh and Joan Rice. Tim signed the deal and handed in his notice to a less than ecstatic Norrie Paramor.
OMG! Three secure years ahead. I could write anything I liked. But with the contract under my belt, writing took equal billing with another top priority, moving out of Harrington Court. Granny had set up a trust fund with about £4000 in it that was mine when I was 25. (Today £63,600.) I persuaded her to advance half to let me buy a flat. I found a basement in a house in Gledhow Gardens near Earl’s Court. It had one big room and backed onto a large garden so it was blissfully quiet. But it was £6500 and to buy this I had to get a mortgage. (Today £103,350.)
When Joseph was rehearsing in St Paul’s Cathedral, Tim and I had just for a laugh popped into the local branch of the highly exclusive bank Coutts and Company, top client HM The Queen. In those days it redefined pomposity. Every member of staff from bank manager to humblest clerk wore Fred Astaire-like white tie and tails – and, no, you didn’t expect them to launch into a tap dance routine on the marble staircase. A visit to Coutts was designed to inspire awe and trepidation in the chosen few of the great and good allowed into its echelons.
Fully expecting to be shown the tradesman’s entrance quicker than promptly, Tim and I marched in and demanded to open an account. We were ushered into the deathly silent office of the assistant manager, a frock-coated character called Tom Slater. He seemed to know about Joseph in St Paul’s which we took as a definitive negative, especially in this hush-toned realm that only needed incense to make it religious. To our astonishment he proffered the forms to open an account and a week later we joined the Queen in entrusting our worldly wealth to Britain’s most exclusive bank. Although I got to know Tom well over the next few years, he never told me why on earth he admitted us. Had he got a score to settle with his bosses that day? Anyway it was to Tom I turned for my first mortgage and buoyed by my new contract I got a loan for £2500. At last I could move away from the dreaded Harrington Court.
My new flat meant that belatedly I began to be confident enough to build a social life. For the very first time I felt secure about inviting home girls. I needed someone to help me pay the mortgage and so I persuaded my school friend David Harington to rent the bedroom and I installed a cunningly concealed Murphy bed in the big room for myself. We turned a sort of garden shed into a tiny psychedelically decorated dining room, uprated the kitchen with a dishwasher of which I was hugely proud and lit the blue touchpaper for a series of Auntie Vi recipe inspired dinner soirées. I became very friendly with two girls, Sally Morgan and Lottie Gray via some Oxford friends, thereby unwittingly brushing with the uppermost echelons of British spy families. It was not long before Sally and Lottie introduced me to a girl who changed my life. I also now had a room where I could install a decent sound system. Along with the dishwasher I bought a 15 ips reel-to-reel tape recorder. I figured that a guy with a three year writing contract absolutely needed one of those.
Sefton Myers laid out the red carpet. Tim and I were installed on the second floor of his Mayfair office. Not only were we given a line manager/minder called Don Norman who also managed jazz singer Annie Ross, but we also acquired a girl called Jane who wore the shortest miniskirts ever and a gopher/publicist called Mike Read who went on to become a top Radio 1 DJ. Mike is a charming bloke who became a firm friend of Tim’s as well as writing and starring in two legendary West End disasters about Oscar Wilde and Norrie’s protégé Cliff Richard.
Then there was David Land. The only way I can describe David is were you to phone Central Casting seeking a caricature warm-hearted, gag a minute, East End Jewish show business manager, they could turn up no one better than David Land. One day a plaque boasting Hope and Glory Ltd appeared outside David’s door. I asked him what on earth this company did. David said it was so he could answer phone calls with “Land of Hope and Glory.” When I asked how he came by his surname he explained that when his father fled Eastern Europe the immigration office thought “Poland” stood for “P.O. Land.” I grew to truly love this man.
A minor problem was that nobody in the business seemed to know much about David other than that he managed the Dagenham Girl Pipers. The Pipers are a sort of community outfit hailing from the sprawling east of London town which gave the Girls their name. It is the British home of Ford Motors and not a thing of beauty, but neither are bagpipes unless you are one of those who find the sound of the Scottish glens deeply moving. There are surprisingly many of these including, apparently, Hitler who is alleged to have remarked, on hearing the Girls when they were touring Germany in the early 1930s, that he “wished he had a band like that.” Which proves he was tone deaf.
One of the most debated memories of my Sydmonton Festival is the sight and sound of the Girls dressed in fake Scottish kilts piping full tilt on my staircase when rain forced them indoors. David revelled in their press cuttings, particularly those that read “all this evening needed to make it truly horrendous was the Dagenham Girl Pipers.” Nonetheless under David’s stewardship the Girls piped their questionably tuned way from Las Vegas to the Royal Variety Show. Undeniably the Dagenham Girl Pipers fulfil an admirable social purpose and still give lots of people a great deal of pleasure. He secretly was very proud of them and was chuffed to bits when their redoubtable leader Peggy Iris got an OBE from the Queen.
“Dagenham Girl Pipers” is cockney rhyming slang for “windscreen wipers.”
THE FIRST FRUIT OF our new contract was Come Back Richard Your Country Needs You. It was terrible. Come Back – and I hope it doesn’t – was conceived as a follow-up to Joseph and was performed by the City of London School where Alan Doggett had become the new director of music. I discovered some of the justly forgotten score when I researched this book and I cannot believe how we ever allowed such slapdash sorry stuff to appear in front of an audience. Having abandoned the Bible as source material, Tim thought the story of England’s Richard the Lionheart was a suitable case for treatment. In truth there is hardly any story. Richard spent most of his reign away from home warmongering on crusades, hence our title. He got captured in Austria on the way back from one of his military forays and his faithful minstrel Blondel is supposed to have gone round Europe warbling Richard’s favourite songs until one day from a castle window his master emitted a cry of recognition. This gave rise to a typical Tim lyric I think worth quoting:
“Sir ’tis I,” cried Blondel.
“For you I’ve travelled far.”
“Rescue me if you can,” said the King,
“But lay off that guitar.”
I don’t know why Tim was so obsessed with this story but undaunted by the tepid reaction Come Back got, years later he wrote a full-blown musical on this slender theme called Blondel. I was not invited to be the composer.
From what I remember of our opus horribilis, three tunes surfaced elsewhere. One became the Act 2 opener of the full-length Joseph and the tune of the lyric I quoted got altered a bit and became the chorus of “Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat.” The third, “Saladin Days,” became “King Herod’s Song” in Jesus Christ Superstar and contained a line about scimitars and Christians which I feel is inadvisable to quote. This melody had been rejected by the Eurovision Song Contest under the title “Try It and See” in Norrie Paramor days and was therefore published by Norrie. This led to a confusing credit in the booklet of the US album version of Superstar which in turn led a few people to mistakenly think Tim and I had not written one of its biggest moments. A single of “Come Back Richard,” sung by Tim, was issued under the name Tim Rice and the Webber Group. It got nowhere.
AFTER THIS DEBACLE, WE needed to write something decent and do it pretty quick. Come Back was not the sort of stuff Sefton Myers had put his money on the line for. On paper our next project must have looked even worse. Obviously post-Joseph we had been urged to choose another biblical subject and many progressive churchmen had urged us to consider the story of Jesus Christ which we resisted. Tim, however, had mentioned several times Bob Dylan’s question, “Did Judas Iscariot have God on his side?” He became fascinated about Judas in the historical context of Roman-occupied Israel. Was Judas the rational disciple trying to prevent the popular reaction to Jesus’s teaching from getting so out of hand that the Romans would crush it? Was Jesus beginning to believe what the people were saying, that he truly was the Messiah? What if we dramatized the last days of Jesus’s life from Judas’s perspective? I could see massive possibilities in this, particularly theatrically. Unsurprisingly, nobody else thought this was remotely a subject for a stage musical but we did write one song whose lyric encapsulated these questions. It was called “Superstar” and its chorus was destined to become the best-known three-chord tune I have written, the same chorus I had jotted on a table napkin in Carlo’s Place and which had briefly been about Samuel.
It was all very well writing the song but the question was what to do with it. David Land was nonplussed. “How do I explain this at the Marble Arch Synagogue?” he opined, but no way did he block our creative juices. Tim had an idea. Jesus and religion were having a bit of a vogue in pop culture, with singles like Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky.” Dennis Potter’s play on the life of Christ had the nattering classes chattering. It emerged that Tim had at some point discussed the possibility of some kind of musical piece about Jesus with Mike Leander, the composer/arranger who had produced our first single with Ross Hannaman at EMI. Mike was now the A&R chief at MCA Records, then a division of Universal Studios, and he was apparently rather enthusiastic. The boss of the British office was a pensive Irishman called Brian Brolly. It was to this odd couple that I first played our song on their office piano with Tim doing his best on vocals.
They bit big time. Brian asked me how I heard the arrangement. I replied that I wanted it to be a fusion of symphony orchestra, soul brass section, gospel choir and rock group with a bluesy lead vocal to go with our three-chord verse, in other words nothing fancy. Astonishingly Brian did not say baulk at my extravagant suggestions, in fact very soon afterwards he called me in to discuss them. Happily I brought with me the unreleased David Daltrey song “Pathway” that I had orchestrated. Brian asked a lot of questions about whether I could handle such disparate forces. He had obviously heard the Joseph album and I told him I wanted to make a single that took the fusion of an orchestra and rock group further than ever before. The “Pathway” demo convinced him. Brian swallowed the bait.
We were given the budget for a full symphony orchestra plus all the other trappings and, joy of joys, allowed to produce it ourselves. I could hardly believe it. There was one issue: MCA wanted to own everything. I was to discover later to my great benefit, that Brian understood the importance of buttoning up all areas of copyright. In return for financing the single, MCA was to have the worldwide rights to any future recording of the as yet unwritten “opera” plus Leeds Music, Universal’s publishing arm, acquiring similar publishing rights on standard pop terms.
However there was no mention of Grand Rights. Sensing Brolly was a sharp operator, I let sleeping cats lie. David Land was a close friend and, I soon discovered, sparring partner of the boss of Leeds Music Cyril Simons. I thought we could tackle this in the unlikely event we ever wrote the complete piece. A deal was signed for the single (and any eventual album) which provided a 5% royalty in Britain and 2½% in the rest of the world, out of which we had to pay back not only the recording costs but any royalties to singers. It was a terrible deal. But MCA were risking a lot of money and we were in no position to turn it down. The big question now was who could perform it?
Tim’s first thought was Murray Head. I agreed. His acting skills meant Tim’s words would be secure. Best of all he had a real bluesy soul voice which he could turn to silk in a heartbeat. Tim’s lyrics were a series of pertinent questions. From the opening couplet “Every time I look at you I don’t understand / Why you let the things you did get so out of hand?” to the chorus “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ / Who are you? What have you sacrificed?” Tim touched on issues just as relevant 50 years later. This was not lost on Murray when we approached him but he was bemused by the song and sceptical about its chances. However he had been dropped by EMI and eventually concluded there was no harm in fronting the single, although understandably he wanted to see what the rest was like before committing to the whole project.
It was Murray who suggested the musicians and thanks to him I acquired a superb rhythm section, bass and drums from Joe Cocker’s backing group the Grease Band plus Juicy Lucy’s Chris Mercer on tenor saxophone and Wynder K. Frog, alias Mick Weaver, on keyboards. The bedrock of a great rhythm section is the bass and drums. Alan Spenner (bass) and Bruce Rowland (drums) played as if they were joined at the hip. Somehow they knew instinctively what the other would do. At last I was working with top musicians and from day one of rehearsals my mind raced with ways to push the band further.
OLYMPIC STUDIOS IN THE southwest London suburb of Barnes was Britain’s hottest rock studio but its big room could accommodate a full-sized symphony orchestra. It was the natural choice for our single. The in-house engineers straddled both rock and orchestral music since major films were regularly scored there. When Keith Grant, Olympic’s legendary recording engineer, saw the scale of my arrangements he suggested that the rock band recorded to a metronome in their headphones. Nowadays this is called a “click track.” With a “click” as a guide an orchestra only has to follow it to be totally in time with the original track. But a “click” dictates that the musicians will play mechanically and not with each other.
No great rock band plays like a machine and there are bound to be minor variations in speed in any performance, hence Keith Grant’s worries about overdubbing a juggernaut of a symphony orchestra without a “click” to guide it. I gambled that a great rhythm track totally outweighed the risk but the issue never arose as Keith assigned our project to a young engineer my age called Alan O’Duffy. Alan is a tall, liltingly soft-spoken, big hearted Irishman who became the rock that pulled our disparate forces together. His experience in a studio that recorded everything from happening bands to symphony orchestras had prepared him for everything I threw at him. A metronome was never on his radar either, so we recorded the band and the soul singers ahead of the orchestra in the big studio where the Rolling Stones made many of their greatest hits.
Murray provided indefatigable guide vocals. A gospel choir, the Trinidad Singers, was hired for the chorus and the “soul trio” were a pair of seasoned white session girls, Sue and Sunny, augmented by Lesley Duncan, the singer-songwriter who later famously duetted with Elton John. Ironically the white soul singers at first sounded blacker than the gospel choir who seemed rather overawed and kicked off more Ascot Gavotte than Caribbean. But when it all eventually started to cook, everyone was astonishing. I tried several variations of the final choruses with the band, but on the master take Alan and Bruce took things into their own hands and played syncopations that defied gravity as if they were joined at the hip. Afterwards I wrote them all out, but although I’ve got rock sections to replicate what they did, it never sounds quite the same.
The timekeeping problem did prove a nightmare for the orchestra. I had scored the big “Superstar” chords in full Guildhall School of Music textbook “Also Sprach Zarathustra” overdrive. Recording that was easy. But recording the linking bridge section, where the full orchestra plays syncopated phrases precisely in time with the rock section, might have had my father’s Methodist minister craving a sip of Dad’s so-called water bottle. With the session clock ticking, we finally got a great take, only for Alan O’Duffy to announce to the whole studio that he had failed to put the tape machine into record. I went nuts. Calmly he got the orchestra to do another take and miraculously it too was perfect.
When the 70-odd players had gone Alan asked if I would like to hear back my orchestra. The sod had recorded them twice. My 70-piece orchestra now numbered 140. Maybe it was this naughty rock’n’roll Heath Robinson vibe in the studio, maybe the sheer adrenaline that comes when you create something spontaneously that you can’t really write down or maybe the vocal creativity that Murray brought to take after take, but whatever the reason that original recording of “Superstar” has never been bettered.
The B-side was orchestral and in two sections. The first was a very Richard Straussian arrangement for heavily divided strings of the melody that eventually became “Gethsemane.” I already knew what I would compose for the crucifixion and my instinct was that this music would become its coda. I wanted the antithesis to the stark horror of Jesus’s death, something overripe and more stained-glass window than wood and nails, that hinted at how Jesus became sentimentalized in paintings like Holman Hunt’s Light of the World or the Baroque excesses of southern Italy. Tim dubbed the music “John 19:41” after the verse in St John’s Gospel describing Jesus’s body resting in his tomb. The second part never made it to the final “opera.” It was a fun tune in 7/8 time which I thought might come in handy if we wanted something celebratory, possibly after Jesus’s triumphant return to Jerusalem. We didn’t.
When Tim, David Land and I played the single to Mike Leander and Brian Brolly, Brian was euphoric. He truly thought it was a major – he even used the word “cathartic” – breakthrough for pop. He pronounced that his American masters would unquestionably finance the rest of the unwritten “rock opera,” as it was decided the non-existent opus would be billed. David Land kept mumbling about what he would say at some friend’s son’s imminent barmitzvah, but the discussion quickly centred on what the single should be called. We settled on “ ‘Superstar’ from the Rock Opera ‘Jesus Christ.’ ”
Everyone agreed that we needed a leading clergyman to endorse the single. An obvious target was Martin Sullivan at St Paul’s Cathedral. Martin was delighted to help and wrote, “There are some people who may be shocked by this record. I ask them to listen to it and think again. It is a desperate cry. Who are you, Jesus Christ? is the urgent enquiry and a very proper one at that.” Martin immediately offered St Paul’s Cathedral for the premiere if and when we finished “Jesus Christ.” We never took up the offer. Events overtook us. But he did give us this advice. Strict, or as he put it, fringe Christians would be bound to denounce our work, but that didn’t bother him. He was certain that most Christians would actively embrace it. His concern was that we could inadvertently offend Jews.
We were taken aback. We were supported by two Jewish businessmen and this possibility had never been touched on. It was not on our radar to write anything that could be remotely interpreted that way. Tim told Martin that his take would spring from whether history had treated the motives of Judas Iscariot and Pontius Pilate unfairly and that he couldn’t see how that could be offensive to anyone. I added that Sefton and David plus their many connections in London’s Jewish community would surely flag any problem. For years Martin’s warning seemed unfounded. It wasn’t until the film of Jesus Christ Superstar was released in the US that it proved real.
BRIAN BROLLY WENT INTO overdrive. “Superstar” would lurch out in the UK on November 21. He secured releases in every major territory and a few I’d never heard of. Of course the most important was the USA where Brian’s ultimate boss Mike Maitland quickly became the project’s unstinting champion. The American release was set for December 1. Back in the UK there was high excitement because we were offered a live performance on David Frost’s Saturday night ITV show. This had two consequences: outraged viewers jamming the ITV switchboard and the beginning of my deep friendship with David that continued up to his far too early death in the summer of 2013.
A rather irritating storm was fabricated by the Daily Express. A creative journalist managed to get quotes that implied we had asked John Lennon to play Jesus. This was ludicrous. For openers there was no score or script to show him. Even today this fabricated rubbish persists as fact. But despite the huge TV plug and this mini furore, the UK reaction was disappointingly ho-hum. Britain wasn’t ready for the single that Brian Brolly hailed as “cathartic” and, it turned out, nor was the USA. True there was a ripple of interest but the big Christmas releases and the subject matter meant airplay was minimal. Thankfully the single did take off in a strange assortment of territories like Holland and Brazil and Brian Brolly confirmed a then massive budget of £20,000 for us to record our “rock opera.” (Today £318,000.)
Having got this nod from MCA we realized we’d better write it. My relative new wealth meant that I had tried most of London’s gastronomic hotspots so I thought it time to get our creative juices flowing in the countryside. I alighted on a then ace watering hole, Stoke Edith House Hotel in deepest rural Herefordshire, having checked out there was an annex with a grand piano and that it served duck “en croute,” a dish whose pastry, Auntie Vi opined, would taste like “clotted greasy bollocks.” Tim remembers that we didn’t do too much writing. I certainly remember scouring every record shop in a damp Christmassy Hereford for our single without much success. I also remember writing a rude note in the Hereford Cathedral visitors’ book cursing the Dean and Chapter for heinously chucking out the superb nineteenth-century chancel screen by Gilbert Scott. Their crass, insensitive stupidity can be gauged in the Victoria & Albert Museum where the screen now lives. Hopefully one day it will be returned.
What we did do was map out the storyline of what was now confirmed as a double album. Overriding everything was that we were telling our story in sound – and sound alone. We had none of the visual elements of theatre and film to fall back on. A cast-iron musical and dramatic structure was the key. In my department, rhythm, orchestral textures, time signatures and melody had to be deployed to keep our listeners’ styluses in the grooves. Crucially important was how to reprise and pace material for dramatic effect. Dialogue had no place on a record, so the music and lyrics had to carry everything.
We did take one major decision in Herefordshire which was an important first step in creating the musical structure. It was where to put the pre-existing single “Superstar.” One thought which we rejected was to use it as a prologue to the album. I suggested that if ever our work was staged it could accompany Jesus’s journey from the place of his trial before Pilate to Golgotha where he was crucified. Thus Judas would become a narrator commenting on a version of the Stations of the Cross. In any event it felt completely right for Tim’s questions to come towards the end of the piece and before Jesus’s ultimate sacrifice.
This decision meant that the big “Superstar” chords had to be the climax of the trial. I had an instinct that whatever I composed for the trial should be condensed and become the overture. Also I figured that the overture had to show off my hugely varied musical forces of synthesizers, orchestra, rock group and choir in two minutes. The overture does this in precisely that order. It is indeed an edited version of the trial with the questioning motif that ends the opera sung by the choir as a prelude to Judas setting out his stall with “Heaven on Their Minds.” Tim comes straight to the point. “My mind is clearer now / [ . . . ] if you strip away the myth from the man / You can see where we all soon will be / Jesus you’ve started to believe / The things they say of you / You really do believe / This talk of God is true” before begging the man who he admires and even loves not to let his followers get so far out of hand that the occupying Romans crush them once and for all.
In truth we were writing a musical radio play. Ultimately this gave us one enormous advantage. Audiences came to know our recording so well that no future director or producer could add musical passages for scene changes or tamper with the construction. The score had become set in stone. There is a famous story regarding my Cats collaborator Trevor Nunn directing Mozart’s Idomeneo at Glyndebourne Opera. During a rehearsal he asked conductor Simon Rattle if he could repeat a section to cover a complicated stage move. Rattle shot back, “This is Mozart not Andrew Lloyd Webber.” Thanks to the record not even Trevor could ask this of Superstar. Actually on second thoughts I am not so sure.
The New Year dawned with young American conscripts still being killed in Vietnam. Back home the troubles in Northern Ireland were festering, although on the mainland we were then still pretty much unaware of them, and there was a divisive General Election looming. But there was little inkling of this that winter. Brian Brolly wanted the double album for release in the fall of 1970. We set ourselves a target to complete the writing by Easter with my target to have the orchestration finished by May. In fact we finished way earlier which was just as well. For there was, as P.G. Wodehouse puts it, a fly in an otherwise unsullied ointment. I fell deeply, passionately, head over heels in love.
11 Love Changes Everything, But . . . (#ua656de99-a461-5b66-a30a-10e6ca97eedb)
I first met Sarah Hugill at a birthday party thrown by my friend Sally in Christ Church, Oxford, organized for Lottie Gray. I can still remember the date. January 21, 1970. Sarah was just a slip of a 16-year-old schoolgirl but it isn’t hard to explain why her parents had allowed her out for this bash. They had a little something in common with Sally and Lottie’s families.
Sarah’s father Tony had individually won the Croix de Guerre for bluffing a German commander into surrendering an entire French village. He had served in the 30 Assault Unit set up by James Bond author Ian Fleming. Tony wasn’t over-keen on Fleming. He told me that he spent too much time in Whitehall and not with his men on the front line. Worse, when Fleming did get there, he had a habit of polishing off all their best brandy and cigarettes. Nonetheless Tony gets a big name check in Casino Royale and is supposed to be one of the role models for James Bond himself. Tony’s day job was research chemist to the sugar company Tate & Lyle with special responsibilities for the plantations in Jamaica. But when he was appointed head of the FAO (the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation) one of his best friends told me never to take things at face value, although neither Sarah nor I know to this day exactly what this meant. Hence the connection with the parents of the party hostess.
I of course knew none of this when his deliciously open-faced daughter offered to be my secretary. Falling in love with Sarah didn’t take long. I asked her to dinner at the bistro opposite the Michelin building in what London real estate agents poncily now call Brompton Cross. I thought she was ordering ludicrously small, simple things. She didn’t know whether she was supposed to pay her share of the bill. That did it. I had to see her again.
By the end of January I had all the main melodies for our “opera” and Tim’s lyrics were flowing as fast and furious as I was falling for Sarah. My new flat came in very handy. It was only a few hundred yards from Sarah’s school. Since she was supposed to be revising for her summer exams she had loads of free time. So most days she would clock into school and promptly ankle round to me. Fairly soon I gave her a spare key. There are worse things when you’re 21 than a pretty schoolgirl waking you up in the morning. Come March it was time to meet her parents. Thanks to the manners Auntie Vi drilled into me I got on well with my elders and Tony and Fanny Hugill were no exception.
I had dinner at their flat near Kensington High Street. My love of architecture soon had small talk regarding their country home veering towards local churches, thus deflecting possible discussion about the length of my hair. I was invited for a weekend and made a note to wise up on north Wiltshire where their out-of-town pad was located. Over the years I have found that when meeting prospective in-laws it goes down well if you know more about where they live than they do.
LOVE MAY WELL CHANGE everything but in my case it had me writing fast and even more furiously. By mid-February Superstar’s structure was advanced enough for me to break the score down into record sides. My sketches for Side 1 are dated February 21 and the final fourth side dated March 4. Unusual, irregular time signatures are a vital part of Superstar’s construction. They give a propulsive energy to the music and thus to the lyric and the storytelling. There is a December ’69 note that Mary Magdalene’s first song must be in 5/4 time and two months later a big exclamation mark above the 5/4 time signature when it had become “Everything’s Alright.” There’s a double exclamation mark above the 7/4 time signature of the Temple Scene in my notes for Side 2. The biggest note is a reminder to myself about writing a musical radio play with “clarity” scrawled across it and endless reminders about light and shade.
The writing may have sprinted apace but finding our singers was less plain sailing. With a guaranteed record release in the bag, Murray came on board quickly so the key role of Judas was cast. We were anxious to snare a known name as Jesus and Tim pursued Colin Blunstone, the lead singer of the Zombies, whose big hit was “She’s Not There,” written by fellow Zombie, Rod Argent, a fine musician with whom I was to work many times almost a decade later. I had a niggling feeling that Colin’s voice was not rocky enough but the Zombies’ record label CBS shot my worries in the foot by refusing permission for him to record for us point blank.
Help arrived unexpectedly. I had been invited a few months before to the Royal Albert Hall premiere of Jon Lord’s Concerto for Group and Orchestra which featured Lord’s band Deep Purple and the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by a friend of my father’s, fellow composer and lover of cocktails, Malcolm Arnold. There I met Deep Purple’s manager Tony Edwards, a smart businessman who like Sefton also dabbled in show business. I found the music bland, so I droned on about how daring it was to fuse a rock group with an orchestra, I discovered that Deep Purple were contemplating a wise career move and about to go heavy metal. I mentioned something about Superstar and Tony Edwards was intrigued.
Now, several months later, we got a call saying Deep Purple had a new lead singer and would Tim and I like to come round to Tony’s very smart Thames-side house in Barnes and hear some of his rough tapes? His name was Ian Gillan. The moment I first heard the famous Ian Gillan primal scream was the moment I found my Jesus who would now be red blooded and full of spunk, not some bloke in a white robe clasping a baby lamb. That night I went back to my flat and rewrote the moment Jesus slings the moneylenders out of the temple.
Work on Superstar took a temporary back seat and not only because of Sarah. Out of the blue I got an offer to write a film score. The film was called Gumshoe and was directed by a first-timer, the future twice Oscar contender Stephen Frears and starred Albert Finney. Albie, as everyone called him, had set up a small independent film company with the actor Michael Medwin called Memorial Enterprises. Michael, an urbane pin-striped suited chap who frequently played the role of upper-class spiv in British B-movies, had been impressed by the mini buzz around the “Superstar” single and apparently had heard me jaw on about film musicals on some radio programme. The plot of Gumshoe involved Albie as a small time Liverpool bingo caller who fantasizes about being a glamorous Bogey-style private dick. Stephen, who unlike the suave Michael Medwin seemed a man ill at ease with the new Conservative government, wanted a score in Max Steiner style which would be a sort of homage to Bogart and Bacall and coupled with very British working-class locations would raise a wry smile. He also wanted a touch of rock’n’roll. I agreed I was their man. At worst this would be a laugh.
A large contraption called a Moviola was manhandled down my basement stairs. This dinosaur was the then standard editing kit for movies and became extinct almost exactly the time Gumshoe was made. You literally marked up the film where you wanted to cut it. Rather like analogue tape, it has recently made a slight comeback. Stephen would get the operator to run a sequence whilst I improvised on the piano until he got out of me what he felt fitted the pictures. Then I orchestrated it. I had a ball writing pastiche but I composed one deliberately filmic tune I was very pleased with. Two decades later I completely reworked the melody as the title song of Sunset Boulevard which I reconceived in 5/8 time. I’m pretty sure this makes it the only title song of a musical in this time signature. The recording sessions were hassle free and I got back to “Superstar” with the delightful team at Gumshoe seemingly contented. I didn’t hear anything more about the movie for months.
WITH MURRAY AND IAN in the bag as Judas and Jesus, I began firming up our band. Joe Cocker was taking a rest from gigging so Grease Banders Alan Spenner and Bruce Rowland on bass and drums were nabbable. Tim and I approached Eric Clapton’s manager Robert Stigwood in a pie-in-the-sky attempt to procure his client as lead guitarist, but an audience in Stigwood’s grand Mayfair offices ended up with us graciously being shown the door. So we went with another Grease Band member Henry McCullough, who subsequently was lead guitarist in Paul McCartney’s Wings. Chris Mercer, the Juicy Lucy sax player on our single, signed on and brought with him guitarist Neil Hubbard.
Finding a keyboard player, however, was hairier. I needed someone who spanned rock and classical, someone who could play rock by feel but could also stick to the musical script when required, in other words actually read music. There was a progressive trio creating quite a ripple in the sweet smoky haze of the live rock circuit called Quatermass. I can’t remember who first played me their virtuoso Hammond organ dominated tracks but big thanks to them for introducing me to Peter Robinson. Pete ticked every box. Not only was he a great rock player but his musical knowledge spanned everything from Led Zeppelin to Schoenberg, and he introduced me to Miles Davis. Not only was my band complete but Quatermass’s singer John Gustafson became our Simon Zealotes. We were almost ready for the studio.
At the beginning of June we were invited by a Father Christopher Huntingdon to be his all-expenses-paid guests at the US premiere of Joseph. The first-ever public performance of a Rice/Lloyd Webber epic in America was taking place at the Cathedral College of the Immaculate Conception, Douglaston, Queens, New York. Father Huntingdon was in charge of the place. We jumped at it. Neither of us had been to America before. Had I known we would be staying at the Harvard Club in central Manhattan I just might have given my shoulder-length hair a tweak and been spared the censorious looks hurled my way in this epicentre of Ivy Leaguedom.
In truth I remember my first Broadway show better than I remember the Joseph performance which was fine but the Elvis wasn’t up to Tim’s. It was Stephen Sondheim’s Company. I had suggested to Tim that we saw it because I had clocked Hal Prince’s name on the poster. It was a matinee and both afternoon and theatre were stiflingly hot. Somehow I had got into my head that my first Broadway show would be big and brash, at the very least with staging like Cabaret. But of course I saw something groundbreaking and utterly the reverse. I was completely unprepared for it and musically it was a million miles away from what was going on in my head at the time. Tim was taken with the lyrics but I was a 22-year-old in love with a 16-year-old girl and not yet ready for middle-age angst. My rose-petal-strewn state of mind was considerably more the last scene of the same writer’s Merrily We Roll Along than the first.
Back in London Sarah quizzed me about how we got on and I told her about Father Huntingdon and the Harvard Club. She replied that she wished I had told her who’d invited us. Father Huntingdon was her mother’s Ivy League American cousin.
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