Unmasked

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 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.

5

“Mr Lloyd Webber, Do You Like Cats?”

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 has 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.