Unmasked

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. 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.

6

Enter Timothy Miles Bindon Rice

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.