Unmasked

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 successor.

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 with a taste for dabbling in show business called Sefton Myers. 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 banked 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.

10

“Did Judas Iscariot Have God on His Side?”

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 it 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.