Unmasked

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 . . .

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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