Unmasked

Throughout life I have found that the best way to get something you want from people is not to dangle your real carrot in front of their nose. Lob it into the mix in passing whilst pushing something else. That way, if you get a nibble, you can act all coy and say it’s not really up for discussion. It also saves you embarrassment on the 99% of occasions when your semi-hidden bait gets zero response. So I wrote to Sefton asking if he would back a museum of pop memorabilia and help find a property for it. Actually time has proved it was a good idea, except I would have been useless at running it. But I also enclosed the Joseph album and a few choice reviews. Two days later I got a letter telling me to call him and arrange a meeting.

We met at his offices in Charles Street, Mayfair, bang opposite the now sadly shadow of its former self Mark’s Club. There was another man at the meeting who remained silent throughout and was introduced as Myers’s show business advisor. His name was David Land. With hindsight this must be the only meeting ever when David Land remained silent. It went as I had hoped. There was no interest in my pop museum. But what was the story behind this Joseph album? Sefton’s show business pal David had been given it to check out and he had loved it. And who was this Tim Rice who had written the words? I made out that he was a cutting-edge record executive with Norrie Paramor and that I was busy on multiple musicals all destined for the West End. Sefton asked if I could come back for a second meeting in a few days’ time.

If you’ll excuse the mixed metaphor, next week the bacon came home to roost. Sefton offered me a management contract with a guaranteed three year income and an option to continue the arrangement for ten years, £2000 a year rising by £500 annually as an advance against a commission of 25% of our earnings. It was a whopping commission but £2000 per year was a lot of money in those days (today approximately £32,000). Furthermore there were no strings attached to what I could write. David Land was rather more vocal at this meeting pronouncing, “My boy, these are serious ackers you can’t refuse.”

There was just one condition. Tim had to agree to sign up too. I needed no persuading. This offer would provide me with three years of secure income and prove to my family that I hadn’t left Oxford in vain. But how best to persuade Tim to chuck up a seemingly safe career path with Norrie Paramor? It would be a tough ask. Tim didn’t seem a natural risk taker. This wouldn’t be easy and, boy, didn’t I know it.

1. Tim and I now own 100% of Joseph as a result of my company being offered the chance to buy the publishing rights years later.

10 “Did Judas Iscariot Have God on His Side?” (#ua656de99-a461-5b66-a30a-10e6ca97eedb)

Of course Tim took loads of convincing. After all he was more than three years older than me and, non-existent as that age gap feels now, then it seemed massive and thoughts of a secure future pressed even heavier on him than me. Tim admits to never having been as passionate about musicals as I am and the thought of giving up a seemingly much safer career path in the then all-powerful record industry must have been agonizing. I believe Tim even tried to persuade Norrie Paramor to take me in-house, but Norrie was having no truck with the long-haired troublemaker who had committed the mortal sin of loving Cabaret and burbled on about Hal Prince. We acquired a lawyer called Ian Rossdale, who negotiated that we each got a £500 advance and that our guaranteed weekly money was definitely non-returnable. (Today £7,950.) I think this was a real carrot for Tim. But most importantly I believe his parents advised him to take the plunge and if that’s true I owe a big posthumous hug to Hugh and Joan Rice. Tim signed the deal and handed in his notice to a less than ecstatic Norrie Paramor.

OMG! Three secure years ahead. I could write anything I liked. But with the contract under my belt, writing took equal billing with another top priority, moving out of Harrington Court. Granny had set up a trust fund with about £4000 in it that was mine when I was 25. (Today £63,600.) I persuaded her to advance half to let me buy a flat. I found a basement in a house in Gledhow Gardens near Earl’s Court. It had one big room and backed onto a large garden so it was blissfully quiet. But it was £6500 and to buy this I had to get a mortgage. (Today £103,350.)

When Joseph was rehearsing in St Paul’s Cathedral, Tim and I had just for a laugh popped into the local branch of the highly exclusive bank Coutts and Company, top client HM The Queen. In those days it redefined pomposity. Every member of staff from bank manager to humblest clerk wore Fred Astaire-like white tie and tails – and, no, you didn’t expect them to launch into a tap dance routine on the marble staircase. A visit to Coutts was designed to inspire awe and trepidation in the chosen few of the great and good allowed into its echelons.

Fully expecting to be shown the tradesman’s entrance quicker than promptly, Tim and I marched in and demanded to open an account. We were ushered into the deathly silent office of the assistant manager, a frock-coated character called Tom Slater. He seemed to know about Joseph in St Paul’s which we took as a definitive negative, especially in this hush-toned realm that only needed incense to make it religious. To our astonishment he proffered the forms to open an account and a week later we joined the Queen in entrusting our worldly wealth to Britain’s most exclusive bank. Although I got to know Tom well over the next few years, he never told me why on earth he admitted us. Had he got a score to settle with his bosses that day? Anyway it was to Tom I turned for my first mortgage and buoyed by my new contract I got a loan for £2500. At last I could move away from the dreaded Harrington Court.

My new flat meant that belatedly I began to be confident enough to build a social life. For the very first time I felt secure about inviting home girls. I needed someone to help me pay the mortgage and so I persuaded my school friend David Harington to rent the bedroom and I installed a cunningly concealed Murphy bed in the big room for myself. We turned a sort of garden shed into a tiny psychedelically decorated dining room, uprated the kitchen with a dishwasher of which I was hugely proud and lit the blue touchpaper for a series of Auntie Vi recipe inspired dinner soirées. I became very friendly with two girls, Sally Morgan and Lottie Gray via some Oxford friends, thereby unwittingly brushing with the uppermost echelons of British spy families. It was not long before Sally and Lottie introduced me to a girl who changed my life. I also now had a room where I could install a decent sound system. Along with the dishwasher I bought a 15 ips reel-to-reel tape recorder. I figured that a guy with a three year writing contract absolutely needed one of those.

Sefton Myers laid out the red carpet. Tim and I were installed on the second floor of his Mayfair office. Not only were we given a line manager/minder called Don Norman who also managed jazz singer Annie Ross, but we also acquired a girl called Jane who wore the shortest miniskirts ever and a gopher/publicist called Mike Read who went on to become a top Radio 1 DJ. Mike is a charming bloke who became a firm friend of Tim’s as well as writing and starring in two legendary West End disasters about Oscar Wilde and Norrie’s protégé Cliff Richard.

Then there was David Land. The only way I can describe David is were you to phone Central Casting seeking a caricature warm-hearted, gag a minute, East End Jewish show business manager, they could turn up no one better than David Land. One day a plaque boasting Hope and Glory Ltd appeared outside David’s door. I asked him what on earth this company did. David said it was so he could answer phone calls with “Land of Hope and Glory.” When I asked how he came by his surname he explained that when his father fled Eastern Europe the immigration office thought “Poland” stood for “P.O. Land.” I grew to truly love this man.

A minor problem was that nobody in the business seemed to know much about David other than that he managed the Dagenham Girl Pipers. The Pipers are a sort of community outfit hailing from the sprawling east of London town which gave the Girls their name. It is the British home of Ford Motors and not a thing of beauty, but neither are bagpipes unless you are one of those who find the sound of the Scottish glens deeply moving. There are surprisingly many of these including, apparently, Hitler who is alleged to have remarked, on hearing the Girls when they were touring Germany in the early 1930s, that he “wished he had a band like that.” Which proves he was tone deaf.

One of the most debated memories of my Sydmonton Festival is the sight and sound of the Girls dressed in fake Scottish kilts piping full tilt on my staircase when rain forced them indoors. David revelled in their press cuttings, particularly those that read “all this evening needed to make it truly horrendous was the Dagenham Girl Pipers.” Nonetheless under David’s stewardship the Girls piped their questionably tuned way from Las Vegas to the Royal Variety Show. Undeniably the Dagenham Girl Pipers fulfil an admirable social purpose and still give lots of people a great deal of pleasure. He secretly was very proud of them and was chuffed to bits when their redoubtable leader Peggy Iris got an OBE from the Queen.

“Dagenham Girl Pipers” is cockney rhyming slang for “windscreen wipers.”

THE FIRST FRUIT OF our new contract was Come Back Richard Your Country Needs You. It was terrible. Come Back – and I hope it doesn’t – was conceived as a follow-up to Joseph and was performed by the City of London School where Alan Doggett had become the new director of music. I discovered some of the justly forgotten score when I researched this book and I cannot believe how we ever allowed such slapdash sorry stuff to appear in front of an audience. Having abandoned the Bible as source material, Tim thought the story of England’s Richard the Lionheart was a suitable case for treatment. In truth there is hardly any story. Richard spent most of his reign away from home warmongering on crusades, hence our title. He got captured in Austria on the way back from one of his military forays and his faithful minstrel Blondel is supposed to have gone round Europe warbling Richard’s favourite songs until one day from a castle window his master emitted a cry of recognition. This gave rise to a typical Tim lyric I think worth quoting:

“Sir ’tis I,” cried Blondel.

“For you I’ve travelled far.”

“Rescue me if you can,” said the King,

“But lay off that guitar.”

I don’t know why Tim was so obsessed with this story but undaunted by the tepid reaction Come Back got, years later he wrote a full-blown musical on this slender theme called Blondel. I was not invited to be the composer.

From what I remember of our opus horribilis, three tunes surfaced elsewhere. One became the Act 2 opener of the full-length Joseph and the tune of the lyric I quoted got altered a bit and became the chorus of “Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat.” The third, “Saladin Days,” became “King Herod’s Song” in Jesus Christ Superstar and contained a line about scimitars and Christians which I feel is inadvisable to quote. This melody had been rejected by the Eurovision Song Contest under the title “Try It and See” in Norrie Paramor days and was therefore published by Norrie. This led to a confusing credit in the booklet of the US album version of Superstar which in turn led a few people to mistakenly think Tim and I had not written one of its biggest moments. A single of “Come Back Richard,” sung by Tim, was issued under the name Tim Rice and the Webber Group. It got nowhere.

AFTER THIS DEBACLE, WE needed to write something decent and do it pretty quick. Come Back was not the sort of stuff Sefton Myers had put his money on the line for. On paper our next project must have looked even worse. Obviously post-Joseph we had been urged to choose another biblical subject and many progressive churchmen had urged us to consider the story of Jesus Christ which we resisted. Tim, however, had mentioned several times Bob Dylan’s question, “Did Judas Iscariot have God on his side?” He became fascinated about Judas in the historical context of Roman-occupied Israel. Was Judas the rational disciple trying to prevent the popular reaction to Jesus’s teaching from getting so out of hand that the Romans would crush it? Was Jesus beginning to believe what the people were saying, that he truly was the Messiah? What if we dramatized the last days of Jesus’s life from Judas’s perspective? I could see massive possibilities in this, particularly theatrically. Unsurprisingly, nobody else thought this was remotely a subject for a stage musical but we did write one song whose lyric encapsulated these questions. It was called “Superstar” and its chorus was destined to become the best-known three-chord tune I have written, the same chorus I had jotted on a table napkin in Carlo’s Place and which had briefly been about Samuel.

It was all very well writing the song but the question was what to do with it. David Land was nonplussed. “How do I explain this at the Marble Arch Synagogue?” he opined, but no way did he block our creative juices. Tim had an idea. Jesus and religion were having a bit of a vogue in pop culture, with singles like Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky.” Dennis Potter’s play on the life of Christ had the nattering classes chattering. It emerged that Tim had at some point discussed the possibility of some kind of musical piece about Jesus with Mike Leander, the composer/arranger who had produced our first single with Ross Hannaman at EMI. Mike was now the A&R chief at MCA Records, then a division of Universal Studios, and he was apparently rather enthusiastic. The boss of the British office was a pensive Irishman called Brian Brolly. It was to this odd couple that I first played our song on their office piano with Tim doing his best on vocals.

They bit big time. Brian asked me how I heard the arrangement. I replied that I wanted it to be a fusion of symphony orchestra, soul brass section, gospel choir and rock group with a bluesy lead vocal to go with our three-chord verse, in other words nothing fancy. Astonishingly Brian did not say baulk at my extravagant suggestions, in fact very soon afterwards he called me in to discuss them. Happily I brought with me the unreleased David Daltrey song “Pathway” that I had orchestrated. Brian asked a lot of questions about whether I could handle such disparate forces. He had obviously heard the Joseph album and I told him I wanted to make a single that took the fusion of an orchestra and rock group further than ever before. The “Pathway” demo convinced him. Brian swallowed the bait.

We were given the budget for a full symphony orchestra plus all the other trappings and, joy of joys, allowed to produce it ourselves. I could hardly believe it. There was one issue: MCA wanted to own everything. I was to discover later to my great benefit, that Brian understood the importance of buttoning up all areas of copyright. In return for financing the single, MCA was to have the worldwide rights to any future recording of the as yet unwritten “opera” plus Leeds Music, Universal’s publishing arm, acquiring similar publishing rights on standard pop terms.

However there was no mention of Grand Rights. Sensing Brolly was a sharp operator, I let sleeping cats lie. David Land was a close friend and, I soon discovered, sparring partner of the boss of Leeds Music Cyril Simons. I thought we could tackle this in the unlikely event we ever wrote the complete piece. A deal was signed for the single (and any eventual album) which provided a 5% royalty in Britain and 2½% in the rest of the world, out of which we had to pay back not only the recording costs but any royalties to singers. It was a terrible deal. But MCA were risking a lot of money and we were in no position to turn it down. The big question now was who could perform it?

Tim’s first thought was Murray Head. I agreed. His acting skills meant Tim’s words would be secure. Best of all he had a real bluesy soul voice which he could turn to silk in a heartbeat. Tim’s lyrics were a series of pertinent questions. From the opening couplet “Every time I look at you I don’t understand / Why you let the things you did get so out of hand?” to the chorus “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ / Who are you? What have you sacrificed?” Tim touched on issues just as relevant 50 years later. This was not lost on Murray when we approached him but he was bemused by the song and sceptical about its chances. However he had been dropped by EMI and eventually concluded there was no harm in fronting the single, although understandably he wanted to see what the rest was like before committing to the whole project.

It was Murray who suggested the musicians and thanks to him I acquired a superb rhythm section, bass and drums from Joe Cocker’s backing group the Grease Band plus Juicy Lucy’s Chris Mercer on tenor saxophone and Wynder K. Frog, alias Mick Weaver, on keyboards. The bedrock of a great rhythm section is the bass and drums. Alan Spenner (bass) and Bruce Rowland (drums) played as if they were joined at the hip. Somehow they knew instinctively what the other would do. At last I was working with top musicians and from day one of rehearsals my mind raced with ways to push the band further.

OLYMPIC STUDIOS IN THE southwest London suburb of Barnes was Britain’s hottest rock studio but its big room could accommodate a full-sized symphony orchestra. It was the natural choice for our single. The in-house engineers straddled both rock and orchestral music since major films were regularly scored there. When Keith Grant, Olympic’s legendary recording engineer, saw the scale of my arrangements he suggested that the rock band recorded to a metronome in their headphones. Nowadays this is called a “click track.” With a “click” as a guide an orchestra only has to follow it to be totally in time with the original track. But a “click” dictates that the musicians will play mechanically and not with each other.

No great rock band plays like a machine and there are bound to be minor variations in speed in any performance, hence Keith Grant’s worries about overdubbing a juggernaut of a symphony orchestra without a “click” to guide it. I gambled that a great rhythm track totally outweighed the risk but the issue never arose as Keith assigned our project to a young engineer my age called Alan O’Duffy. Alan is a tall, liltingly soft-spoken, big hearted Irishman who became the rock that pulled our disparate forces together. His experience in a studio that recorded everything from happening bands to symphony orchestras had prepared him for everything I threw at him. A metronome was never on his radar either, so we recorded the band and the soul singers ahead of the orchestra in the big studio where the Rolling Stones made many of their greatest hits.

Murray provided indefatigable guide vocals. A gospel choir, the Trinidad Singers, was hired for the chorus and the “soul trio” were a pair of seasoned white session girls, Sue and Sunny, augmented by Lesley Duncan, the singer-songwriter who later famously duetted with Elton John. Ironically the white soul singers at first sounded blacker than the gospel choir who seemed rather overawed and kicked off more Ascot Gavotte than Caribbean. But when it all eventually started to cook, everyone was astonishing. I tried several variations of the final choruses with the band, but on the master take Alan and Bruce took things into their own hands and played syncopations that defied gravity as if they were joined at the hip. Afterwards I wrote them all out, but although I’ve got rock sections to replicate what they did, it never sounds quite the same.

The timekeeping problem did prove a nightmare for the orchestra. I had scored the big “Superstar” chords in full Guildhall School of Music textbook “Also Sprach Zarathustra” overdrive. Recording that was easy. But recording the linking bridge section, where the full orchestra plays syncopated phrases precisely in time with the rock section, might have had my father’s Methodist minister craving a sip of Dad’s so-called water bottle. With the session clock ticking, we finally got a great take, only for Alan O’Duffy to announce to the whole studio that he had failed to put the tape machine into record. I went nuts. Calmly he got the orchestra to do another take and miraculously it too was perfect.

When the 70-odd players had gone Alan asked if I would like to hear back my orchestra. The sod had recorded them twice. My 70-piece orchestra now numbered 140. Maybe it was this naughty rock’n’roll Heath Robinson vibe in the studio, maybe the sheer adrenaline that comes when you create something spontaneously that you can’t really write down or maybe the vocal creativity that Murray brought to take after take, but whatever the reason that original recording of “Superstar” has never been bettered.

The B-side was orchestral and in two sections. The first was a very Richard Straussian arrangement for heavily divided strings of the melody that eventually became “Gethsemane.” I already knew what I would compose for the crucifixion and my instinct was that this music would become its coda. I wanted the antithesis to the stark horror of Jesus’s death, something overripe and more stained-glass window than wood and nails, that hinted at how Jesus became sentimentalized in paintings like Holman Hunt’s Light of the World or the Baroque excesses of southern Italy. Tim dubbed the music “John 19:41” after the verse in St John’s Gospel describing Jesus’s body resting in his tomb. The second part never made it to the final “opera.” It was a fun tune in 7/8 time which I thought might come in handy if we wanted something celebratory, possibly after Jesus’s triumphant return to Jerusalem. We didn’t.

When Tim, David Land and I played the single to Mike Leander and Brian Brolly, Brian was euphoric. He truly thought it was a major – he even used the word “cathartic” – breakthrough for pop. He pronounced that his American masters would unquestionably finance the rest of the unwritten “rock opera,” as it was decided the non-existent opus would be billed. David Land kept mumbling about what he would say at some friend’s son’s imminent barmitzvah, but the discussion quickly centred on what the single should be called. We settled on “ ‘Superstar’ from the Rock Opera ‘Jesus Christ.’ ”

Everyone agreed that we needed a leading clergyman to endorse the single. An obvious target was Martin Sullivan at St Paul’s Cathedral. Martin was delighted to help and wrote, “There are some people who may be shocked by this record. I ask them to listen to it and think again. It is a desperate cry. Who are you, Jesus Christ? is the urgent enquiry and a very proper one at that.” Martin immediately offered St Paul’s Cathedral for the premiere if and when we finished “Jesus Christ.” We never took up the offer. Events overtook us. But he did give us this advice. Strict, or as he put it, fringe Christians would be bound to denounce our work, but that didn’t bother him. He was certain that most Christians would actively embrace it. His concern was that we could inadvertently offend Jews.

We were taken aback. We were supported by two Jewish businessmen and this possibility had never been touched on. It was not on our radar to write anything that could be remotely interpreted that way. Tim told Martin that his take would spring from whether history had treated the motives of Judas Iscariot and Pontius Pilate unfairly and that he couldn’t see how that could be offensive to anyone. I added that Sefton and David plus their many connections in London’s Jewish community would surely flag any problem. For years Martin’s warning seemed unfounded. It wasn’t until the film of Jesus Christ Superstar was released in the US that it proved real.

BRIAN BROLLY WENT INTO overdrive. “Superstar” would lurch out in the UK on November 21. He secured releases in every major territory and a few I’d never heard of. Of course the most important was the USA where Brian’s ultimate boss Mike Maitland quickly became the project’s unstinting champion. The American release was set for December 1. Back in the UK there was high excitement because we were offered a live performance on David Frost’s Saturday night ITV show. This had two consequences: outraged viewers jamming the ITV switchboard and the beginning of my deep friendship with David that continued up to his far too early death in the summer of 2013.

A rather irritating storm was fabricated by the Daily Express. A creative journalist managed to get quotes that implied we had asked John Lennon to play Jesus. This was ludicrous. For openers there was no score or script to show him. Even today this fabricated rubbish persists as fact. But despite the huge TV plug and this mini furore, the UK reaction was disappointingly ho-hum. Britain wasn’t ready for the single that Brian Brolly hailed as “cathartic” and, it turned out, nor was the USA. True there was a ripple of interest but the big Christmas releases and the subject matter meant airplay was minimal. Thankfully the single did take off in a strange assortment of territories like Holland and Brazil and Brian Brolly confirmed a then massive budget of £20,000 for us to record our “rock opera.” (Today £318,000.)

Having got this nod from MCA we realized we’d better write it. My relative new wealth meant that I had tried most of London’s gastronomic hotspots so I thought it time to get our creative juices flowing in the countryside. I alighted on a then ace watering hole, Stoke Edith House Hotel in deepest rural Herefordshire, having checked out there was an annex with a grand piano and that it served duck “en croute,” a dish whose pastry, Auntie Vi opined, would taste like “clotted greasy bollocks.” Tim remembers that we didn’t do too much writing. I certainly remember scouring every record shop in a damp Christmassy Hereford for our single without much success. I also remember writing a rude note in the Hereford Cathedral visitors’ book cursing the Dean and Chapter for heinously chucking out the superb nineteenth-century chancel screen by Gilbert Scott. Their crass, insensitive stupidity can be gauged in the Victoria & Albert Museum where the screen now lives. Hopefully one day it will be returned.

What we did do was map out the storyline of what was now confirmed as a double album. Overriding everything was that we were telling our story in sound – and sound alone. We had none of the visual elements of theatre and film to fall back on. A cast-iron musical and dramatic structure was the key. In my department, rhythm, orchestral textures, time signatures and melody had to be deployed to keep our listeners’ styluses in the grooves. Crucially important was how to reprise and pace material for dramatic effect. Dialogue had no place on a record, so the music and lyrics had to carry everything.

We did take one major decision in Herefordshire which was an important first step in creating the musical structure. It was where to put the pre-existing single “Superstar.” One thought which we rejected was to use it as a prologue to the album. I suggested that if ever our work was staged it could accompany Jesus’s journey from the place of his trial before Pilate to Golgotha where he was crucified. Thus Judas would become a narrator commenting on a version of the Stations of the Cross. In any event it felt completely right for Tim’s questions to come towards the end of the piece and before Jesus’s ultimate sacrifice.

This decision meant that the big “Superstar” chords had to be the climax of the trial. I had an instinct that whatever I composed for the trial should be condensed and become the overture. Also I figured that the overture had to show off my hugely varied musical forces of synthesizers, orchestra, rock group and choir in two minutes. The overture does this in precisely that order. It is indeed an edited version of the trial with the questioning motif that ends the opera sung by the choir as a prelude to Judas setting out his stall with “Heaven on Their Minds.” Tim comes straight to the point. “My mind is clearer now / [ . . . ] if you strip away the myth from the man / You can see where we all soon will be / Jesus you’ve started to believe / The things they say of you / You really do believe / This talk of God is true” before begging the man who he admires and even loves not to let his followers get so far out of hand that the occupying Romans crush them once and for all.

In truth we were writing a musical radio play. Ultimately this gave us one enormous advantage. Audiences came to know our recording so well that no future director or producer could add musical passages for scene changes or tamper with the construction. The score had become set in stone. There is a famous story regarding my Cats collaborator Trevor Nunn directing Mozart’s Idomeneo at Glyndebourne Opera. During a rehearsal he asked conductor Simon Rattle if he could repeat a section to cover a complicated stage move. Rattle shot back, “This is Mozart not Andrew Lloyd Webber.” Thanks to the record not even Trevor could ask this of Superstar. Actually on second thoughts I am not so sure.

The New Year dawned with young American conscripts still being killed in Vietnam. Back home the troubles in Northern Ireland were festering, although on the mainland we were then still pretty much unaware of them, and there was a divisive General Election looming. But there was little inkling of this that winter. Brian Brolly wanted the double album for release in the fall of 1970. We set ourselves a target to complete the writing by Easter with my target to have the orchestration finished by May. In fact we finished way earlier which was just as well. For there was, as P.G. Wodehouse puts it, a fly in an otherwise unsullied ointment. I fell deeply, passionately, head over heels in love.

11 Love Changes Everything, But . . . (#ua656de99-a461-5b66-a30a-10e6ca97eedb)

I first met Sarah Hugill at a birthday party thrown by my friend Sally in Christ Church, Oxford, organized for Lottie Gray. I can still remember the date. January 21, 1970. Sarah was just a slip of a 16-year-old schoolgirl but it isn’t hard to explain why her parents had allowed her out for this bash. They had a little something in common with Sally and Lottie’s families.

Sarah’s father Tony had individually won the Croix de Guerre for bluffing a German commander into surrendering an entire French village. He had served in the 30 Assault Unit set up by James Bond author Ian Fleming. Tony wasn’t over-keen on Fleming. He told me that he spent too much time in Whitehall and not with his men on the front line. Worse, when Fleming did get there, he had a habit of polishing off all their best brandy and cigarettes. Nonetheless Tony gets a big name check in Casino Royale and is supposed to be one of the role models for James Bond himself. Tony’s day job was research chemist to the sugar company Tate & Lyle with special responsibilities for the plantations in Jamaica. But when he was appointed head of the FAO (the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation) one of his best friends told me never to take things at face value, although neither Sarah nor I know to this day exactly what this meant. Hence the connection with the parents of the party hostess.