Unmasked

It was not surprising then that having a young, good looking male pop star author of his own creation under his belt so to speak, Desmond was no longer as enthused about me as he once was. So when he negotiated a £100 advance for both Tim and me out of Novello’s, peanuts to what he was earning from Adam Diment, he assumed my father (the legal age you could sign a contract in 1968 was 21) would ink the agreement immediately. (Today £1670.) Fortunately Bob Kingston’s homily echoed round my skull and I added the words “excluding Grand Rights” to the document I got Dad to initial as well as adding his moniker.

The resulting explosion in Desmond’s St James’s Street office could be heard above the teatime quartet in the palm court of the neighbouring Ritz Hotel. How could I be so stupid as to jeopardize this deal? I was wasting his time. Anyway there never would be Grand Rights involved with a 20-minute pop cantata. Nobody would perform it in a theatre. He ended a diatribe of a letter to my father with “enough is enough.” Tim stood back aloof from the fray, possibly savouring the saga. I stood my ground. I argued that Novello’s would hardly be bothered about Grand Rights income if there was never going to be any, so let’s leave the wording in, just in case. I was right: Novello’s didn’t even murmur. The contracts were signed excluding Grand Rights. My relationship with Desmond was never the same again.

The clamour for a repeat performance of Joseph simmered just enough for Tim, Alan and me to take it seriously. The problem was a venue. Here my father stepped in. He suggested a performance at the Central Hall, Westminster after the 6:30 pm Sunday service. There were two snags. The Central Hall, Westminster is big – three thousand or so seats. Could we fill it? Secondly Joseph was only 22 minutes long. There would have to be something else to go with it. Now my mother surfaced. The first half of the concert could be classical. Julian could do a bit, Dad could play the organ and John Lill would be the Act 1 closer. May 12 was fixed as the big night. There’s a strange coincidence in this. May 12 was also the date of the first public performance of Jesus Christ Superstar in Pittsburgh three years later.

Rehearsals went just about OK. The vastness of the Central Hall swallowed up the Mixed Bag and without a proper PA system I got very worried David Daltrey’s vocals would be lost. Alan Doggett had never conducted in a hall of this size and didn’t have the control that an experienced musical director would have had. I got so nervous that I wanted to cancel the performance and Tim’s laid-back approach to the issues wound me up still further, something not lost on him. I found the playing untogether and feared it was all going to be too amateurish for a performance open to the public.

I need not have been so stressed. Despite the classical first half being way, way overlong, the joy of Joseph and the infectious enthusiasm of its young performers carried all before it. Although it was past most of the kids’ bedtimes, there were once again several ecstatically received encores, a harbinger of what was to happen to Joseph in the future. Desmond Elliott at last showed some interest, although I don’t think he saw a future in Joseph beyond schools. We had made one alteration. In a quest to make what possibly could be a single on the lines of the hugely successful “Excerpt from ‘A Teenage Opera’ ” the previous summer, we lengthened the sequence in which Pharaoh makes Joseph his second in command. We also added a “teenage opera”-style hooky kids chorus. “Joseph how can we ever say all that we want to about you.” This has become one of the central themes of today’s Joseph, although we were soon to rework this whole section.

But thoughts like that were a million miles away after the huge reaction to the performance. I wanted that night to go on forever. Would there ever be another performance of Joseph like this?

9 Any Dream Won’t Do (#ua656de99-a461-5b66-a30a-10e6ca97eedb)

I woke on the morning of May 13 to the radio blasting that there were massive student riots in Paris and they were spreading all over France and already threatening Nice. This bothered me. I had anticipated post-Joseph cold turkey by booking a cheap night flight to Vi and George’s place, and the local airport to La Mortola is Nice Côte D’Azur. That lunchtime I got a telegram from Aunt Vi saying the airport was blockaded so I had to say arrivederci Nizza. I fixed up dinner with my school friend David Harington. David was and still is always good for a cheer up. He is also the father of Game of Thrones actor Kit Harington. David is, like me, a serious foodie.

One of the greater current myths purveyed by today’s food writers is that London was a gastronomic desert before they came on the scene. This is, as my Aunt Vi would have eloquently stated, clotted bollocks on stilts. Britain may not have heaved with top-notch cooking but it had many fine restaurants. One such was the restaurant David and I graced that night. It was called Carlo’s Place and was way down the Fulham Road next to a newsagent that sold reviewers’ copies of new LPs at half-price. The decor, all exposed pipes and brickwork, would look cutting edge today in New York’s Meatpacking District and the marinated pigeon breasts were to die for. Carlo’s Place was special to me. It was there that a year later I wrote what became the signature theme of Jesus Christ Superstar on a hastily summoned paper napkin.

It was just as well I had planned to meet David. That morning a review of Joseph appeared in the Times Educational Supplement. After a few gratuitous knocks at my father’s organ playing in the Wagnerian length Part 1, it opined that Joseph was pleasant enough but none of the tunes was outstanding, “being of the Christian pop crusading type,” and it was rhythmically based too much in “chugging 4/4 time.” This much upset me as I was very proud that the moment where Joseph accuses his brother of theft is in 7/8 time. I consoled myself that the combination of the Mixed Bag and the Central Hall’s acoustic could indeed have rendered this less than obvious to Meirion Bowen, the reviewer. However what really got to me was that he finally damned with faint praise saying that Joseph provided “abundant” evidence that I could one day “become a successful composer/arranger.”

Damn it, man, I wanted to be one now. If I’d stayed at Oxford I would have been a hugely employable graduate by the summer! Anyway the dinner with David perked me up, David having questioned the latter statement, and I took off to Brighton to mooch around Victorian churches and generally forget about things. Perhaps, I thought in the phenomenal brick nave (far taller even than Westminster Abbey) of the internationally important Victorian masterpiece St Bartholomew’s, I should contact Roy Featherstone at EMI and, armed with Mr Bowen’s prediction, remind him of what he had said about my arrangements of David Daltrey’s songs.

EVENTS TOOK A DECIDEDLY unexpected turn on Sunday. For in the Sunday Times under the rather insipid headline “Pop Goes Joseph” was the rave review every first-timer prays for. The only stricture that pop/rock critic Derek Jewell had was that “the snap, crackle and pop” of Joseph zipped along too fast. Where was Tim? Had he seen it? He had said he was going away on a “private” weekend which I assumed was with some girl or other. I couldn’t wait to get back to London, find Alan Doggett and buy him a drink. Tim eventually found me at Harrington Court and I detected a crack in his normal easy-going nothing-really- matters veneer. Tim was ecstatic. We had been hailed as having made a breakthrough for pop! Not lost on both of us, buried at the bottom of the review was a less than flattering appraisal of the new offerings from Norrie Paramor’s star artist Cliff Richard.

Next day the action started. Possibly riled by the Cliff Richard dig and possibly feeling that it would be no bad thing to be associated with “a breakthrough for pop,” especially since this alleged breakthrough was under his nose, the great legend Norrie Paramor decided to get behind Joseph. Very shortly he obtained an offer from Decca Records to make a Joseph album and not only that, Decca were happy that it should be with our original performers. This was great news, although it did cross our minds that it might just be that named artists would cost Decca and Norrie a lot more money.

There were two snags. Joseph was only the length of one side of an LP. The second was that Norrie wanted to publish it, i.e. cream off some of our potential income for himself. Joseph was already contracted to Novello’s, a genuine traditional publishing house, rather than Norrie who had had a rough time a few years previous when the TV show That Was The Week That Was uncharitably suggested that artistic reasons might not be the reason Norrie Paramor compositions just happened to crop up on the B-sides of the top artists he produced at EMI.

Norrie’s brother Alan was wheeled out as head of the so-called Paramor publishing division. Unbeknown at least to me, he had already contacted Novello’s about muscling in on their publishing deal. Novello’s, being a classical outfit, had signed Joseph on classical music terms not on the extortionate “50% of what the publisher chooses to account for” terms that were standard then in the pop world. And of course, thanks to Bob Kingston and no thanks to Desmond Elliott, they had zilch of the Grand Rights. What Alan Paramor proposed was that to accommodate Norrie the contract was redrawn on pop terms with the Grand Rights included. No agreement, no Decca record. Of course this was blackmail. Furthermore Tim was dependent on Norrie for his job and was in no position to battle. What happened next was the first of many times I got cast as the bad guy in negotiations. Yet all I was doing was trying to protect us both from being bullied into something manifestly unfair. I have no doubt that any wavering thoughts Norrie might have had of bringing me under his wing ended after a one-on- one tussle I had with his so-called publisher brother.

I pointed out that Tim was an employee of Norrie with a guaranteed income and I had no such support. Therefore why should I, frankly also Tim, give up potential earnings on a project Norrie had absolutely no involvement in developing? Alan was furious. He thought I would be a pushover. Eventually the Paramors, who obviously had also threatened out-of- their- depth classical publisher Novello’s with the same no deal, no record scenario, proposed upping the publisher share to 40% not the 50% of the standard rip-off pop publishing contract. But the Grand Rights had to be thrown in. I resisted. At another one-on- one with Alan, where he told me I was an ungrateful troublemaking upstart, he offered to leave control of the Grand Rights with us but he wanted 20% of them, or bye bye record. I was in no position to argue any more. It still seemed far fetched to think a 22-minute school cantata would have life in theatre and film. But even so, that meeting rankles with me to this day. At least I kept us 80% not 50% of our theatre and film income, despite having no idea of whether there would ever be any.

WITH THE PUBLISHING ISSUE decided, Tim and my next task was to expand Joseph to LP length, i.e. about 40 minutes. This was easy. Most of the songs had been deliberately kept very short lest the kids got bored and they needed expanding anyway. But we added two new songs. In the Colet Court version we had skipped the story of Egyptian mogul Potiphar and his wife who fancied Joseph. The new song “Potiphar” contained a typical Rice lyric:

Potiphar had very few cares

He was one of Egypt’s millionaires

Having made a fortune buying shares

In pyramids.

The second, “Go Go Go Joseph,” is an archetypical Sixties song that tells the story of Joseph’s dream-solving activities in gaol and is now the Act 1 closer in the theatre. Little did we premeditate that when we wrote it.

Norrie Paramor wanted to keep a watchful eye on what I was up to with the orchestrations so I did a lot of writing in his office. My stock with the great man got even worse when he opined that he had been to the opening night of Cabaret and that it had no hit songs and was an average musical at best. I had seen it in preview and, aside from the subplot with a boring song about pineapples, I thought it was great, flamboyantly directed by a name I banked – Hal Prince – and with sensational performances by Judi Dench as Sally Bowles and Barry Dennen as the MC. I told Norrie that I thought it was the best thing I’d seen on the London stage since Callas in Tosca. Even if that was absurdly comparing apples and oranges, Cabaret opened my eyes to a new seamless way of staging that chimed with my growing certainty that musicals could be through-composed.

Cabaret arguments notwithstanding, Norrie seemed pleased enough with my arrangements and the Decca recording was green lit. There was a minor hiccup, however. We got a letter from Technicolor demanding that we drop the word from our title as we were infringing a trademark. I replied saying that was fine by us as we were doing a deal with Eastmancolor who were keen to be associated with vibrant new cutting-edge stuff. Practically by return we got a letter saying we could use Technicolor provided we spelt it correctly. Naturally we had been spelling it the British way with a “u” in the colour bit.

When you write an orchestration it’s a bit like an artist with paint. You have musical colours in your head and the palette is infinite. The big difference is that an artist executes a picture himself. A composer relies on others to execute what he has written. I, like all composers who orchestrate, hear the complete work in my head as I want it to sound. Unfortunately the reality doesn’t always turn out that way. Come the Joseph recording, the delightful but very amateur playing of our Potters Bar stars was shown up hugely when combined with the hardened orchestral session musicians that Norrie hired for our day in Decca Records’ long-vanished North London recording studios. Alan Doggett, an amateur conductor himself, was way out of his comfort zone. I found the solo vocal performances under par. In short I was not the happiest bunny in the control room.

I worked myself up into such a lather that I didn’t stay till the bitter end. My lather foamed further when I heard the finished mixes. Some of the playing was so ragged that I wondered if the recording would even be released. The production values I had hoped for were zero. Lather turned to meltdown. Tim was scheduled to play the finished tapes to Norrie the next day. I told him we couldn’t play him such amateur night out stuff.

How wrong I was. Norrie loved it and so did Decca. The homespun quality of the pop group next door combined with the kids for whom Joseph was written exactly conveyed the irresistible joy that happens when people make music just for the fun of it. But as a recording to rival Sgt. Pepper or “MacArthur Park,” as I had hoped, Joseph didn’t stand a chance. The vocal performances were merely pleasant and not remotely charismatic enough for there to be a serious shot at a hit single. “Any Dream Will Do” had to wait over 20 years to chart when Jason Donovan’s recording went to No. 1 in Britain.

Parenthetically in 2002 “Any Dream Will Do” was sniped at from an unexpected quarter. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, chose the annual Dimbleby Lecture to challenge the lyric for suggesting “The personal goals recommended were simply activating your potential in any direction you happen to set your heart on.” He caused quite a stir and Tim was not best pleased. My quibble with the lyric is its pessimism, “May I return to the beginning / The light is dimming / And the dream is too. / The world and I / We are still waiting / Still hesitating / Any dream will do.” It is interesting that in the original Colet Court version the lyric read “My dream is dimming” rather than “the light.” I wonder how many of the school kids who have sung my jaunty tune over the years were aware that what Tim is saying is world weary – the lyrics aren’t jaunty at all.

Looking back, I realize that my angst in the studio was the first of many meltdowns I have had when faced with less than bullseye performances. Bad sound is one of my pet hates and even today I go to too many musicals where it seems the creative teams have cloth ears. My problem always has been, and still is, that I am a perfectionist. Any substandard performance drives me bonkers. I think I have got slightly better at controlling myself in my old age but only slightly. Anyway, shortly after Decca announced they were happy we were offered a performance of Joseph in St Paul’s Cathedral. But it was not until November. Furthermore Decca decided they would release Joseph in January 1969. The record company honchos figured it might get more noticed than if it was smothered by the Autumn/Christmas schedule. So I had an outsize hole in the summer. It was filled by the not inconsiderable bulk of darling Auntie Vi.

YOU MAY RECALL THAT I alluded earlier to the matter of Auntie Vi and too many cocks spoil the breath. This issue was about to percolate into my life in a major way. It began with a telegram that read thus:

GOD BUGGER THE POPE STOP ARRIVING IN UCL HOSPITAL

TOMORROW STOP SORRY HOLS OFF CALL STOP VI STOP

Just as well the postmistress in La Mortola has scant English, I thought, as I booked a call to find out what on earth had happened on the Costa Fiore.

The matter had two nubs. Nub one, my uncle George explained, was that poor Vi had very badly broken her leg in three places. She was being freighted back to England by air ambulance and would be ensconced in UCL Hospital in London. Since I was her favourite relative, I was expected to rise to the occasion. So far so good. Hospital visits to see Vi would doubtless be colourful and George, being a doctor, would see she got great treatment.

It was nub two that proved more troublesome. She had started writing a cookbook and wanted me to help her continue with it in her hour of need. The manuscript to date was in the post via registered mail. Had I received it? I hadn’t. No matter, first off after arrival her leg would have to be reset but George was sure Vi would be compos mentis fairly soon after the surgeons had strutted their stuff. Then she would need cheering up and help with the book was the prescribed tonic. None of this sounded unreasonable. I loved nattering food with Vi. Then the manuscript turned up. The title page of the draft in the registered brown envelope said it all.

THE QUEENS OWN COOKBOOK

Camp Cooking for Town Dwellers

by Rodney Spoke

Auntie, no doubt inspired by her many theatrical friends, and maybe Kenneth Williams on the BBC World Service, was writing a gay cookbook.

Before you say “what’s wrong with that?” you have to remember this was more than 50 years ago. London may have been swinging and recipes like Coq Up and her version of Spotted Dick might have hit my funny bone but away from the Kings Road things hadn’t swung far enough for mainstream publishers to embrace this volume wholeheartedly. I quote the introduction.

Running mascara, eye-lashes slipping, nose unpowdered, nails unvarnished and even a hint of stubble. There is no excuse for it. You can stop messing about in the kitchen and come out in the sitting room. Here at last is a cook book for the Bona Viveur.

It struck me there was only one publisher for Auntie. Desmond Elliott. I was right. Soon after Vi’s leg was reset she had a deal set with Desmond’s Arlington Books. Vi had broken her leg very badly and her stay in hospital through that hot summer was a long one. I enlisted my friend David Harington to help Vi concoct chapters like “Game Meat” and we did keep Vi merry as she created the character of Rodney Spoke, whose “graceful hand had been behind so many of London’s leading restaurateurs.” The book eventually was published in 1970 and I spent most of that year and a few years after praying that nobody discovered that Rodney was my aunt or that I had anything to do with it.

THE REVEREND MARTIN SULLIVAN, the New Zealand-born dean of Sir Christopher Wren’s masterpiece St Paul’s Cathedral, was not averse to publicity in the name of Jesus. He inaugurated a summer youth festival called Pop-In at St Paul’s by abseiling down the cathedral’s West Front. Traditionalists were not keen. There are historical connections between St Paul’s School in West London and the cathedral and Rev. Sullivan thought Joseph would be a perfect follow- up to his summer high jinks. Not a few eyebrows shot up at the announcement that a pop cantata was to be performed on November 9 in the church hailed as one of the better consequences of the Great Fire of London.

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 follow-up.

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