Unmasked. Эндрю Ллойд Уэббер
world dressed in “mod” outfits. London bus sides proclaimed “If you can’t read Adam Diment love him.” For a brief while Adam made a heap of money and was quite a celebrity.
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?
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