Unmasked. Эндрю Ллойд Уэббер
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