Andrew Lloyd Webber - Unmasked

Tim wasn’t instantly ecstatic at the thought of writing something for a bunch of 8–13-year-old school kids. It was a bit of a comedown from hopes of a West End premiere and the white-hot heat of EMI in the year that company launched Sgt. Pepper . But Tim had schoolday memories of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and Gilbert’s witty lyrics in particular. Also the notion of a “pop cantata” did chime with what was happening at the time. We liked the idea that there would be no script – not that we ever had experience of one, since Leslie Thomas had still failed to deliver anything for the increasingly dust-gathering The Likes of Us . So we tossed a few ideas around. At first we felt another Bible story wasn’t cool. Maybe something from English history? I don’t remember if the subject we subsequently toyed with, King Richard I and his minstrel Blondel, surfaced at the time. We certainly combed our history books, but nothing grabbed us. A James Bond themed idea was temporarily our frontrunner, but it was soon shown the egress as we thought it would date and anyway it needed a plot.

Salvation came in the form of The Wonder Book of Bible Stories . Books like these are excellent source material for musicals. They save a lot of reading time and effort. The plots are nicely condensed, the print is big and there are lots of pictures to bring important moments to life. Tim fell on the story of Joseph and his coat of many colours. I liked the idea. It had the primal ingredients of revenge and forgiveness. There could be humour, particularly if Joseph himself was made out to be a bit of an irritating prick who in the end turns out to be OK. And then there was Pharaoh. I wondered what would happen if we built and built Pharaoh’s entrance and he turned out to be Elvis. Plus there is a nice happy ending when Joseph is reunited with his dad and family. It seemed a natural.

At first Alan Doggett wasn’t convinced. This would be the third biblical cantata the school would have done. Couldn’t we think of something more original? But he melted when one evening I played him the opening two songs. He beamed at Tim’s turn of phrase

And when Joseph tried it on

He knew his sheepskin days were gone

His astounding clothing took the biscuit

Quite the smoothest person in the district

It’s the use of everyday colloquialisms that makes Joseph ’s lyrics so great. It was 1967, we were writing a “pop cantata” and who cared whether rhymes were perfect. Confirmed bachelor Alan melted still further when I introduced him to Tim. Soon Joseph was slated for the Colet Court End of Easter Term Concert, 1968. The work that launched our careers was under starter’s orders.

From Easter 1967 our pop cantata simmered leisurely on the back burner, but with The Likes of Us in the deep freeze Tim and I started writing pop songs. The first Rice/Lloyd Webber song to be commercially released was “Down Thru’ Summer.” The artist was Ross Hannaman and the arranger/producer Mike Leander who had arranged “She’s Leaving Home” for The Beatles. Ross was a contestant in the London Evening Standard Girl of the Year, 1967 competition. Those were the days when such contests were only just beginning to be deemed un-PC. We had noticed in Ross’s blurb that she sang. Tim asked his bosses if he could sign her if she won the competition. Surprisingly the answer was yes. So we piled off to hear her sing in some club where we encountered a very pretty teenager with an OK folksy voice, very much in the Marianne Faithfull mould. Tim immediately fancied her, but she had two blokes who managed her, one of whom was her boyfriend, so Tim was temporarily stymied.

You could vote as many times as you liked for your favourite Girl of the Year provided you voted on a coupon in your Evening Standard , presumably a marketing wheeze to sell more newspapers to the competitors’ nearest and dearest. Tim and Ross’s manager found a heap of unsold Standards that were about to be pulped and duly voted with the whole lot of them. Her resulting victory was so obviously false that Angus McGill, the witty veteran doyen of Fleet Street diarists who organized the competition, had to declare Ross a joint winner. He couldn’t disqualify her because the rules said you could vote as many times as you liked. But he hadn’t reckoned on someone hijacking the odd thousand unsold copies in a recycling plant. Actually Angus was amused. The contest was hardly serious and he liked the idea that one of the winners might become a pop star. I was introduced to Angus and soon we became real friends. I would often meet him in his Regent’s Park flat from where we would drive to his shop Knobs and Knockers which sold exactly what was on the ticket.

The tune I wrote for Ross was tailor-made for her wispy soprano, a wistful folk ballad that I heard in my head simply arranged for acoustic guitar and a small, sparely scored string section. Tim provided a suitably obtuse flower-powery lyric. “Down thru’ summer you would stay here and be mine.” It was the Summer of Love, after all. The recording session was not at Abbey Road, but Olympic Studios, studio of choice for the Rolling Stones and in those days boasting one of the best sounding rooms for an orchestra in London. Little did I guess when I pitched up that morning what a huge part Olympic was to play in my life. Unfortunately Mike Leander’s perception of my little tune could not have been more different from mine. Instead of an acoustic guitar and chamber strings, Mike had arranged the song for a full out galumphing electric rhythm section plus a thrashing drummer whose unsubtle playing was so loud that it spilled over the microphones of the entire orchestra. Nothing could have been more at odds with how I heard my tune and I sat in the corner of the studio, disconsolate.

I thought the B-side, a sort of “Semi-Detached Suburban Mr James” re-run called “I’ll Give All My Love to Southend” (we were in the “Winchester Cathedral” era), fared rather better, even though Tim and I had a “beat group” in mind rather than a pretty folksy girl soprano. I always liked the tune of “Down Thru’ Summer” and reused it as the middle section of “Buenos Aires” in Evita . When the melody accompanies Eva’s premonition of her fatal illness in Act 2, the arrangement isn’t far from how I had heard Ross’s single.

Angus arranged various promotional stunts for Tim and me and the Evening Standard joint winners ranging from a day at Royal Ascot to a night in Mark Birley’s newly opened Annabel’s. This may have made good copy for the Standard , but was hardly likely to ingratiate our hopeless single on the record-buying public. Amazingly Tim swung it that we got a second chance with Ross. The song was titled “1969” and the lyric was about someone having a trippy premonition, “a Chinese band marched by in fours,” that sort of thing. The chorus went “Hey, I hate the picture, 1969.” Tim the soothsayer didn’t predict 1969 to be a bundle of laughs. This time the tune was only partially by me because we decided to make something out of Beethoven’s “Für Elise.” I added what I thought was a rather hooky chorus and a spooky descending tritone linking section. This time the arrangement by ex-Shadows drummer Tony Meehan was far closer to my intentions and I don’t find it totally unlistenable to today. The B-side, “Probably on Thursday,” had a really lovely wistful lyric even if, like so many of Tim’s songs, it told a pessimistic story: “You’re going to leave me, possibly on Wednesday, / Probably on Thursday.” Twenty years later I rewrote the melody of the verse and recorded the song with Sarah Brightman.