Andrew Lloyd Webber - Unmasked

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 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: