Unmasked. Эндрю Ллойд Уэббер

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СКАЧАТЬ Mellotron and Tambourines

      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” rerun 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.

      That summer we wrote a song for Joseph that we thought might just be a pop hit. Most pop lyrics emanating from the Summer of Love displayed a somewhat opaque side – witness that legendary pop-synth fusion album Days of Future Passed by the Moody Blues or any of Donovan’s hits. The song was “Any Dream Will Do” and the lyrics were no exception. But more of this anon.

      A STOCK CHARACTER IN pop showbiz films is the record company postboy. Invariably this character delivers mail to the top executive brass and refuses to leave their offices until they listen to some act he’s discovered. Just to get him out of the door, the top brass reluctantly go to one of the act’s gigs. The act, after various cliffhanging story twists, turns out to be pop’s answer to the Second Coming. EMI had such a postboy. His name was Martin Wilcox. I don’t know if he ever blagged his way into the top honcho’s offices. But he did get as far as Tim Rice. The act he was peddling had a suitably psychedelic name, the Tales of Justine. Its guiding force was a teenager called David Daltrey, naturally presumed to be a distant relative of Roger Daltrey of The Who but I’ve never seen any proof. He lived in Potters Bar in Hertfordshire, not that far from Tim’s home in an area that by 1967 was a sprawling monotone London suburb. Maybe as an escape David had written songs with titles like “Albert (A Pet Sunflower).” He also had a pleasant singing voice and was friendly with an outfit called the Mixed Bag, who did competent cover performances of current hits.

      Tim managed to get EMI to sign the Tales of Justine, “Albert (A Pet Sunflower)” was the first single and Tim winged it with his bosses that I arranged it. Albert owed a debt to British music hall, so I stuck a Sgt. Peppery brass band on top of the group which made the record rather fun. We all thought it was catchy enough to be big. Tim and I also signed the band up to ourselves as managers – we called ourselves Antim Management – and we added them to our roster of one, Ross Hannaman, who had ditched her previous team, possibly because she’d had a brief fling with Tim. Unfortunately Ross’s stay with Antim didn’t last long. She shacked up with the begetter of “Excerpt from ‘A Teenage Opera’ ” Mark Wirtz who immediately issued a press release informing the world that we would hear a new Ross Hannaman. In fact we heard nothing at all, the pair got married and were divorced two years later.

      Antim Management was undeterred by Ross giving us the heave-ho. Being cutting-edge representatives of our clients, we now designed and printed up some psychedelic sleeves for the Tales of Justine’s “Albert.” One night after hours we inserted all the promotion copies into these sleeves. Our theory was that since no EMI single ever had special promotion covers radio producers and reviewers would think EMI’s entire might was behind this release.

      Unfortunately the head of EMI’s promotion department, a thirtyish guy called Roy Featherstone, was extremely unimpressed as was the British public. Sales were zilch. Roy gave Tim a hell of a roasting. I was therefore pretty scared when I got a message from Granny at Harrington Court saying that a Mr Featherstone had called and wanted to see me in his office. I was unprepared for a smiling Roy Featherstone and the offer of a cup of coffee when I quivered into his office two weeks later. Tim had recorded quite a few songs with David Daltrey, and I had done all the arrangements. Mr Featherstone said he thought the songs were OK but the arrangements were terrific, particularly one called “Pathway” where I had experimented with all sorts of effects. He would like to help me get a few more arranging gigs with other artists. This was the first time anyone in a record company had noticed my music, even if it was only my orchestrations. The timing couldn’t have been better because Tim had just hit СКАЧАТЬ