just for a laugh popped into the local branch of the highly exclusive bank Coutts and Company, top client HM The Queen. In those days it redefined pomposity. Every member of staff from bank manager to humblest clerk wore Fred Astaire-like white tie and tails – and, no, you didn’t expect them to launch into a tap dance routine on the marble staircase. A visit to Coutts was designed to inspire awe and trepidation in the chosen few of the great and good allowed into its echelons.
Fully expecting to be shown the tradesman’s entrance quicker than promptly, Tim and I marched in and demanded to open an account. We were ushered into the deathly silent office of the assistant manager, a frock-coated character called Tom Slater. He seemed to know about Joseph in St Paul’s which we took as a definitive negative, especially in this hush-toned realm that only needed incense to make it religious. To our astonishment, he proffered the forms to open an account and a week later we joined the Queen in entrusting our worldly wealth to Britain’s most exclusive bank. Although I got to know Tom well over the next few years, he never told me why on earth he admitted us. Had he got a score to settle with his bosses that day? Anyway it was to Tom I turned for my first mortgage and buoyed by my new contract I got a loan for £2500. At last I could move away from the dreaded Harrington Court.
My new flat meant that belatedly I began to be confident enough to build a social life. For the very first time I felt secure about inviting home girls. I needed someone to help me pay the mortgage and so I persuaded my school friend David Harington to rent the bedroom and I installed a cunningly concealed Murphy bed in the big room for myself. We turned a sort of garden shed into a tiny psychedelically decorated dining room, uprated the kitchen with a dishwasher of which I was hugely proud and lit the blue touchpaper for a series of Auntie Vi recipe inspired dinner soirées. I became very friendly with two girls, Sally Morgan and Lottie Gray via some Oxford friends, thereby unwittingly brushing with the uppermost echelons of British spy families. It was not long before Sally and Lottie introduced me to a girl who changed my life. I also now had a room where I could install a decent sound system. Along with the dishwasher I bought a 15 ips reel-to-reel tape recorder. I figured that a guy with a three year writing contract absolutely needed one of those.
Sefton Myers laid out the red carpet. Tim and I were installed on the second floor of his Mayfair office. Not only were we given a line manager/minder called Don Norman who also managed jazz singer Annie Ross, but we also acquired a girl called Jane who wore the shortest miniskirts ever and a gopher/publicist called Mike Read who went on to become a top Radio 1 DJ. Mike is a charming bloke who became a firm friend of Tim’s as well as writing and starring in two legendary West End disasters about Oscar Wilde and Norrie’s protégé Cliff Richard.
Then there was David Land. The only way I can describe David is, were you to phone Central Casting seeking a caricature warm-hearted, gag a minute, East End Jewish show business manager, they could turn up no one better than David Land. One day a plaque boasting Hope and Glory Ltd appeared outside David’s door. I asked him what on earth this company did. David said it was so he could answer phone calls with “Land of Hope and Glory.” When I asked how he came by his surname he explained that when his father fled Eastern Europe the immigration office thought “Poland” stood for “P.O. Land.” I grew to truly love this man.
A minor problem was that nobody in the business seemed to know much about David other than that he managed the Dagenham Girl Pipers. The Pipers are a sort of community outfit hailing from the sprawling east of London town which gave the Girls their name. It is the British home of Ford Motors and not a thing of beauty, but neither are bagpipes unless you are one of those who find the sound of the Scottish glens deeply moving. There are surprisingly many of these including, apparently, Hitler who is alleged to have remarked, on hearing the Girls when they were touring Germany in the early 1930s, that he “wished he had a band like that.” Which proves he was tone deaf.
One of the most debated memories of my Sydmonton Festival is the sight and sound of the Girls dressed in fake Scottish kilts piping full tilt on my staircase when rain forced them indoors. David revelled in their press cuttings, particularly those that read “all this evening needed to make it truly horrendous was the Dagenham Girl Pipers.” Nonetheless under David’s stewardship the Girls piped their questionably tuned way from Las Vegas to the Royal Variety Show. Undeniably the Dagenham Girl Pipers fulfil an admirable social purpose and still give lots of people a great deal of pleasure. He 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