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 original track. But a “click” dictates that the musicians will play mechanically and not with each other.
No great rock band plays like a machine and there are bound to be minor variations in speed in any performance, hence Keith Grant’s worries about overdubbing a juggernaut of a symphony orchestra without a “click” to guide it. I gambled that a great rhythm track totally outweighed the risk, but the issue never arose as Keith assigned our project to a young engineer my age called Alan O’Duffy. Alan is a tall, liltingly soft-spoken, big hearted Irishman who became the rock that pulled our disparate forces together. His experience in a studio that recorded everything from happening bands to symphony orchestras had prepared him for everything I threw at him. A metronome was never on his radar either, so we recorded the band and the soul singers ahead of the orchestra in the big studio where the Rolling Stones made many of their greatest hits.
Murray provided indefatigable guide vocals. A gospel choir, the Trinidad Singers, was hired for the chorus and the “soul trio” were a pair of seasoned white session girls, Sue and Sunny, augmented by Lesley Duncan, the singer-songwriter who later famously duetted with Elton John. Ironically the white soul singers at first sounded blacker than the gospel choir who seemed rather overawed and kicked off more Ascot Gavotte than Caribbean. But when it all eventually started to cook, everyone was astonishing. I tried several variations of the final choruses with the band, but on the master take Alan and Bruce took things into their own hands and played syncopations that defied gravity. Afterwards I wrote them all out, but although I’ve got rock sections to replicate what they did, it never sounds quite the same.
The timekeeping problem did prove a nightmare for the orchestra. I had scored the big “Superstar” chords in full Guildhall School of Music textbook “Also Sprach Zarathustra” overdrive. Recording that was easy. But recording the linking bridge section, where the full orchestra plays syncopated phrases precisely in time with the rock section, might have had my father’s Methodist minister craving a sip of Dad’s so-called water bottle. With the session clock ticking, we finally got a great take, only for Alan O’Duffy to announce to the whole studio that he had failed to put the tape machine into record. I went nuts. Calmly he got the orchestra to do another take and miraculously it too was perfect.
When the 70-odd players had gone Alan asked if I would like to hear back my orchestra. The sod had recorded them twice. My 70-piece orchestra now numbered 140. Maybe it was this naughty rock’n’roll Heath Robinson vibe in the studio, maybe the sheer adrenaline that comes when you create something spontaneously that you can’t really write down or maybe the vocal creativity that Murray brought to take after take, but whatever the reason that original recording of “Superstar” has never been bettered.
The B-side was orchestral and in two sections. The first was a very Richard Straussian arrangement for heavily divided strings of the melody that eventually became “Gethsemane.” I already knew what I would compose for the crucifixion and my instinct was that this music would become its coda. I wanted the antithesis to the stark horror of Jesus’s death, something overripe and more stained-glass window than wood and nails, that hinted at how Jesus became sentimentalized in paintings like Holman Hunt’s Light of the World or the Baroque excesses of southern Italy. Tim dubbed the music “John 19:41” after the verse in St John’s Gospel describing Jesus’s body resting in his tomb. The second part never made it to the final “opera.” It was a fun tune in 7/8 time which I thought might come in handy if we wanted something celebratory, possibly after Jesus’s triumphant return to Jerusalem. We didn’t.
When Tim, David Land and I played the single to Mike Leander and Brian Brolly, Brian was euphoric. He truly thought it was a major – he even used the word “cathartic” – breakthrough for pop. He pronounced that his American masters would unquestionably finance the rest of the unwritten “rock opera,” as it was decided the non-existent opus would be billed. David Land kept mumbling about what he would say at some friend’s son’s imminent barmitzvah, but the discussion quickly centred on what the single