LITMIR.BIZ

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rock star. I learned that he had been to Lancing College in Sussex, that he was born in 1944 and was therefore nearly four years older than me, that his father worked for Hawker Siddeley Aviation and his mother wrote children’s stories. He brought a disc with him of a song he had written and sung himself. Apparently there was tons of interest in it and also in Tim as a solo pop god answer to Peter and Gordon. I was wondering where on earth I could fit into this saga of impending stardom.

      So the first song and lyric I heard by Tim Rice was “That’s My Story.” It was a catchy, very appealing demo with Tim singing his three-chord tune in a laid-back, folksy way, accompanying himself on acoustic guitar. But it instantly struck me that the simple, happy, hooky melody seemed at odds with the rather bittersweet lyric about a guy dumping his girlfriend except the story was a charade. The guy had been dumped by his girlfriend. The punchline was “That’s my story but, oh Lord, it isn’t true.”

      Anyway, I thought it would make Tim a huge star by the end of the year. I reckoned that it would be nice to say I had met him before he was world famous and that was about it. I somewhat diffidently broached that, although I loved pop and rock, my real love was musicals. To my surprise Tim said he’d been brought up on his parents’ cast albums and he actually liked theatre songs. I didn’t sense that he had an overpowering passion for musicals, but he certainly didn’t rubbish them like most of my friends. I don’t think I mentioned the Dr Barnardo project and The Likes of Us, but after he had met my parents, who were both charmed by him, we arranged to meet each other again.

      I really liked Tim. He had a laconic turn of phrase and a quick wit I had never found in anyone before. He met my school friends who liked him too, particularly the gay ones. Eventually I tentatively broached Desmond Elliott’s Dr Barnardo musical and played him two tunes. Tim seemed quite taken. All I had was the rough synopsis I concocted in the absence of anything from Leslie Thomas, but at least it was a start. One melody was meant for two teenage cockney lovebirds who were the basis of a subplot. The other was for an auction told in song. In it Dr Barnardo, after a few fun lots to set things up, saw off all bidders and bought the Edinburgh Castle Gin Palace in London’s cockney epicentre, the Mile End Road. This he would turn into a temperance centre for general do-gooding. It was that sort of show.

      A few days later Tim showed up with two lyrics. The first was the auction song which he had called “Going, Going, Gone!” The first lot to go under the gavel was a parrot. The first couplet I read by my future collaborator went thus:

       Here I have a lovely parrot, sound in wind and limb

       I can guarantee that there is nothing wrong with him.

      How could I not smile? To this day only Rice would come up with a parrot sound in wind and limb. The quirkiness and simplicity of Tim’s turn of phrase grabbed me immediately. By some strange osmosis with “Going, Going, Gone!” we had written a plot driven song that was a harbinger of the dialogue-free style of our three best-known shows. Tim titled the other song for the lovestruck subplotters “Love Is Here.” The first verse went:

       I ain’t got no gifts to bring

       It ain’t Paris, it ain’t Spring

       No pearls for you to wear

       Painters they have missed it too

       Writers haven’t got a clue

       They can’t see love is here.

      Desmond Elliott however was not best pleased when I broke the news that I had decided that Tim should be my writing partner for The Likes of Us. A with it pop lyricist should stick to with it pop lyrics, was his opinion. That was, until I played Desmond the songs. Very shortly Tim too was managed by Desmond Elliott of Arlington Books.

      DESPITE THERE BEING STILL no plot outline from Leslie Thomas, Tim made some song suggestions and we started writing. Desmond co-opted a “producer” who was in fact another book publisher, Ernest Hecht of Souvenir Press. Ernest Hecht was a Kindertransport émigré from Nazi Germany who once told me that a publisher’s first duty to an author is to remain solvent. He had dabbled in theatre and in 1967 presented the farceur Brian Rix in Uproar in the House. What qualified him in 1965 to present a musical is anyone’s guess. But it was Desmond’s gig and I presumed he knew best.

      Meantime I acquired a music publisher. During my skiving off school days I had got to meet some of the guys at Southern Music, an American-owned publisher with a big country and western catalogue and a very active London office in Tin Pan Alley. Soon I was taken under the wing of the CEO, a guy called Bob Kingston. Bob was later to give me one of the greatest pieces of advice of my career, thanks to which quite a few people have made a considerable fortune. He spotted that I was an oddball seventeen-year-old with a curious appetite for musical theatre – the pariah of my generation – and that my passion just might rub off on other people. So he did a deal with Desmond to publish The Likes of Us.

      Bob was very enthusiastic about our embryonic score but felt we lacked a killer ballad. He kept banging on about another “As Long as He Needs Me.” The consequence was a string of tunes, all with three long notes, as per the “he needs me” bit of Lionel Bart’s mega hit. Proof, if needed, that it is unwise to create songs by formula can be found in “How Am I to Know” which made it through to the recording of The Likes of Us at the Sydmonton Festival many years later. I suppose it got included because Tim and I thought it the best of many attempts to emulate Bart’s classic. It would have exited were the show to have made it to rehearsal because it had been usurped as pole position banker by another putative winner “A Man on His Own.” Guess what? The tune was “Make Believe Love” (the song that failed to launch my career as a lyricist). Bob pronounced we had a smash hit on our hands and the score was complete.

      A demo recording with bass, drums and a very ancient pianist was made featuring a couple of session singers and Tim and I filling in gaps. The ancient pianist had only one style, stride piano. Even the big ballads acquired a honky-tonk sheen. The sound engineer had an addiction to his new echo machine. So bits of the demo were helpful, others emphatically less so. All of them sounded as if they had been recorded in Penn Station at three in the morning. No matter. Back home I was able to render friends soporific with my first show LP. Surely the West End was a matter of months away.

      The summer of 1965 wasn’t exclusively taken up with The Likes of Us. I toured Italy with a group of school friends and spent loads of time with Vi and George at La Mortola. It was that summer that I properly met Vi’s friend, the film director Ronnie Neame. Ronnie had recently directed Judy Garland in a movie called I Could Go on Singing. This was also the title song. It had an unfortunate lyric since it continued “till the cows come home” which prompted a version on That Was The Week That Was in which the singer was stampeded by a herd of rampant bovines. I had the cheek to play Ronnie a tune I thought better that I had wanted to send him when he was making the movie, but Vi had stopped me. He said it sounded a bit “classical.” It later surfaced as “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.”

      Ronnie had been David Lean’s cameraman and producing partner on classic movies like Great Expectations. I was enthralled when he told me how, in an emotional scene with co-star Dirk Bogarde, Judy Garland had without warning veered totally off script into a supercharged autobiographical monologue. Ronnie feared the cameraman might stop shooting this unrehearsed pure gold so he eased the guy off his camera and took over himself. Ronnie tightened the shot and, by inching the camera slowly back on its track, lured Garland to keep monologuing her way forward into his retreating lens. Thus he created a seminal Garland moment in a not particularly special movie.

      Also that summer I met Tim’s parents for the first time. I had just failed my driving test, so Tim drove me in a pre-World War Two Austin car that his parents lent him to their converted farmhouse near Hatfield, about 20 miles north of London. Joan and Hugh were very kind and asked me a lot of questions about my family and what my ambitions were. They asked me quite a bit about Oxford and I, maybe wrongly, thought there was a question too many in front of Tim on the subject of university. I didn’t tell them of the

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