Seize the Day (29 page)

B
Y THE MID
’90s I was on the Classic FM breakfast show, where one of the regular features was the Morning March. In fact the station trumpeted, ‘The Pope is Catholic, Judith Chalmers has a passport, and just after 7.30 a.m. on Classic FM you can hear a good, rousing march.’

The Morning March had become one of the favourite features of the breakfast show, attracting an audience of devotees that included celebrities, journalists and even the odd MP. I thought it odd that no composer had ever written a tune called ‘The Morning March’, but maybe pre-prandial marching wasn’t too popular. Jogging or walking alone is socially acceptable. Marching alone, with or without uniform, is considered weird and makes the watcher feel marginally uncomfortable. I had some workings for a march that I was going to use in the
Young Apollo
musical, so I suggested to the station that I might finish it and call it ‘The Morning March’. They loved the idea, which led to HM Band of the Royal Marines, who’d played live at Classic FM, recording it. I journeyed to Portsmouth for the occasion, under the beckoning baton of Lieutenant Colonel Richard Waterer and the watchful eye of the arranger, Mike MacDermott. What a thrill it was to
be later invited into Richard Waterer’s box at the Royal Albert Hall to hear the Massed Bands of Her Majesty’s Royal Marines play ‘The Morning March’ to a very responsive audience, for the Mountbatten Festival of Music 1998. Being on the same bill as Rossini, Delibes and Bach wasn’t rock & roll, but I liked it.

It was an equally big thrill when the piece was included on Classic FM’s successful
Morning March
CD, alongside works by Elgar, Prokofiev, Verdi, Strauss, Dvo
ř
ák and Sibelius. A bonus came when it was also featured on a
Radio Times
classical CD and I found myself joining the ranks of Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Rimsky-Korsakov and Bruch. It was definitely my ‘Roll over Beethoven and tell Tchaikovsky the news’ moment.

Let it not be said that I merely mingled and rubbed shoulders with the ghosts of the revered creatives of old; I also had the current crop in my sights. An old friend from Weybridge, Bob Grace, by then one of the country’s leading publishers, suggested a writing session with Albert Hammond. It’d take a few pages to list all the great songs that Albert has written, although my favourite is ‘99 Miles from LA’, and he did have a couple of classic hits of his own with ‘Free Electric Band’ and ‘It Never Rains in Southern California’, so I was delighted to have the opportunity to write with him. I arrived at his London flat in Holland Park, probably looking a little too eager and clutching my guitar case. I was tuned and ready to go – let’s start writing those hits, Albert. But I sensed a lack of urgency from my co-writer as he flicked on the TV.

‘Do you like football?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Great. There’s a match I want to watch.’

Ah well, that’ll be a hitless hour and three quarters, then. We might have knocked off our first album in that time. My hopes rose again as the final whistle blew, but there was a further question. ‘I’m really hungry, aren’t you?’

I could be, I suppose. Off we trotted to Julie’s Wine Bar, normally
a favourite, but tonight a mild frustration. By something past midnight we were back outside Albert’s place. Super chap, great supper, decent match, no songs. ‘Well, goodnight.’ I managed a weak smile, slightly embarrassed by the unused guitar that I had toted around all evening like an expectant child.

‘Coffee, tea?’

Why not? Tea finished and the clock gathering pace towards sunrise, there was a third question. ‘Got any ideas, then?’ I think I beat the dawn home, but at least we’d written a song. ‘The Power of Life’ is parked on a shelf, and may not be the greatest song ever written, but it still stands up pretty well.

Some writers like to work together and kick ideas around while others work independently of each other, returning with their latest contribution as and when. The song I wrote with Andrew Lloyd Webber in the summer of 1997 was one of the latter. I was having lunch at Sydmonton to discuss something or other and after we’d watched Venus Williams doing amazing things with yellow balls at Wimbledon, Andrew mentioned a couple of songs he had that needed lyrics. If he sent me his rough instrumental could I have a go at some words? I could indeed. Nothing turned up for a couple of weeks so I assumed he’d forgotten. I was pottering around a local mill that had once been the home of the composer John Ireland, when, by interesting coincidence, Andrew called to say one of the tracks was in the post. With Peter Ainsworth, then an MP, I’d been suggesting turning the mill into a South Downs musical museum, for the likes of Ireland, Havergal Brian, Hubert Parry, William Blake and Edward Elgar. The excuse that was given for not being able to do it was that the surrounding area was landfill and therefore the ground (and the mill) could be unsafe, apart from any noxious gases that might emanate from the area. That, however, didn’t affect the tune from ALW. I pounced on a good title almost immediately, ‘No Smoke without Fire’. The lyric took shape, but I really needed to play with the tune and add a middle eight. I knew Andrew well enough to ask him if I could move
his melody around where necessary and he readily and graciously agreed. I was definitely pleased with the result and did a pretty good demo, much in the style of UB40. Andrew loved it too, which was good news, and decided to have it performed at the next Sydmonton Festival, along with his workshop for
Whistle Down The Wind
. It went down very well and Andrew was confident that our song was going to be a huge hit. Any congratulations from those present that came my way were tempered by experience. Andrew was so busy that today’s great idea might well slip down the chart of priority within a week or two, plunge even further after a month and then slide under the radar and off into the ether. I didn’t want to be right, but I was.

Fast forward to the launch of Tim Rice’s autobiography. After the event, Andrew and I headed back to his London house to watch an England match. It won’t have escaped the more astute among you that there is a theme here, with songwriters inviting me round to watch football. The screen was so large that at times I felt that I was playing in midfield, especially after a glass or two from Andrew’s cellar. After the game we listened to some Bollywood music of which he had become enamoured, before he treated me to some tunes on the piano from his forthcoming musical
The Beautiful Game
. Andrew is a great writer of melodies, no doubt about that.

A month or two later I had calls from a couple of friends, delighted that the song I had written with Andrew was in his new musical. Was it? No one told me. Someone played it to me. That was it, all right, with different and to my mind inferior lyrics (no offence to the hugely talented Ben Elton, whose name was on the credit) but the same re-structured melody. I mentioned it to Tim, who wasn’t unduly surprised, and I wondered if Andrew would bring it up. He never has. I’ve seen him on many occasions since then, but not a squeak. My publisher suggested suing him. I laughed. Not that ‘hollow, mocking laugh’ used by crime writers to create an atmosphere, just a normal laugh with no hidden agenda. I wasn’t going to go down that road, for several reasons: I’ve known Andrew for ever, he wouldn’t have done it
deliberately, it would cause a rift in an old friendship, it was only one song in a musical that wasn’t one of his blockbusters, and frankly I didn’t mind. The original ‘No Smoke without Fire’ still sounds good. When Andrew stages
Pyrotechny, The Musical
, the song will come into its own.

Like me, Andrew is a big Bobby Vee aficionado, Bobby having performed at various of his functions in the ’90s, but the press jumped the gun rather by announcing that I planned a musical about the early ’60s US heart-throb. They announced that Bobby would play himself in the show, but in reality it had got no further than drawing-board stage, with him and me kicking round a few ideas. The idea was for Bobby to have been the pivotal narrator with a young singer portraying him from the day he stepped in for Buddy Holly and through the ’60s. Back when I bought his records, I never imagined I’d get to meet him, let alone to be able to call him a friend and that he would call me whenever he was in the UK. A lovely man, with a lovely family, though sadly he’s not in the best of health now.

I’d also been a fan of Ricky Nelson’s records. He sang in a range that was achievable by chaps such as myself, and had dozens of hits and a great image. He’d also been a child star on his parents’ long-running TV and radio series across the States,
Ozzie and Harriet.
Tragically, he died in a plane crash on New Year’s Eve 1985 when only in his mid-forties. The news came through on the car radio while driving back from a party with Janet Ellis, whom I went out with a few times. I was so shocked that I cried. She was probably shocked that I did. Later I began work on an idea for a stage musical on Ricky, using the title
Teenage Idol.
By 1995
The Buddy Holly Story
was in its seventh year as a stage musical and had grossed an incredible £100 million worldwide, so there was clearly a market for shows like this. While the Bobby Vee one hadn’t worked out, perhaps this one would. While I was working on it, Andrew Lloyd Webber, also a Ricky Nelson fan, said that he’d like to stage it at Sydmonton. Again, we had a lot of press coverage up front, including a double-page spread in the
Daily 
Express
, where I gave my reasons for choosing this subject: ‘The story has it all … fame, success, glamour and tragedy. It’s a gripping subject. In America, by the end of the ’50s, not only young people adored him but their parents did as well.’ It seemed reasonable. He was a pop star at seventeen and sold millions of records.

I took a gamble on the unknown Richard Sharp, then just twenty, in the lead role and Tony Rivers and his boys as the backing vocalists, also singing radio jingles. We rehearsed in Chelsea with director Nicola Treherne and got up to speed before heading off to Andrew’s for the show. It was a busy weekend for me as the Sunday morning service at the local church (as part of the Sydmonton Festival) featured the choir performing my setting of Rupert Brooke’s war sonnets.
Ricky Nelson – Teenage Idol
was well received by an audience that included Charlie and Martin Sheen, George Martin and Don Black. I’m sure it was daunting for Richard, who’d never acted before in his life, but he pulled it off and the piece was a success. As I’ve never been certain what to do with it after Sydmonton, that remains its only performance.

One musical play that didn’t even make it to the stage was my adaptation of Alan Sillitoe’s classic
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
. I used music from the period and met with Alan, who liked the adaptation and gave me permission to go ahead. That was good news. More good news was that Bill Kenwright called, wanting to stage it. But back comes that old phrase, ‘life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans’, and somehow it slipped away, despite me renewing the rights to stage it for several years. I did write a title song, with Chris Eaton, but despite being a strong song, that too remains on the shelf, hopefully waiting for its moment to shine. I’m convinced that ‘shelf’ will give way one day under the not inconsiderable strain.

I mentioned the Rupert Brooke sonnets as in 1996 there was action on the Rupert Brooke front. Imagining I’d need music for the film, I had set Brooke’s five war sonnets to music. I’d written a film script and there was a heck of a lot of interest from production companies, with letters flying backwards and forwards and meetings galore.
Pleased with the result after a few months, I’d asked Ralph to work on the arrangements, which turned out splendidly. From there we played my demos to the head of music at King’s College, Cambridge, Stephen Cleobury, who agreed that the King’s College Choir could record them. I organised the recordings to be filmed, fondly imagining the choir to be dressed accordingly, looking angelic and with candles guttering to throw wild and fanciful shapes across the fan vaulting of King’s College Chapel. I hadn’t reckoned on casual dress – rock T-shirts, jeans and trainers – but we filmed everything anyway, including Stephen ticking off one lad whose shirt was hanging out. The cameras were still rolling as he reluctantly and sullenly made his way outside, only to re-appear with it tucked in in a token manner. Henry VI had first instigated a choir here in the mid-1400s a few years after what was initially known as Our College Royal of Nicholas opened its doors to scholars, and here we were more than 500 years later with microphones suspended at every angle. What would Henry (incidentally our youngest-ever king, at nine months) have made of that? Stephen Cleobury made me realise how lucky I was to be having my songs recorded here when he reminded me how much of the music sung in the chapel was by greats that had long departed such as Mozart, Bach, Tallis and Taverner. The Eton College Choir later performed the Brooke settings from the chapel for a BBC World Service programme, in which I was one of the readers of the secular and non-secular narrative linking the pieces.

In the mid ’90s, Simon May had been commissioned to write the music for a new comedy film,
Caught in the Act
, and he asked me to come up with some ideas for a title track. I needed no second bidding and soon knocked up a demo that included a basic melody for Simon as a starting point. It failed to start, although listening to it years later, it’s pretty damn good. As happens with films, the idea for a title was sidelined and instead there would be an opening operatic dream sequence. Fine, getting onside with a soupçon of W. S. Gilbert wouldn’t be a problem. What was a problem, though, was this. They
wanted the lyrics in Italian. ‘Sorry,’ said Simon, ‘but that’s what they want. I’ll have to find an Italian lyricist.’

‘I can do it.’

‘I didn’t know you could speak Italian.’

‘You give me the tune and I’ll give you a great Italian lyric.’

‘If you’re sure.’