Socrates Swings and thought I needed help, or perhaps because we had found something in common re La Promenade des Anglais in Nice, in the spring of 1963 he decided to send me part-time to a specialist music college in the school holidays. The “college” actually was a place that taught musically illiterate songwriters how to put their efforts on paper. It was run by a guy who, it transpired, Dad had known in student days called Eric Gilder and Dad thought I’d pick up a few practical tips. Indeed Mr Gilder did show me a rather nifty key change trick which I occasionally still use. It makes a change from the usual half-step upwards. The most valuable thing Gilder taught me was how to prepare the piano score of a musical. The guinea pig was a show I had started based upon one of the worst ideas ever conceived for the stage short of a musical about the humanitarian work of Genghis Khan. It was called Westonia! and was a sort of send-up of the Ruritanian concoctions much beloved by Ivor Novello. Nearly 60 years later my embarrassment is such that nobody – not even my dearest or closest – knows where I have hidden the score.
Westonia! came about because I was desperate. Robin Barrow was now university bound and there were no other budding lyricists lurking in the Westminster cloisters. The meteoric rise of the Fab Four had sent my contemporaries’ interest in musicals plummeting from zero to minus ratings. The only person I could find to write lyrics to my juvenilia was a brassy Australian ex-actress friend of my aunt’s called Joan Colmore. Thus Westonia! was born.
Thanks to Mr Gilder, the score of this horror was presented in a rather professional way. So when I sent it to the top West End producer Harold Fielding, accompanied by a letter stressing I was fourteen, it got noticed. The producer of Half a Sixpence and Ziegfeld let it be known that he thought the music was promising. Somehow word spread enough for a couple of agents to enquire of Dad whether I needed representing. Naturally I thought a West End opening was imminent and my skiving off school to meet publishers and the like reached fever pitch.
Eventually I got a sweet letter from Harold Fielding saying that I should press on with the music but in no way was Westonia! headed for the West End any time soon. Along the way I had a short stint represented by a top agency the Noel Gay Organisation, who promptly dropped me once Fielding put me back in my box. I came down to earth with a mega bump. Musicals, I decided, were dead ducks – especially if top producers couldn’t see the obvious quality of cutting-edge works like Westonia! It was time to be a pop songwriter. But firmly in the way was the inescapable fact that I was stuck in a boarding school that I was less than partial to and the Lill saga dominated home life.
Towards the close of the Easter holidays I was deeply depressed. Mum’s John Lill obsession was making her increasingly moody and erratic. Home was a cauldron of overwrought emotion and jealousy, fuelled increasingly in Dad’s case by alcohol. Another term at boarding school loomed like a grey sledgehammer. My adolescent hormones told me I’d had enough.
One morning I stole some Veganin tablets out of the bathroom cupboard, went to the post office and withdrew my savings – all £7 of them. Then I bought aspirin from two different South Ken chemists and headed for the underground station. In those days the “underground” penetrated as far as Ongar in the then deep Essex countryside. I bought a one-way ticket. When I hit the end of the line I wandered into the town, bought some more aspirin and a bottle of Lucozade and headed for the bus station. I planned to take the first bus, get off somewhere remote and swallow my arsenal of pills behind a convenient hedgerow.
I saw a bus with “Lavenham” on its front. Something told me to take it – the name rang an architectural bell. The ancient bus trundled through the Essex countryside and as we hit Suffolk the sun came out. By the time we arrived at Lavenham an overcast morning had turned into a glorious spring day.
Lavenham! I’d never seen such an unspoilt English village before. But it was the church that did it. All I remember now is sitting inside for what must have been two hours and saying “thank God for Lavenham.” I headed back to the bus stop and London thinking things weren’t so bad after all. But I kept the pills.
It would be elasticating the truth if I claimed that my Westminster days didn’t have plusses. First, Westminster kicked off my burgeoning love of Victorian architecture. One of the College prefects was a guy called John House, who sadly died in 2014, having had a distinguished career as an art curator and becoming Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University. John was the first person to introduce me to the great Victorian architects and, together with my increasingly inseparable friend Gray Watson, I began combing Britain for Victorian churches.
By my second year in College there were few parts of London I didn’t know. My architectural crawls took me to parts of Britain’s cities that I suspect very few of my Westminster contemporaries saw. Most of the finest Victorian churches were built as mission bases from which to scupper Satan’s enticements to the defenceless poor. So I got into some near misses with local youths who did not take kindly to an effeminate boy in a smart school suit clutching poncy architectural guidebooks. As a result of this I discovered I wasn’t totally unathletic. I could run.
By the time I left school I had a pretty fair knowledge of at least a dozen British cities. This was the era of mass demolition of housing deemed uninhabitable, for which read housing of a human scale. It was the 1960s that saw the brutal creation of urban roads that swathed through Britain’s town centres thanks to the new planning mantra that separated pedestrians from God the car. Everywhere there was an orgy of government-inspired destruction that ripped the heart out of Britain’s cities far more effectively than Hitler’s Luftwaffe ever did. Of course Victorian buildings, being considered the runt of all architecture, were top of the list for the wrecker’s ball, theatres being particular targets. I remember lying down in Pall Mall with a group of my aunt’s friends in vain protest at the demolition of London’s gorgeous St James Theatre. The preservation of Britain’s most vulnerable architecture became a lifelong passion.
The other plus was the arguments with Granny. Gray Watson and a group of us College boys salivated over hopping on the underground to Harrington Court where we berated the co-founder of the Christian Communist Party with our ever more right-wing, ludicrously politically incorrect views. She secretly loved it, of course. I began to discover increasing depths to this remarkable woman. She confided about her bohemian open house in Harrow and that her sister Ella’s greasy spoon for truck drivers was called Jock’s Box. Was she beginning to see in me a glimmer of her own son so tragically taken from her when he had barely left school?
However there was one thing she didn’t notice. Harrington Court was becoming so dirty and scruffy that it was becoming embarrassing to ask friends home.
IN THE WINTER OF 1963 my new-found role as ace pop songwriter paid off big time. Or so I thought. A publisher at United Artists Music had sent a fistful of my efforts to an A&R chief at Decca Records called Charles Blackwell. Blackwell was a big cheese who steered top artists like P.J. Proby, the singer who provocatively split his trousers whilst performing in a cinema in Walthamstow to much tabloid shock horror. I witnessed this minor piece of rock history, having sneaked out of school one Saturday night. Unfortunately a photo of Proby, split trousers and audience with me in it (now lost), got into one of the rags but thankfully nobody at school saw it.
Blackwell decided to record one of my songs with a singer called Wes Sands. Wesley (real name Clive Sarstedt) was the brother of pre-Beatles- era singer Eden Kane (Richard Sarstedt) and of Peter Sarstedt who one day was to have a huge hit with “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?,” a song Tim Rice at the time rechristened “Where Do You Go to My Ugly,” but now says he rather likes. Sarstedt, rather than Kane/Sands, was the real family name. The song Blackwell chose was called “Make Believe Love.” To top it all, I had written the lyrics. Modesty and common sense prohibit my reproducing the lyrics here. Suffice it to say I was certain that my career was off and running. I acquired a new agent, a thirtyish very camp publisher called Desmond Elliott. I was invited to the recording session. I could oversee the creation of my first runaway hit!
