a huge manufacturing base not only of the software but the hardware of the music business, plus the world’s most famous recording studio complex at Abbey Road. It is hard to believe that today this once proud company’s initials survive only in the names Sony/ATV/EMI Publishing and Virgin/EMI Records. In 2012 the then owners, venture capitalists Terra Firma, became infamously infirm as the giant turned into a munchkin. After complex shenanigans, Japanese giant Sony acquired the music publishing and the record division was swallowed up by Universal Music, who merged it with the Virgin label.
At almost exactly the same time as Tim started at EMI I got a letter from Magdalen. It got straight to the point. The college bigwigs had heard that I was working on a musical. They wished me luck but hoped I realized that when I returned I was expected to concentrate on my studies. If I wanted I could discuss changing the course I was reading but if I returned they expected me to live up to my exhibitioner status.
Reality had caught up with me big time. I thought about switching from History to Music. My father knew Dr Bernard Rose, the highly regarded director of Magdalen College’s fabled choir. But Dad was hugely against my studying music. He felt that the Oxford course would be far too academic for me. So my only future at Oxford was to return and read history seriously. Even give or take a little bit, realistically I would have to take a three-year break from musical theatre or at least from attempting any professional involvement.
Meantime Tim, nearly four years older than me and understandably ambitious for his own future, was starting a job in the creative department of the world’s top record company. Even if Tim was at the bottom of the ladder, he had his foot in the door. Tim could easily have a hit on his own or with another writer. He might easily lose interest in a younger hopeful whose real interest was theatre, a world far away from chart-obsessed EMI and the white-hot heat of Swinging London. Furthermore I knew full well that Oxford offered nobody who could hold a candle to his lyrics.
Should I go back to Oxford or leave? It was the biggest decision of my life and there was nobody I felt I could turn to for advice. My family would point to two dismal A-level results as my only academic qualifications. I had the odd music grade but no way was I a performer so there was no hope down that alley. The most anyone could say about me was that I wrote tunes, had an oddball love of musicals and a bizarre love of architecture and medieval history. I knew that my family would be appalled if I chucked in the lifeline that Magdalen had offered me.
I took myself away to agonize. What if musicals were on the way out? What if I was no good at them anyway? I knew I was no lyricist. So was it not lunacy to try a career where my music was greatly dependent on the words that went with it and stories that might be lousy? What if the writer of those words, in this case Tim, no longer wanted to work with me? What if that writer didn’t come up with the goods? Most musicals are flops. Why should mine be any different? That is, if I ever got one on.
I went over and over in my head what an Oxford degree would mean for me. I couldn’t imagine a career I’d enjoy where it would do me any good. But my family had no money; they didn’t even own the Harrington Court flat. I would have to make a living somehow, someday. But with or without a degree at what? At least staying at Oxford would stave off a career decision for three years. True I would have to knuckle down and work to get a decent class of degree. But on the flip side of the coin I fretted that I was an exhibitioner who was taking up a college subsidized place that would probably have gone to someone far worthier than I had it not been for Professor McFarlane’s cat. Should I not let that worthier someone have my place?
However, there was the certainty of what a decision to leave would do to the family. Granny Molly would be consumed with anxiety. Aunt Vi and Uncle George would be livid. Mum might just take it on the chin but I couldn’t tell what Dad would make of it. Of all the family I was closest to Molly. I strongly sensed that my increasingly frail Granny would regard my leaving Oxford as an insane, suicidal move. Could it somehow rekindle in her a myriad of associations with the loss of her son Alastair? She cared that much about me. But what if I lost Tim? The thought went round and round in my head and drilled into it like an unmelodic earworm. Finally I made my decision. On July 17, 1966 I wrote to Thomas Boase, Magdalen College’s admission tutor, informing him that I did not want to continue as a History exhibitioner.
I thought my bombshell was received pretty well; a few long faces, a bit of muttering, as far as I was concerned that was about it. I took three school friends to stay at Vi and George’s. They seemed on the sombre side of OK but pretty soon Vi and I were experimenting with olive-oil recipes in her glorious seaview kitchen. It’s only recently that I learned things were not quite as I thought. First my brother Julian remembered that he had never witnessed such a family row as happened after I told Mum and Dad of my decision. Then I discovered among some of Mum’s papers the outline of her autobiography. It seems I was dead right about Granny equating what I was doing with the loss of Alastair. In her view I was throwing my life away and she felt appalled that Dad was doing nothing to stop it. Vi and George were safely out of the way in Italy. It was difficult and costly in 1966 to make international phone calls, you had to book them via the operator, but they made their views patently clear in letters that were kept from me.
Years later, according to Mum, I was staggered to learn that it was Dad who not only defended me but supported my decision. Apparently he strongly argued that in all his experience with students at the Royal and London Colleges of Music he had not come across anyone with such determination to succeed and that it would be completely counter-productive to put roadblocks in my way. With hindsight this is borne out by a conversation that Dad and I had before I took off with my school friends to Italy. First he reiterated that he would not support my trying for the Royal College of Music. I remember his reason, “it would educate the music out of you,” quite a statement from the senior Professor of Composition at the Royal College and the head of the London College of Music to boot.
Secondly he strongly felt that I should take a course in orchestration. The orchestra, he opined, provided the richest palette of colours in music if you knew how to use it. I was thrilled when Dad said he would fix for me to take a part-time course at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. I was fascinated by the tone colours of composers like Britten and how a high romantic like Richard Strauss could take the orchestra to ever more overripe extremes. I remember thinking that learning orchestration is like learning the basics of cooking: just as I knew from Vi how to make a soufflé or a mayonnaise, now I would learn how to make my orchestral ideas a reality. That Guildhall course has stood me in good stead. It is the only academic course I have taken seriously.
MEANTIME TIM WAS SETTLING in at EMI. I suspect he was too busy finding his feet to worry about my decision and I often wonder if he realized just how big a factor he was in my making it. But the fact that he had a toe in the door of the world’s number one record company could open doors for both of us and I was keen to coat-tail. Tim was assigned to the department of one of EMI’s most successful old-time arranger/producers, Norrie Paramor.
Norrie was a supremo of the pre-Beatles old guard. He was the guiding light behind the legendary British pop star Cliff Richard who has the distinction of having a number one hit in five different decades. Norrie was still a very major force in the British record industry even if younger musical Turks had overtaken him. But come mid-1966 Norrie’s star at EMI was again in the ascendancy. This was because the cream of EMI’s top producers had left to form an independent company, disgusted by the low pay and derisory royalties (if any) they got in return for making EMI untold millions. Stars like Beatles guru George Martin had had enough.
This left good old reliable Norrie in pole position. And with artists like Sinatra again pulverizing the action with songs such as “My Way,” the top brass at EMI might have been forgiven for thinking they made the right call in letting go the George Martins of this world. So Tim was in the right place at the right time. I suspect that old-school Norrie Paramor saw in the contemporary pop ears of the very personable Tim Rice a presentable way into a young world that was no more his natural habitat. Furthermore Tim wrote lyrics. It wasn’t long
