having checked out there was an annex with a grand piano and that it served duck “en croute,” a dish whose pastry, Auntie Vi opined, would taste like “clotted greasy bollocks.” Tim remembers that we didn’t do too much writing. I certainly remember scouring every record shop in a damp Christmassy Hereford for our single without much success. I also remember writing a rude note in the Hereford Cathedral visitors’ book cursing the Dean and Chapter for heinously chucking out the superb nineteenth-century chancel screen by Gilbert Scott. Their crass, insensitive stupidity can be gauged in the Victoria & Albert Museum where the screen now lives. Hopefully one day it will be returned.
What we did do was map out the storyline of what was now confirmed as a double album. Overriding everything was that we were telling our story in sound – and sound alone. We had none of the visual elements of theatre and film to fall back on. A cast-iron musical and dramatic structure was the key. In my department, rhythm, orchestral textures, time signatures and melody had to be deployed to keep our listeners’ styluses in the grooves. Crucially important was how to reprise and pace material for dramatic effect. Dialogue had no place on a record, so the music and lyrics had to carry everything.
We did take one major decision in Herefordshire which was an important first step in creating the musical structure. It was where to put the pre-existing single “Superstar.” One thought which we rejected was to use it as a prologue to the album. I suggested that if ever our work was staged it could accompany Jesus’s journey from the place of his trial before Pilate to Golgotha where he was crucified. Thus Judas would become a narrator commenting on a version of the Stations of the Cross. In any event it felt completely right for Tim’s questions to come towards the end of the piece and before Jesus’s ultimate sacrifice.
This decision meant that the big “Superstar” chords had to be the climax of the trial. I had an instinct that whatever I composed for the trial should be condensed and become the overture. Also I figured that the overture had to show off my hugely varied musical forces of synthesizers, orchestra, rock group and choir in two minutes. The overture does this in precisely that order. It is indeed an edited version of the trial with the questioning motif that ends the opera sung by the choir as a prelude to Judas setting out his stall with “Heaven on Their Minds.” Tim comes straight to the point. “My mind is clearer now / [ . . . ] if you strip away the myth from the man / You can see where we all soon will be / Jesus you’ve started to believe / The things they say of you / You really do believe / This talk of God is true” before begging the man who he admires and even loves not to let his followers get so far out of hand that the occupying Romans crush them once and for all.
In truth we were writing a musical radio play. Ultimately this gave us one enormous advantage. Audiences came to know our recording so well that no future director or producer could add musical passages for scene changes or tamper with the construction. The score had become set in stone. There is a famous story regarding my Cats collaborator Trevor Nunn directing Mozart’s Idomeneo at Glyndebourne Opera. During a rehearsal he asked conductor Simon Rattle if he could repeat a section to cover a complicated stage move. Rattle shot back, “This is Mozart not Andrew Lloyd Webber.” Thanks to the record not even Trevor could ask this of Superstar. Actually on second thoughts I am not so sure.
The New Year dawned with young American conscripts still being killed in Vietnam. Back home the troubles in Northern Ireland were festering, although on the mainland we were then still pretty much unaware of them, and there was a divisive General Election looming. But there was little inkling of this that winter. Brian Brolly wanted the double album for release in the fall of 1970. We set ourselves a target to complete the writing by Easter with my target to have the orchestration finished by May. In fact we finished way earlier which was just as well. For there was, as P.G. Wodehouse puts it, a fly in an otherwise unsullied ointment. I fell deeply, passionately, head over heels in love.
11 Love Changes Everything, But . . .
I first met Sarah Hugill at a birthday party thrown by my friend Sally in Christ Church, Oxford, organized for Lottie Gray. I can still remember the date. January 21, 1970. Sarah was just a slip of a 16-year-old schoolgirl but it isn’t hard to explain why her parents had allowed her out for this bash. They had a little something in common with Sally and Lottie’s families.
Sarah’s father Tony had individually won the Croix de Guerre for bluffing a German commander into surrendering an entire French village. He had served in the 30 Assault Unit set up by James Bond author Ian Fleming. Tony wasn’t over-keen on Fleming. He told me that he spent too much time in Whitehall and not with his men on the front line. Worse, when Fleming did get there, he had a habit of polishing off all their best brandy and cigarettes. Nonetheless Tony gets a big name check in Casino Royale and is supposed to be one of the role models for James Bond himself. Tony’s day job was research chemist to the sugar company Tate & Lyle with special responsibilities for the plantations in Jamaica. But when he was appointed head of the FAO (the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation) one of his best friends told me never to take things at face value, although neither Sarah nor I know to this day exactly what this meant. Hence the connection with the parents of the party hostess.
I of course knew none of this when his deliciously open-faced daughter offered to be my secretary. Falling in love with Sarah didn’t take long. I asked her to dinner at the bistro opposite the Michelin building in what London real estate agents poncily now call Brompton Cross. I thought she was ordering ludicrously small, simple things. She didn’t know whether she was supposed to pay her share of the bill. That did it. I had to see her again.
By the end of January I had all the main melodies for our “opera” and Tim’s lyrics were flowing as fast and furious as I was falling for Sarah. My new flat came in very handy. It was only a few hundred yards from Sarah’s school. Since she was supposed to be revising for her summer exams she had loads of free time. So most days she would clock into school and promptly ankle round to me. Fairly soon I gave her a spare key. There are worse things when you’re 21 than a pretty schoolgirl waking you up in the morning. Come March it was time to meet her parents. Thanks to the manners Auntie Vi drilled into me I got on well with my elders and Tony and Fanny Hugill were no exception.
I had dinner at their flat near Kensington High Street. My love of architecture soon had small talk regarding their country home veering towards local churches, thus deflecting possible discussion about the length of my hair. I was invited for a weekend and made a note to wise up on north Wiltshire where their out-of-town pad was located. Over the years I have found that when meeting prospective in-laws it goes down well if you know more about where they live than they do.
LOVE MAY WELL CHANGE everything but in my case it had me writing fast and even more furiously. By mid-February Superstar’s structure was advanced enough for me to break the score down into record sides. My sketches for Side 1 are dated February 21 and the final fourth side dated March 4. Unusual, irregular time signatures are a vital part of Superstar’s construction. They give a propulsive energy to the music and thus to the lyric and the storytelling. There is a December ’69 note that Mary Magdalene’s first song must be in 5/4 time and two months later a big exclamation mark above the 5/4 time signature when it had become “Everything’s Alright.” There’s a double exclamation mark above the 7/4 time signature of the Temple Scene in my notes for Side 2. The biggest note is a reminder to myself about writing a musical radio play with “clarity” scrawled across it and endless reminders about light and shade.
The writing may have sprinted apace but finding our singers was less plain sailing. With a guaranteed record release in the bag, Murray came on board quickly so the key role of Judas was cast. We were anxious to snare a known name as Jesus and Tim pursued Colin Blunstone, the lead singer of the Zombies, whose big hit was “She’s Not There,” written by fellow Zombie, Rod Argent, a fine musician with whom I was to work many times almost a decade later.
