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[0:00] Tim Rice: Hello, this is Tim Rice, and this is episode sixty-four of my podcast Get On to My Cloud.

[0:16] Tim Rice: Nineteen Fifty Five, the final year when non rock and roll held sway on the pop charts. But still a year that produced some of the greatest all-time standards.

[1:50] Tim Rice: I've hungered for your touch for longs by so small and time can do so much for you still I need your love I need your love speed your love to me that was Unchained Melody, beyond doubt one of the most popular, successful, and recorded songs of all time, despite the apparent handicap of its title not being mentioned in the song, and featuring first time out in only a mildly successful prison-themed movie, Unchained.

[3:15] Tim Rice: There were five major hit versions in the American charts alone in 1955, with Les, his orchestra and chorus getting to number two, just inching ahead of Al Hibbler, Roy Hamilton, June Valley, and Les Baxter had to be content with number 10.

[3:38] Tim Rice: Writers Alex North, Music and High Zarat, lyrics, were eventually honored by literally hundreds of other covers to appear, most dramatically by the Righteous Brothers, or rather Bobby Hatfield of the Righteous Brothers in 1965, and again in 1990. And in 1955, it was one of the first songs I heard on American radio in Japan.

[4:04] Tim Rice: In January 1955, none of the three Rice children, me, my brothers Joe and Andy, had set foot outside England, not even in Scotland or Wales. Family holidays had only extended as far as South Sea, Exmouth, or Yarmouth, one summer to Cornwall, mainly summers to Auntie Gertie and Uncle Arthur in St. Leonard's.

[4:26] Tim Rice: Of course, foreign travel was much, much rarer in 1955 than it is today. Even a trip to France was never a serious consideration for most British middle class holidays, and a jaunt to Disneyland, which opened in 1955, or even to New York, an impossible dream, and millions of British tourists in shell suits, an impossible nightmare.

[4:47] Tim Rice: My father Hugh had worked for the de Havilland Aircraft Company for nearly 10 years, having left the Army shortly after the end of the war. He had risen to the role of Far East representative, which had meant several long distance business trips, which in those days meant rarely less than two months away from home.

[5:05] Tim Rice: Not only because aeroplanes were very much slower than they are today, neither were they capable of journeys much longer than a couple of time zones. The jet age was still having teething troubles, and sad to say, De Havilland had been seriously involved with these after two fatal accidents involving their Comet Airliner.

[5:24] Tim Rice: The Japanese and other Far Eastern buyers were naturally reluctant to fulfill their orders, and Hugh was a key De Havilland player in the quest to renew their confidence in the Comet and other aeroplanes. He would be in the Far East for at least six months this time, and he applied for permission to take his young family with him.

[5:44] Tim Rice: This was granted, and so my first ever overseas trip began on a boat, a German liner named Bayernstein, leaving Southampton Water in January 1955. We were to be away from home for nine months, living in Japan, still occupied by American forces.

[6:03] Tim Rice: The Voyage Out could have made a gripping podcast on its own, with stops in Genoa, Port Said, Aden, Colombo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Manila, and finally Yokohama. Maybe around episode 88 of Get On to My Cloud.

[6:17] Tim Rice: Anyway, after six weeks at sea, we arrived in Japan. The family home provided for us was in the Shibuya district of Tokyo. The house was an interesting amalgam of Western and Japanese, with our staff of three Japanese ladies installed in an oriental wing, all paper walls and rush matting.

[6:34] Tim Rice: The three women wore only traditional Japanese kimonos, and tended to every need of the British family in the traditionally European half of the house, furnished very much as our house was back in England. One item in Tokyo that we never possessed back home was a piano, at which I spent hours bashing out one fingered versions of the songs I'd learnt at school.

[6:55] Tim Rice: I had no clue about chords or keys, technique or rhythm, and had always been considered a worthy inheritor of the Rice's total lack of musical ability. But these fumblings indicated that I might not be totally tone deaf. A momentous decision was therefore taken to enroll me for piano lessons with a French lady down the road, if only to lessen the agony my stints at the piano must have given my parents.

[7:20] Tim Rice: In 1955, Japan was still occupied by US forces, and one of the centers of American social activity in Tokyo was the American Club, a complex that included a massive swimming pool and a wondrous, unheard-of distraction, a ten-pin bowling alley.

[7:37] Tim Rice: American allies seemed to qualify for membership too, and we Brits spent many long days sampling and loving our first experience of Americana. US comic books were a special treat, unlike any British children's comic, and the slogan we absorbed on opening every copy, Dell Comics Are Good Comics is our only credo and constant goal, had my total commercial and emotional support.

[8:00] Tim Rice: American characters who never impinged upon British consciousness, such as Little Lulu, Howdy Doody, and Casper the Friendly Ghost, not to mention Blondie and Dagwood and the entire host of Disney and Warner Brothers heroes became as important to us as Dan Dare and Lord Snooty.

[8:18] Tim Rice: I found that my early knowledge of American children's comic books was a useful string to my bow decades later when I worked at Walt Disney. There were very few references to US childhood icons of whom I'd not heard. Spending two terms at an international school run on American lines taught me a great deal about the United States.

[8:37] Tim Rice: Throw in frequent visits to new school friends at Washington Heights, a microcosm of a middle American town slap in the middle of Tokyo, and it's easy to see how Brother Joe and I probably absorbed more of America than of our host country during our six months in Japan.

[8:54] Tim Rice: Another factor here was my father's subscription to the Saturday Evening Post. This great US news magazine was then in fine fetal and inspired in me a lasting appreciation of the magnificent work of Norman Rockwell, whose art graced many of its covers.

[9:11] Tim Rice: Here's another taste of the American charts of 1955.

[9:15] Tim Rice: Hearts made of stone.

[9:23] Tim Rice: For the love you have for them.

[9:26] Tim Rice: They just won't take.

[10:38] Tim Rice: Yes, hearts of stone.

[10:41] Tim Rice: Well cause Japan.

[10:43] Tim Rice: Do I do the water?

[10:44] Tim Rice: Although you love them.

[10:47] Tim Rice: They'll stop just saying.

[10:50] Tim Rice: You can ask them, please.

[10:52] Tim Rice: Please, please, please break!

[10:55] Tim Rice: And all of your love is there to take one.

[11:01] Tim Rice: But they'll say no, no, no, no, no, no, no, everybody knows.

[11:09] Tim Rice: I thought you knew.

[11:12] Tim Rice: Hearts made of stone.

[11:18] Tim Rice: The Fontaine Sisters and their number one smash, Hearts of Stone, written by Rudy Jackson and Eddie Ray. Six weeks at the top for B, Marge, and Jerry, as big as Banana Rama in their day.

[11:29] Tim Rice: Another song I only got to know because of my Japanese year out. The school we attended in Japan was St. Mary's International. The staff were a bunch of rather aggressive Canadian monks whose order, the brothers of Christian Instruction, clearly regarded corporal punishment as an essential stop en route to heaven.

[11:48] Tim Rice: I was placed in what was then the highest form, the third grade, which matched my age 10, but was way behind my academic status. Subjects that I'd already studied for three years in England, such as Latin, French, algebra, and geometry, were nowhere on the St. Mary's syllabus. Although baseball, which I loved, excessive Catholicism, and American history were.

[12:15] Tim Rice: For me to wade through French irregular verbs and congruent triangles after ours. Eventually, an unspoken truce was called, and my education in the summer of 1955 became merely an extremely comfortable cruise through stuff I'd mastered ages before back home.

[12:32] Tim Rice: Parental consciences were solved by the hope that I was bright enough to catch up when I got home and that my brothers and I were learning far more about the world than we could possibly have done during two more terms of my English school.

[12:44] Tim Rice: They were certainly right on the second count. At St. Mary's, I may not have got myself any closer to a secondary school scholarship, but my view of the world was hugely broadened.

[12:53] Tim Rice: There were maybe 25 or 30 boys in my class, of which the majority were sons of American servicemen, some with Japanese mothers, stationed in Tokyo. There were a couple of fellow Brits and even a Spanish child, but our class was essentially exactly like thousands of third grade classes all over the United States.

[13:11] Tim Rice: To put it mildly, St. Mary's was long on religion. Only about half the pupils were Catholic, but we were all subjected to friendly indoctrination. There was a vague feeling among non-Catholics that we were perhaps not as important to God as the rest, but discrimination only occurred as far as chapel was concerned.

[13:30] Tim Rice: Non-Catholics didn't go, which was fine by me. Every other lesson seemed to be divinity, and at the slightest opportunity, Brother Andrew or Brother Michael would divert the progress of any other subject into a sermon. Most of the boys had rosaries, and Hail Mary's were recited first thing every morning, more often than not between lessons, too. Any student's slight fall from grace was an excuse for a beating and/or prayer. The brother in charge of our form usually found three or four excuses to lay into a boy per day, administering wax with a cane on the bottom or with a ruler on the hands. The latter was far more painful. The victim's colleagues watched with a combination of ghoulish fascination and apprehension as the punishment was delivered.

No child ever seemed particularly disturbed by the experience, though I may have simply been unobservant or insensitive to long-term reactions, and I doubt very much if any parent ever complained. I was only ever beaten once for some wise crack. It was a ludicrous reaction on the part of whichever brother it was to beat me for making the class laugh, but it didn't really hurt, and I enjoyed the brief notoriety. What worried me most was that my parents found out. Today, most victims would have been instructed their parents to instruct a lawyer. In view of the high thrashing count, I must have been rather wet to have only suffered once, but I suspect the monks did not really formulate their sentencing policy to fit the crime.

One poor boy named Gregory Jones seemed to be permanently bending over or holding out his hands, often as a result of others sneaking on him, which struck me as being desperately unfair. The brothers of Christian instruction seemed to encourage racking on your mates, presumably justified, because this gave the sinner a chance to repent that he might not otherwise have had. And yet it seemed to be a happy school. The monks pursued their overall mission to educate with unflagging, if not unflogging, enthusiasm and generally good humor. I often wonder what happened to my American schoolmates. Did Gregory Jones and the guy next to him, the exotically named Briggs Ekram, go to Vietnam? This possibility only struck me forcibly after watching the film American Graffiti in the early 70s. None of my contemporaries from all the other schools I attended would have faced such a grim assignment.

I hope Gregory and Briggs did not. I suppose I became slightly religious as a result of the brothers' force feeling. I used to recite the occasional Hail Mary out of school and became fascinated with the words of the Lord's Prayer, for language reasons as well as for religious ones. I said my prayers every night, asking God to forgive me and bless all my family and friends, but I was pretty low-key about it. My parents had never been regular churchgoers, and even at ten, I reckoned they wouldn't go wild about a son who had seen the light. On top of that, I wasn't really converted, more intrigued, keeping all options open. But my interest in Bible stories and the language of Christianity never waned, greatly to my good fortune and benefit some twelve years later.

But of all the influences that I first absorbed in 1955, that of American pop music became the most significant. Before living in Japan, my interest in the hits of the day was pretty half-hearted. Sometimes a hugely popular song such as Doggy in the Window or Happy Wanderer sunk in, but I had no awareness of the record charts, or rather the hit parade. Not that many other people in Britain had. Paris Prado and Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White, an inspiration for many future numbers, including on This Night of a Thousand Stars in Evita. Another U.S. chart topper, while I tuned in. The music on US Forces Radio in Tokyo was all good. I'd never heard of any of the artists or songs, and indeed, looking back, I would not say the last pre-rock and roll year was a particularly distinguished one for music.

Nonetheless, every record I heard was infinitely more appealing than the soporific stuff served up sporadically on the BBC. And it was linked by an excited and exciting voice. I soon discovered to be that of a disc jockey, in turn, leading me to the revelation that gramophone records could be known as discs or even platters. Best of all, the records were arranged in a new order each week, which was right up a statistic freak's alley. I was hooked after just one top 20 rundown on the triple whammy of radio, pop records, and the charts. The three biggest hits of our months in Japan were Unchained Melody, Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White, and Rock Around the Clock. Only the last in any way, a clue to the music revolution around the corner.

But all three, together with the many other hits of the day, a whole new treasure trove, a whole new source of entertainment in a young boy's life. Of course, besides our American diversions, we saw a good deal of the real Japan. We picked up a smattering of the language, my parents actually took a course, and were able to make ourselves understood just a little in shops and on the streets. We thought in yen, not shillings. We were forever purchasing goldfish at the nearest Shibuya department store, which I think was our intention, not because the Japanese for goldfish sounds rather like the Japanese for hello. We played in Meiji Park and flew paper carp on Boys' Day. We were often followed around in the street by crowds of schoolchildren, giggling at the strange gaijin, foreigners, inquisitive and never threatening.

We learnt to play Young Ken Pon, Scissors Paper Stone. And my brother Joe and I still settled the odd dispute this way. We went on a family holiday to Lake Chuzenji, then a two-hour drive out of Tokyo into the mountains, where we spent a week on the lakeside in a fairly primitive house, home to some extremely weird insects, where we had the biggest of several earth tremors we experienced during the summer. Shamefully, the dreary younger generation of Rices made no attempt whatsoever to contemplate trying Japanese food. In early September, after what had seemed like an endless summer, we began the trek home. We were to go by plane. I was delighted by this prospect, having been thrilled by my first flight from our backyard, the De Havilland runway, to an air show in Kent in a De Havilland Dove two years before.

Our return from Japan was scheduled to take the best part of a month. My father had various meetings in different Asian cities on the way home, and consequently, we were able to add several new countries to our already impressive list of places visited: Burma, India, Thailand, Pakistan. I tended to judge each place by the quality of its swimming pools, but as had been the case during the whole fantastic nine months, I was just about old and aware enough to appreciate what I was going through. I arrived home, dying to see Granny and the dog. I trust in that order, not remotely sharing my parents' concern whether their two elder sons, particularly me, had lost too much educational ground. For no reason that I can explain, the story made a big impact upon me.

One, two, three o'clock, four o'clock, rock. Five, six, seven o'clock, eight o'clock, rock. Nine, ten, eleven o'clock, twelve o'clock, rock. We're going to rock. Around the clock tonight, what's up? Join me. We're going to rock and gonna rock around the clock tonight. When the chimes ring five, six and seven, we'll be right in seventh and we're gonna rock around the clock tonight. We're gonna rock rock rock till broad daylight, we're gonna rock on a rock around the clock tonight. Well it's eight, nine, ten, eleven two, how we go and strong and so are you we're gonna rock around the clock tonight, we're gonna rock rock rock till the road daylight, we're gonna rock on a rock around the clock tonight.

When the clock strikes twelve, we'll pull off and start a rock and around the clock again. We're gonna rock around the clock tonight. We're gonna rock, rock, rock till broad daylight, we're gonna rock, gonna rock around the clock tonight. By the way, the comet eventually flew again in nineteen fifty-five and was reintroduced to commercial service in nineteen fifty-eight. That was episode sixty-four of my podcast, Get Onto My Cloud, written and presented by me, Tim Rice, and produced suavely by Peter Holtz.