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[0:00] Tim Rice: Hello, this is Tim Rice.

[0:01] Tim Rice: Welcome to my podcast, Get Onto My Cloud.

[0:04] Tim Rice: This is episode 15.

[0:07] Tim Rice: Blondel.

[0:17] Tim Rice: This episode of Get Onto My Cloud features my first serious flop.

[0:22] Tim Rice: But I still thoroughly enjoy the show, and above all the work of the composer, the late Stephen Oliver.

[0:28] Tim Rice: The show is called Blondel.

[0:30] Tim Rice: It's a tale set in the 12th century and was introduced on stage by a quartet of monks who acted as narrators throughout the show.

[0:38] Tim Rice: Played by the superb vocal quartet Cantabile, also known as the London Quartet.

[0:45] Tim Rice: Let them explain what the audiences were in for.

[1:03] Tim Rice: And the monarchy served so faithfully King Richard the First.

[1:09] Tim Rice: Richard the Lionheart in French curl.

[1:14] Tim Rice: Was however the name by which he was known at the time.

[1:18] Tim Rice: Because after all, it was 1189, and nobody had heard of Richard the Second.

[1:26] Tim Rice: Let alone Richard the Third.

[1:35] Tim Rice: As the foundations of Plantagenet society are rocked by the gentle twanging of a talented troubadour who became a crusade's most unusual recruit.

[1:52] Tim Rice: Quiver, quiver, quiver in emotion.

[1:55] Tim Rice: Through Blondel's desperate five-nation quest with a woman he loves in hearts pursued.

[2:04] Tim Rice: Through anticipation.

[2:12] Tim Rice: As the ear is most ruthless killer stalks the heat.

[2:18] Tim Rice: Stalks the king with intent to execute Benedictus Pepe Benedictus Pepe Benedictum.

[2:32] Tim Rice: Benedict is Benedict.

[2:35] Tim Rice: We shall review to you and only thought.

[2:40] Tim Rice: Our tale of Blondel is new.

[2:43] Tim Rice: You'll understand.

[2:50] Tim Rice: But more often than not, no one in King Richard's court appreciated Blondel.

[2:57] Tim Rice: He, however, knew he'd write.

[3:03] Tim Rice: He was overdue to ride a million-selling Rondo.

[3:08] Tim Rice: I was very lucky at the start of my career in musical theatre, in that after one false start, when Andrew Lloyd Webber and I were just beginning, we had three seriously successful hit musicals on the trot.

[3:19] Tim Rice: Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Evita.

[3:24] Tim Rice: For the best part of ten years from 1970, we barely put a foot wrong.

[3:29] Tim Rice: I don't think I was totally complacent, but after that lot, I did begin to think that I knew how to survive in the musical shark pool.

[3:37] Tim Rice: Wrong, as my next foray into the West End was to prove.

[3:42] Tim Rice: After the establishing of Evita in the late 70s, beginning with the studio recording of 1976 and culminating with the Broadway opening in late 1979, which incidentally was slaughtered by the New York critics, but not by the New York public.

[3:56] Tim Rice: The nitty-gritty question was clearly, what next?

[4:00] Tim Rice: Frankly, I didn't really have a clue.

[4:03] Tim Rice: Andrew and I had played around with a deliberately modest idea featuring the love life of a young woman across two continents, in which Elaine Paige would play the lead, probably as a TV show or maybe as a chamber theatrical piece.

[4:16] Tim Rice: Although we did have one meeting with a TV company and wrote about one and a half songs, it never got going and was sunk for good as far as I was concerned when Andrew decided to pursue the idea with Don Black writing the words.

[4:28] Tim Rice: The result of this union was the UK hit album Tell Me on a Sunday featuring Marty Webb.

[4:33] Tim Rice: I did at least get one of my rejected lyrics from this doomed project to Elton John, who wrote a great tune to The Legal Boys, one of the songs, for his Jump Up album, and that brief association could well have been a factor in his agreeing to work with me on The Lion King many years later.

[4:50] Tim Rice: So my expulsion from what became Tell Me on a Sunday was possibly, in the end, a really lucky break for me.

[4:57] Tim Rice: I'm sure I was a bit miffed at the time, but I honestly can't remember.

[5:01] Tim Rice: Andrew's idea for his next big proper musical extravaganza was Cats.

[5:06] Tim Rice: I thought this was a barking idea for a show, if barking is the right adjective for a cat show.

[5:12] Tim Rice: But more relevant to my immediate situation was that this project did not need a lyricist, as the words were already written by the late T.S. Eliot, whose collection of poems, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, set to ALW's music, was the show.

[5:28] Tim Rice: Clearly an insane idea for a musical, I thought.

[5:31] Tim Rice: How wrong can you be?

[5:33] Tim Rice: Anyway, Andrew was set on Cats and there was no role for me, although I briefly, and against my better judgment, agreed at the 11th hour to write a lyric for the one original non-T.S. Eliot song that eventually became Memory with someone else's words.

[5:49] Tim Rice: Nonetheless, I'm still often congratulated by total strangers, usually at airports, for writing it.

[5:55] Tim Rice: Sometimes I accept the praise with tact and gratitude.

[5:58] Tim Rice: Sometimes I go grumpy and say I didn't feel my words for Memory were very good.

[6:03] Tim Rice: In fact, my words were okay, the original ones I wrote, but never quite finished.

[6:08] Tim Rice: That's really a story for another podcast, but for sure not here.

[6:12] Tim Rice: So, while Andrew was in the catering, what should I do next?

[6:16] Tim Rice: And who with?

[6:18] Tim Rice: In 1977, I'd gone to Australia to participate in the Sydney Arts Festival, and one of my fellow performers was the classical composer Stephen Oliver.

[6:28] Tim Rice: He was the most civilized, witty, and amusing man, and we got on very well from day one.

[6:33] Tim Rice: In his all too short life, he wrote as many as 40 operas, as well as being a radio broadcast of wit and wisdom.

[6:40] Tim Rice: John Oliver, the well-known US TV personality stroke comedian, is Stephen's nephew and bears a remarkable physical similarity to him.

[6:49] Tim Rice: Stephen died in 1992.

[6:51] Tim Rice: I had long felt that the story of Blondel, the medieval minstrel who allegedly roamed around Europe searching for the imprisoned king of England and chunks of France, Richard the Lionheart, was the basis for a funny, light-hearted musical, somewhat along the lines of Joseph.

[7:08] Tim Rice: Andrew and I had actually written an oratorio together, post-Joseph, but before Superstar, entitled Come Back Richard, Your Country Needs You, which was centered more around King Richard than Blondel, but basically had as the centerpiece of the work Blondel's Quest to Find His Missing Monarch.

[7:25] Tim Rice: We're talking 12th century Europe here.

[7:28] Tim Rice: Richard, and this is fact, returning from a crusade to the Holy Land, had been locked up by the Duke of Austria, who wanted a hefty ransom for his release.

[7:37] Tim Rice: The story that a court musician, Blondel, found out where the king was by playing his greatest hits outside every castle prison in Europe, is slightly less strongly authenticated.

[7:49] Tim Rice: Come back, Richard, your country needs you got nowhere after one school performance.

[7:53] Tim Rice: The title song is featured in my Get Onto My Cloud podcast episode 7, if you're desperate to hear it.

[8:00] Tim Rice: But I'd still felt the story had legs, but with Blondel the hero rather than Richard.

[8:05] Tim Rice: I kept in touch with Stephen back in England simply because he was such a nice guy.

[8:09] Tim Rice: When Cats reared its furry head, I realized that if I was going to write a show in the early 80s, it was not going to be with ALW.

[8:16] Tim Rice: I asked Stephen, who at the time was working on music for the staging of Nicholas Nickleby for the Royal Shakespeare Company, if he'd be interested in going down market by writing what I hoped would be a popular musical.

[8:28] Tim Rice: He readily agreed, even when I told him my idea was Blondel.

[8:32] Tim Rice: We began working on the show in late 1981, and it eventually premiered at the Theatre Royal Bath in 1983.

[8:40] Tim Rice: The writing was great fun, and I loved Stephen's tuneful yet sophisticated music.

[8:45] Tim Rice: Where the piece fell down was largely my fault.

[8:48] Tim Rice: The basic storyline was more or less clear most of the way through, but there was a lot of complex exposition that was not really vital and slowed things down.

[8:56] Tim Rice: The portrayals of Blondel and his girlfriend Fiona, a totally fictitious creation, were not always sympathetic.

[9:04] Tim Rice: They were arguing in scene one and had made up by scene four, so there was not much of a plausible dramatic arc in their relationship.

[9:11] Tim Rice: The characters that really worked were King Richard and his ghastly brother Prince John.

[9:16] Tim Rice: Richard had gone missing when returning from his crusade, having fought the Middle Eastern despot Saladin, and John was determined to seize the throne.

[9:25] Tim Rice: Here, King Richard, Stephen Tate, in jail in Austria, muses about the good old days of battle with Saladin in his song Saladin Days.

[9:34] Tim Rice: While John, David Burt, in England, reckons his accession to the throne is only a motion away.

[9:42] Tim Rice: In his song, I Just Can't Wait to Be King.

[9:50] Tim Rice: Oh, the shame to be shackled like this.

[9:54] Tim Rice: I'm a lonely chained male.

[9:58] Tim Rice: Not the sort either fault.

[10:03] Tim Rice: Who'd ever end up in jail?

[10:05] Tim Rice: Saladin Days.

[10:09] Tim Rice: Those are the times of this.

[10:14] Tim Rice: Those were the days.

[10:18] Tim Rice: Oh, it's such bliss to rem.

[10:25] Tim Rice: Instant replays.

[10:29] Tim Rice: Saladin Days.

[10:34] Tim Rice: I recall every brilliant campaign, every military ploy, and I dream of the team who made crusading a joy.

[10:49] Tim Rice: Saladin Days, me and my knights, so bold, those were the days.

[11:02] Tim Rice: Oh, but the story should be told.

[11:09] Tim Rice: We were ablaze.

[11:22] Tim Rice: Every day to being more life.

[11:31] Tim Rice: And I must confess, I prepared for the stress and terrain.

[11:43] Tim Rice: I Just Can't Wait to Be King.

[11:47] Tim Rice: My dynasty's ready to swing.

[11:50] Tim Rice: Hand me the orb and the ring.

[11:53] Tim Rice: Bet your life that I'd accept a scepter.

[11:57] Tim Rice: I can't wait to launch ships.

[12:01] Tim Rice: Go walk about on overseas trips.

[12:04] Tim Rice: It brings a smile to my lips to know I made my term in firm.

[12:10] Tim Rice: I'll see my face on a note on a pound note.

[12:15] Tim Rice: I'll date an actress or two.

[12:18] Tim Rice: Be in Who's Who I wish that brother of mine arrogant swine knew that his fatal mistake gave me my break.

[12:32] Tim Rice: Yes, I ran a canvas. I will put a pair for the stores and I dream wearing a crown on the team. Get me down. I just come wait to be kidding me and my night. My dynasty is ready to has me the orb and the ring. Oh but the shilder. Wait a lot. When will they come? Go on the back of overseas trips. If a rings, a smile to my lip, I didn't make my tame. King Richard and Prince John, Stephen Tate and David Burt. And yes, I did reuse the song title, I just can't wait to be king for Simba in The Lion King, but not the rest of the lyric. Unlike composers who can shift tunes around from show to show with gay abandon. It's usually very hard or impossible to transfer a lyric from one show to another. So we words guys should grab the chance to do so whenever possible, even if it's only one line.

Blondel moved from Bath, great reviews, to Manchester, iffy reviews, thence the newly refurbished Old Vic in London, very iffy reviews. The music direction was by John Cameron. It was directed by Peter James, and it starred Paul Nicholas as the title character. Thence to the West End, where it ran for the best part of a year, so no disgrace, not a copper bottom flop, but it never quite captured the imagination of London theatre goers and hasn't had very many revivals since. The producer was Cameron Mackintosh, no less, so I'm afraid I proved that even he was fallible. By mid-1983, I was heavily involved with writing chess with Bjorn Orveus and Benny Anderson, and Stephen had plenty of commitments too.

By the end of the 80s, dear Stephen was ill, and opportunities for the two of us to tweak and maybe improve Blondel faded away. But the show had some great moments, so I'd not given up hope of a reincarnation. For the moment, I still have happy memories of working with Stephen, and I still enjoy the score we wrote together for all its construction faults. There was a country flavoured love song sung by Fiona, Sharon Lee Hill, called Running Back for More, and a spoof patriotic anthem entitled I'm a Monarchist, with which Blondel hoped to impress his king. Then there was a begging for forgiveness love song, sung by Blondel to Fiona, The Least of My Troubles.

[15:46] ♪ Musical number: "The Least of My Troubles" — performed by Paul Nicholas ♪

[19:07] Tim Rice: Paul Nicholas in romantic mood with a tongue twister, in which the superb David Burt as Prince John attempts to convince Blondel that he should be the subject of his songs rather than Richard. No rhyme for Richard. How can anyone seriously write a song about Richard? Nothing rhymes with Richard. Uh think about it. You see, there's no rhyme for Richard. Richard, be suitable. You won't find a rhyme that can fit. Observe how the rhymes flow with some phenomenon. When you write your chansong with joy, a name with no rivals. Well, maybe if all whereupon I must now recommend you improve certain stanzas, my friend John. This isn't a car for all your creations. John's a cynic one on. Oh, the classes of join I'll continue anon.

For I disposers a whole lexicon. So poet, write on. For instance, there's Amazon and Oregon, although I do concede that in 1189 their rhymes you may not need. My growing reputation from here to run a need gives you the chance to be the second venerable feed. There's Mastodon, Automaton, and Don should not be missed. Hoots Mon Peron Pantechnicon can wretch and match this list. I see no use or skeleton, but on the other hand, the use of John with paragon is nothing short of brand. There's silicon and venison and more at your command or tarragon. Or that long sketch one. If you want the dog or shrimp. So be gone to the hole where you write And erase every rich of its singing unison. Let the rest be consigned to a believion And let no simple tongue say, well, what about wrong?

Foreign's really Ronald. And I am shear John. I am nothing but a John. Immaculate John. So poet that time has come to spell it out. Away with subtle hints. Yes, I propose that you compose a tribute to your prince. A rose by any other name. But John would smell a sweet. My time has come prepared to stomach this job. You have a perfect subject. Go ahead, the quill game three. You love this joke! Cut Richard!

[23:50] Tim Rice: Looking back at this 37 years on, I find more to like than to be embarrassed by, and I still harbor hopes of a reworking and extended life for the show. Maybe that's being overoptimistic, but to have given some of these songs a fresh airing on this podcast has been fun. Not every show that works is all brilliant, and not every show that flops is all bad. If only we writers knew which bits were which before we let our epics loose on an unsuspecting public. This was episode 15 of my podcast, Get Onto My Cloud, written and presented by me, Tim Rice, and produced by Peter Hobbs.