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[0:00] Tim Rice: Hello, this is Tim Rice, and this is podcast number 38 in my series Get Onto My Cloud. Way back in late 1963, when I was younger, so much younger than today, I began work, my first proper employment since leaving school with a firm of London solicitors for the princely sum of five pounds a week. I had the vague idea that someday I would become a lawyer, despite the fact that I had no real interest in the law, to be emphasized in due course by my failing my legal exams three times. My principal obsession in life back then was the music scene, the popular music scene at that very moment, beginning to be shaken to the core by a beat group that most people had never heard of a few months before, the Beatles.

While plodding extremely slowly along a path to legal humiliation, I also made some tentative steps towards getting involved with the rock and pop scene, which had clearly begun to swing without me. One of the instigators of that swinging scene was the extremely popular television show Ready Steady Go. Every Friday night on ITV, one of the only two channels in operation, the youth of Britain tuned in to see live performances in black and white from the hottest or potentially hottest recording stars of the day. Even at the time, many realized that 1963 was a watershed year in British popular music. As ever since the Beatles hit the top ten in February with Please Please Me, a seemingly never-ending supply of beat groups, originally mainly from Liverpool and up north, swept many long-established names from the British charts, including virtually every leading American idol.

Bye bye to all those clean-cut Johnnies and Bobbies. Even Elvis struggled. In quick succession, the Beatles were followed into the charts and into the hearts of millions of teenagers by Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, the Hollies, the Foremost, the Searchers, Freddie and the Dreamers, the Dave Clark Five, with plenty more in the wings, such as a promising London quintet called The Rolling Stones. None of these acts made even the slightest dent in the American charts in 1963, which may seem strange now, but back then even the British music business did not expect record success in the US for UK acts. There was the odd freak British instrumental hit such as Acker Bilk's Stranger on the Shore, The Tornado's Telstar or Kenny Ball's Midnight in Moscow that made it there.

But even we Brits who bought the British hits in 1963 didn't think it strange that the Americans didn't even want to release the Beatles singles. Of course, all that changed dramatically and forever, almost overnight at the beginning of 1964, when I Wanna Hold Your Hand kicked the door to the US Hot 100 wide open. And that did amaze me and my pals. As a footnote, I should perhaps say that Please Please Me is now not officially considered the first Beatles UK number one, when in all honesty, it should have been, and in fact, quite possibly was. And this probable misinformation is my fault, is my brother Joe's fault, is Paul Gambaccini's fault, and is Mike Read's fault. When the four of us founded the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles in 1976, the first comprehensive analysis of the British charts since their formation in 1952, we switched our information source from the New Musical Express to the trade paper, Record Retailer, in March 1960.

This was because the latter published a top 50, as opposed to the NME's mere top 30. The NME did put Please Please Me at number one in February 1963, but Record Retailer had it peak at number two behind Frank Ifield's Wayward Wind, so we did too. The Guinness Books became known as the Bibles of the Charts, and thus the Beatles' third single, From Me To You, has been officially their first UK number one ever since. This has even affected some Beatles albums. The compilation one, which consisted of all their US and or UK number ones, did not include Please Please Me, our fault. Ironically, it did include Love Me Do, the first ever Beatles British release, which made number one in America in 1964, when belated Beatlemania was at its most insane, but only number 17 in the United Kingdom in 1962.

I occasionally feel mildly guilty that we tweaked a tiny piece of Beatles' history, perhaps unfairly. But the Beatles never complained, nor did Frank Ifield. But I digress, back to Ready Steady Go, the TV program that best captured the start of the Swinging 60s. Every week, the show featured a lookalike spot in which four contestants from the general public mimed to a current hit. I turned up on the Tuesday before the first Friday show of January 1964 with about 60 other would-be Billy J. Kramers to audition for the honour of lip-syncing I'll Keep You Satisfied on Ready Steady Go three days later. After what seemed to me to be a very slapdash procedure, in which all 60 of us jerked around simultaneously in a large room for barely two minutes to the strains of Billy J on a Dansette record player, I made it to the finals.

The four lucky finalists had to be available all day on the Friday for rehearsal. So I therefore had to fake illness on the great day itself, hoping that none of the lawyers in my office were fans of Ready Steady Go. A fairly safe bet. I'll Keep You Satisfied was Liverpudlian Billy J. Kramer's third consecutive hit. All written for him by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Unlike Do You Want to Know a Secret and Bad to Me, both chart toppers, it only got to number four and is now all but forgotten, but not by me, as it marked my television debut.

[6:15] ♪ Musical number: "I'll Keep You Satisfied" — performed by Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas ♪

[8:13] Tim Rice: To this day, every time I hear I'll Keep You Satisfied, I leap to my feet and mime it. Fortunately, it's not on the air as often as his three number ones. My day at the television studios in Holborn was absolutely thrilling. My co-stars included the Ronettes, Dave Berry, Georgie Fame, Chris Sandford of Coronation Street, and the Tony Meehan Combo. Not perhaps the most stellar lineup that excellent program ever signed, but by miles, the closest I'd ever got to the ever more glamorous world of British pop, with which I was ever more obsessed. So being just 19 and worried that he might be right, I had to grab chances like Ready Steady Go pretty sharpish. At the run-through, top DJ and host Keith Fordyce chose me as the winner, emphasizing to my three surly rivals that this would have no bearing whatsoever on the results when it came to the actual show, which of course was going out live.

However, I felt sure that this premature taste of glory doomed me to failure in the real final. And sure enough, Chris Sandford cruelly ignored my subtle interpretation of Mr. Kramer's idiosyncrasies. In recent years, many vintage episodes of Ready Steady Go have been viewable online, but never my show. And I fear it must have been wiped, which is a tragedy, if only because the Ronettes were sensational. They performed their latest release, as good as their first Be My Baby, Baby I Love You.

[9:37] ♪ Musical number: "Baby, I Love You" — performed by The Ronettes ♪

[12:21] Tim Rice: The three girls from New York were quite simply the most exotic ladies I'd ever seen. I spoke to them briefly and got their autographs since lost. The day after the show, I wrote Ronnie, Nedra, and Estelle a letter, inviting them to dinner any night they wanted during their tour of the UK. Amazing to relate, they wrote back, but regretted that they simply did not have any spare time. It was a bitter pill to swallow when I saw pictures of them in the New Musical Express out on the town with the Rolling Stones. Incidentally, one other person I did meet for three seconds at Ready Steady Go was Andrew Lou Goldham, then manager of the Stones. The next day I sent him a tape of a couple of songs I'd written, but I never heard back.

In 1994, he called me out of the blue about a book idea. I immediately asked him whether he liked the tape I'd sent him 30 years before. He asked me if he could have another two weeks to consider. However, in the end, I did get back together with Ronnie. In the early 90s, I translated the hit French musical Starmania into English, which became the album Tycoon, featuring a number of distinguished rock and pop singers, including the by now legendary Ronnie Spector. Her song was entitled Farewell to a Sex Symbol, and I spent a couple of days in a New York recording studio working with her. She was a charming woman, voice still thrilling, who had had a few tough times but come through them with strength and humor intact.

Strange to relate, she had no recollection of my 1964 fan letter, but she did remember seeing Mick Jagger and Brian Jones back then. I've seen her autobiographical concert in more recent times, and it's a powerful and emotional show. Starmania or Starmenia is one of the all-time most successful French musicals in France, a country not known for its appreciation of contemporary musical theatre. Starmania, a true rock opera, has in many respects been more successful and influential than Les Miserables and any of the biggest British and American musicals in France. Outside of France and French speaking Canada, zéro. Starmania was launched as an album in 1978 by its creators Michel Berger and Luc Plamondon before any stage production.

That followed in 1979 in Paris, and like the album that preceded it, the show was a huge success in France. In 1988, I was invited to see the show in Paris during one of its many revivals, in fact, it had hardly ever been away, with a view to translating the work and Luc Plamondon's lyrics into English. I don't think I was the first to have been invited to do so. I loved the show, which was a dystopian glimpse into the future, set in the year 2000, which even in 1988 seemed quite a way away. The story was insanely intriguing. The music and the lyrics were very strong. My A-level French enabled me to get the drift of the plot, but I must confess that even after studying the story and words in great detail over the succeeding months, it looked to me like a tough sell in foreign markets.

Nonetheless, I really liked the work, and as I was going through a quiet period workwise, an extremely quiet period, I happily agreed to tackle the translation, or rather, adaptation. As I recalled in episode six of this series of podcasts, Michel Berger assembled a very strong lineup of recording stars, including Cindy Lauper, Tom Jones, Mink DeVille, Nina Hagen, Kevin Robinson, Celine Dion, Kim Cannes, and Peter Kingsbury to feature on the UK album, and I therefore became confident that Starmania in both record and stage form would be a big hit in the UK. And with all these big names, why not America too? Well, it wasn't. But I still love the record we made, although the only major success it enjoyed in English was in France.

Cindy Lauper's version of one of the songs The World is Stone did make number 12 in Britain in 1992. But three English language tracks made number one in France, as did the English language album. So the album was not a total turkey, un dandon worldwide. I played three of the English versions in that earlier episode of this podcast, but not the track by Ronnie Spector. The part that Ronnie sang on the album was that of the famous megastar Stella Spotlight, who has taken the momentous decision to retire to quit at the top, having seen which way the terrifying wind is blowing through the divided city of riot-torn, corrupt metropolis. She is ditching her lover and zillionaire businessman turned presidential candidate, sounds familiar, for what she hopes will be a simpler, better life.

We never know whether Stella Spotlight succeeds. Ronnie Spector has, I hope, achieved this. It was an honor and a pleasure to work with her. And as we are still in touch, I hope the opportunity arises again. Here she is, with her song from Starmania, aka Tycoon, Farewell to a Sex Symbol.

[13:32] ♪ Musical number: "Farewell to a Sex Symbol" — performed by Ronnie Spector ♪

[23:15] Tim Rice: That was Get Onto My Cloud episode thirty-eight, written and introduced by me, Tim Rice, and produced by Peter Hawks in England.