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[0:00] Tim Rice: Hello, this is Tim Rice, and welcome to Get Onto My Cloud.

[0:04] Tim Rice: This is episode 25.

[0:17] Tim Rice: In this edition of my podcast, which has just reached a quarter of a century of episodes, I thought I'd feature one or two one-off songs I've written with some of my favourite composers, to wit Graham Gouldman, Vangelis, Richard Kerr, and Florrie Palmer.

[0:33] Tim Rice: I've often found songs that are not part of a larger work harder to write than songs that are part of, say, a stage musical or film.

[0:41] Tim Rice: When writing lyrics that are part of a story, such as The Life of Ava Perron or a wicked lion attempting to murder his nephew, the characters and plot are already in place, or should be, and it's relatively easy to decide what they need to say.

[0:57] Tim Rice: Whether one can make them say it well and entertainingly is of course another matter.

[1:01] Tim Rice: But if I know exactly who's going to sing the lyric, and if I can put myself in their position, that's half the battle, whether writing for an Argentine dictator's wife or for a warthog with wind problems.

[1:13] Tim Rice: Not that I've ever stood on a balcony in Buenos Aires in a dress speaking to thousands, nor have I ever roamed the Serengeti with a dodgy digestive system.

[1:22] Tim Rice: I've only enjoyed one commercial success with a song that had no link to any show or movie, and that was with A Winter's Tale, written with Mike Batt in 1982, sung by David Essex.

[1:35] Tim Rice: Even that was really only a big hit in the UK.

[1:38] Tim Rice: But some of the other one-off efforts I've done with composers are among my favourite compositions.

[1:44] Tim Rice: For example, The Monkey and the Onion with Graham Gouldman.

[1:48] Tim Rice: When I was in Tokyo for the Japanese version of The Lion King, in which Simba, Pumba, and Timon spoke fluent Japanese, I heard a charming Japanese story about a monkey and an onion.

[2:01] Tim Rice: A monkey is given an onion and investigates by peeling it.

[2:05] Tim Rice: Naturally, his tears start to flow, and he's baffled.

[2:09] Tim Rice: Why is he crying?

[2:10] Tim Rice: He peels away more and more layers of the onion, and eventually he stops crying because there is no onion left.

[2:22] Tim Rice: Maybe he should never have investigated in the first place.

[5:58] ♪ Musical number: "The Monkey and the Onion" — performed by Graham Gouldman ♪

[6:00] Tim Rice: In the extremely unlikely event that you don't know who Graham Gouldman is, you'll certainly know many of his superb songs, both with his band 10cc and those which were big international hits for other artists.

[6:12] Tim Rice: His first pop groups in the early 60s never broke big for him as a performer, but as a songwriter for others, he enjoyed a phenomenal run of success, beginning in 1965 with For Your Love, The Yardbirds.

[6:25] Tim Rice: Subsequent biggies included, among many, No Milk Today, Herman's Hermits, and Bus Stop, The Hollies, those two both wonderful three-minute musicals.

[6:35] Tim Rice: And of course, his three number ones with 10cc, notably I'm Not in Love and the irresistible, to me, Dreadlock Holiday, I don't like cricket, I love it.

[6:45] Tim Rice: Dreadlock Holiday, like No Milk Today and Bus Stop, also sounds to me like a compressed version of an entire theatrical evening.

[6:55] Tim Rice: In short, Graham, whether working alone on both words and music or with others, notably fellow 10cc alumnus Eric Stewart, is one of the best English songwriters of the past 50 years.

[7:07] Tim Rice: And I'm very happy to have his name in my CV, thanks to The Monkey and the Onion, which graced a 10cc album back in 1995.

[7:15] Tim Rice: And now a ballad I wrote with the Greek genius Vangelis in 1982.

[7:19] Tim Rice: Vangelis, a year after his Oscar-winning score for Chariots of Fire, wrote the music for a magnificent film directed by Costa-Gavras, and which starred Jack Lemmon as an American searching for his son who had disappeared in the aftermath of the violent 1973 coup in Chile.

[7:36] Tim Rice: The film is called Missing.

[7:38] Tim Rice: It's a gripping and sad story, a drama documentary, and Vangelis's music is an essential part of the drama.

[7:45] Tim Rice: When he played with the music for Missing, I was immediately keen to have a bash at putting words to the beautiful principal theme, even though I soon realized that it was too late to include any words I wrote in the picture, not even over the end credits.

[7:59] Tim Rice: So no hope of an Oscar nomination or a Rotten Tomatoes nomination come to that.

[8:04] Tim Rice: I think I did a reasonable job with Vangelis's great tune.

[8:08] Tim Rice: One of the cover versions it attracted was by Vangelis's fellow Greek artist, Nana Mouskouri.

[8:27] ♪ Musical number: "Missing" — performed by Nana Mouskouri ♪

[12:32] Tim Rice: I've written a couple of other songs with the great Vangelis, but that for me was the best of the three. Maybe I'll inflict the other two upon you in a future Get Onto My Cloud. Stay tuned. One of the most underrated British composers I know is Richard Kerr. If he'd only written "Mandy" for Barry Manilow and plenty of others, and "I'll Never Fall in Love Again" for Dion Warwick and plenty of others, he would be an important chapter in the history of British music conquering America. But he's done so much more than those two standards. He's written a host of other hits over the years. He's also written a couple of songs with me. One was entitled "One of My Best Friends," which Michael Crawford recorded, and another was called "Nevermind," which only Richard himself has recorded as a demo, which no recording artist has yet picked up on. So, "Nevermind" has never even been officially released. But if I were invited to a desert island disc session at which I could only choose eight records of my own stuff, "Nevermind" would make it.

[13:53] Tim Rice: Narrated by Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki. The review in the Sydney Morning Herald began with a four-line poem. Now, all you young people, come listen to me. When you take your vacation down by the Salt Sea, if you wish for the gods and the fates to be kind. Ah, never mind, never mind, never mind. There was no indication in the review who'd actually written these lines, although the reviewer, Doug Anderson, referred to them as another gem from the atomic Cole Porter. Maybe Cole Porter did write them, but I don't think so. The program he reviewed, which you can find on YouTube now, was part of a series on the human race's detrimental effect on the environment. So it was in some respects way ahead of its time.

I was fascinated by the four lines, and subsequent attempts in the past 31 years to find out who actually wrote them have all failed. I even included them in a poetry anthology as some of my favorite lines, and still nobody emerged to claim authorship or copyright. What I did do, however, was to write some more verses in the same format and mood and ask Richard to set it to music. I think I was intrigued by the poet realizing that nobody would take much notice of his words. So my lyric continued in the rather inconclusive, inconsistent vein. Be that as it may, when Richard's marvellous singing voice got to grips with it, I was very happy. There again, nobody else has ever recorded it.

[15:42] ♪ Musical number: "Nevermind" — performed by Richard Kerr ♪

[19:38] Tim Rice: Maybe I should stick to writing long sagas as opposed to one-off efforts, but I'm still happy to collaborate with composers I like and admire on briefer efforts. I've just done a couple of songs with Gary Barlow, which may or may not see the light of day in the next few months. Talking of long sagas, I'll be back to "Chess" in Get Onto My Cloud 26. I'll finish episode 25 with a number I wrote with Florrie Palmer, a fine British singer-songwriter and also novelist who wrote Sheena Easton's massive hit "My Baby Takes the Morning Train." Our song was called "The Last One to Leave," sung here by Elaine Paige.

[20:11] ♪ Musical number: "The Last One to Leave" — performed by Elaine Paige ♪

[23:12] Tim Rice: That was Get Onto My Cloud, episode twenty-five, written and introduced by me, Tim Rice, and produced by Peter Hobbes.