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[0:00] Tim Rice: Hello, this is Tim Rice, and this is episode 39 of my podcast Get On to My Cloud.

[0:14] Tim Rice: I've been recording these weekly podcasts, which by and large reminisce about highlights and indeed lowlights of my 50 plus years in records and musical theatre.

[0:24] Tim Rice: I've been recording them for about nine months now.

[0:27] Tim Rice: And it's been interesting and perhaps instructive to note that the podcasts dealing with Chess, the musical I wrote with Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson in 1983 and 1984, attract by some distance the greatest interest and reaction.

[0:44] Tim Rice: So here I go with the sixth podcast dedicated to the early days of Chess, which, as I'm sure all Chess nuts will know, started life as an album and a concert, which played five European capitals in late 1984.

[1:00] Tim Rice: That concert tour, which visited Paris, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Stockholm, and London, featured the stars of the record, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Ambrosian singers, and in humble capacity, the writers of the work themselves.

[1:16] Tim Rice: The album and the concerts could hardly have gone better, and by early 1985, we were riding high on the music charts and had had several approaches from theatrical producers for a stage production.

[1:29] Tim Rice: How we managed to make a cock up of subsequent stage shows could be a topic for half a dozen future podcasts.

[1:29] Tim Rice: A combination of incompetence and sheer bad luck nearly derailed Chess's theatrical life completely.

[1:43] Tim Rice: But nearly 40 years on, the piece is still in huge demand from theatrical companies all over the world.

[1:50] Tim Rice: Post-pandemic, if the world ever returns to normal, there is no piece of mind I would rather see back on the boards than Chess.

[1:59] Tim Rice: I remember shortly after the album had been released, getting a call at home from the great director Peter Hall.

[2:06] Tim Rice: He was very interested in talking about a stage production of Chess.

[2:09] Tim Rice: Yup, the Peter Hall, one of the most distinguished British directors of the 20th century.

[2:16] Tim Rice: To my total shame, I was very offhand with him, as I'd never forgotten a piece he wrote, I think it was for the Observer newspaper, over a decade earlier, entitled something along the lines of The Failure of Jesus Christ Superstar.

[2:32] Tim Rice: Shortly after knocking Jesus Christ Superstar, Peter Hall directed a musical of his own entitled Via Galactica, a sci-fi space travel rock opera of the future, which was a total flop.

[2:45] Tim Rice: It only ran for seven performances on Broadway, one of which I attended.

[2:49] Tim Rice: It was indeed pretty awful, despite a very distinguished creative lineup, including Galt McDermott, who'd written the music for Hair, and Christopher Gore, who was later to become an Oscar-nominated writer for his screenplay of the hit movie Fame.

[3:05] Tim Rice: Christopher Gore is not to be confused with Michael Gore, brother of the It's My Party singer and writer Leslie Gore, who, and this is confusing, talking about Michael now, won an Oscar for the title song in Fame the Movie.

[3:21] Tim Rice: Furthermore, Via Galactica starred the marvellous Broadway leading man Raúl Juliá and the wonderful Irene Cara, who herself became a major star in the movie of Fame.

[3:33] Tim Rice: Via Galactica's set was constructed principally of trampolines, and it was described as a futuristic story of social outcasts living on an asteroid set in the year 2972, then 1,000 years away, now only 951 years away.

[3:52] Tim Rice: Among this gang of social outcasts was Gabriel Finn, who was a space sanitation man who collected trash in a clamshell-shaped garbage ship called The Helen of Troy.

[4:06] Tim Rice: But I digress.

[4:07] Tim Rice: The point is I was rather rude to Sir Peter, and bearing in mind his way senior position to me in the theatrical world, I should not have allowed one ancient article and one flop show to have influenced me so many years later.

[4:21] Tim Rice: I never met the late Peter Hall, but saw several of his outstanding shows in later years, not least his work with Elaine Paige on shows such as Poppy.

[4:31] Tim Rice: I wish that I'd apologized.

[4:33] Tim Rice: Who can say what might have happened had Peter Hall directed the first stage production of Chess.

[4:38] Tim Rice: But for now, let me continue with less guilt to tell a few tales about the Chess recording sessions which took place primarily in Stockholm in 83 and 84.

[4:49] Tim Rice: In previous Get On to My Cloud shows, I've dealt with many of the main arias in the work, such as I Know Him So Well, Anthem, One Night in Bangkok and Where I Want to Be.

[4:59] Tim Rice: I'd now like to chat about one of the most demanding songs in the score, Pity the Child.

[5:05] Tim Rice: It's become known in some musical circles as Pity the Singer, as the vocal range required is, to put it mildly, considerable.

[5:13] Tim Rice: Nonetheless, several fine actors and singers have, to use an expression which is still, I believe, just about in vogue at the time of this podcast, nailed it.

[5:22] Tim Rice: The first man to do so was, of course, Murray Head, and frankly, his version on the album has never been surpassed.

[5:29] Tim Rice: I don't say it hasn't been equaled.

[5:31] Tim Rice: I've witnessed thrilling live performances from the likes of Josh Groban, Adam Pascal, and James Fox to name but three.

[5:39] Tim Rice: But on the album, Murray certainly matched his magnificent performance as Judas on the original Jesus Christ Superstar album fifteen years before.

[5:49] Tim Rice: The Chess storyline clearly needed a scene in which we explain why Freddie Trumper, the American chess player, behaved erratically, neurotically, and often abusively, often against his own interest.

[6:14] Tim Rice: Ending the post-World War II Soviet domination of the sport at the height of the Cold War, all these being factors that inspired my idea for the show in the first place.

[10:14] Tim Rice: This was clearly a brilliant and emotional piece of dramatic music.

[10:18] Tim Rice: Complex but melodic, rock, percussive, and potentially symphonic, and over five minutes long.

[10:25] Tim Rice: I didn't even know for sure what I wanted Freddy to say, but I reckoned this was the music he could use to say it.

[10:31] Tim Rice: It took me a while to get the structure and the tempo of the vocal line into my head, in which task I was helped enormously by Bjorn's guide vocals.

[10:40] Tim Rice: As ever, his dummy lyrics were anything but dummy.

[10:44] Tim Rice: Here he is singing a couple of verses that show me exactly where my words were to lie.

[11:00] Tim Rice: Any my most beloved men, she never let me die.

[11:07] Tim Rice: Take even the days of the safety with the sun glowing red like a crimson.

[11:53] Tim Rice: Where is my God as well as my friend?

[12:00] Tim Rice: I want to conquer, I want to move.

[12:24] Tim Rice: Something inside me must have done by. Some of Bjorn's lyrics sound as if they're part of another show with a lead character named Millie. Taking me through the desert safely, with the sun burning red like a crimson eye, we always touched the sky. How did I ever dare to say goodbye? What a terrible dream. It's intriguing stuff, even though probably written off the cuff. No rhyme intended there. Anyway, I remember finishing what was to be the final version of the lyrics for Pity the Child in Benny's house, just outside Trossa, a small town on the Swedish coast, some forty-five miles from Stockholm. My memory's not quite as clear as it should be of those few days in Trossa, but I recall one night in particular when we were celebrating the completion of something, quite possibly Pity the Child, and did not call it a day until well into the next one.

It barely got dark in Trossa between late spring and early autumn, and it was something like 6 a.m. before I decided to stagger to my room. I woke at four in the afternoon, and there was no sign of life in other parts of the house. Furthermore, the landline of the phone appeared to be disconnected, and these were pre-mobile days. Needing to ring home as I usually did daily on my Scandinavian travels, I began to wait in vain for my colleagues to surface and reconnect the dwelling to the outside world. After a couple of hours of wandering around the beautiful woodlands, amid which Benny's country pad nestled, I noticed that Benny's car was A, open, and B, the key was in the ignition. So I hopped in and set off to downtown Trossa in search of a phone and a sandwich, hoping not to meet a moose en route, well aware that every year in Sweden there was something like six thousand road accidents involving mooses, meese, moose.

The roads were pretty deserted, which made it harder to remind myself to drive on the right, and although I felt totally on the ball, I was not sure a breathalyzer would have brightened my evening. I made it into town, found a cafe, knocked back a small beer, and managed to call home. On the way back, it suddenly dawned on me that I'd no idea whether the car I'd borrowed was even Benny's. Maybe I'd nicked the vehicle belonging to the chap coming to fix the phone. Anyway, I got back without meeting any wildlife, and indeed without immediately meeting Bjorn and Benny, who was still sleeping it off. It was getting dark again by the time they surfaced, and the three of us enjoyed a quiet evening.

The phone had simply fallen off the hook in one of the bedrooms, and the car was Benny's. Murray's first crack at Pity the Child was vocally outstanding. Some of the lyrics in the production were to change before the final version was released, but I think even at this early stage we were aware that this was a particularly powerful and dramatic scene. I created what I felt was a plausible story of Freddie Trumper's childhood and adolescence, a father who'd abandoned the family, and a mother whom Freddie came to despise for looking elsewhere for love and support. I could not draw at all on my personal experience, as I was fortunate enough to enjoy a very happy and conventional British post-war childhood.

I've appreciated that many people over the years have told me that they identified with aspects of the lyric, and they were sometimes surprised when I pointed out that it really wasn't based on anything I'd been through. After all, there are plenty of other examples of my output when I've written, whether well or not, from a point of view or situation I've never myself experienced. So why should Pity the Child be different? This is particularly true for the majority of lyrics I've written for women to sing. And of course, I've never stood on a balcony in Buenos Aires, bedecked with jewels, addressing 50,000 workers, claiming to be the answer to their problems. So, like most other songs I've written, Pity the Child was total fiction, as far as I was concerned.

I had a bit of trouble convincing my own dear mother of this. She never really warmed to the song, but I think she realized she was most certainly not even the slightest inspiration for it. Ironically, there are other moments in Chess, far more than in any other work of mine, which are drawn from my personal experience. Here is Murray Head's first excellent version of Pity the Child.

[17:09] ♪ Musical number: "Pity the Child" — performed by Murray Head ♪

[22:39] Tim Rice: To wind up this chess podcast, which has been fairly Pity the Child heavy, some Benny Ramblings recorded at the same time. Exploring variations on One Night in Bangkok. That was episode thirty-nine of Get On to My Cloud, written and presented by me, Tim Rice, and produced impeccably by Peter Holtz.