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

[0:01] Tim Rice: Welcome to episode 41 of my podcast, Get On to My Cloud.

[0:16] Tim Rice: This episode of Get On to My Cloud is not about my exploits in musical theatre or film or even primarily the record business, but about a venture I made into the world of books in conjunction with my author brother Joe and the well-known broadcasters and writers Paul Gambaccini and Mike Reed.

[0:35] Tim Rice: I refer to the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles, which the four of us founded in the mid-70s.

[0:41] Tim Rice: The publication of the first edition of the work in 1977 led to another nine during the 70s, 80s, and early 90s, plus a host of related titles dealing with the album charts, separate decades of chart history, the stories of all the number ones, and even quiz books.

[1:04] Tim Rice: In short, and there's no way to avoid saying this, it was a staggering success.

[1:09] Tim Rice: However, by the 90s, we, or certainly I, had lost the Anorak-fueled interest we had in the charts, and we flogged the concept back to our publishers, Guinness Superlatives.

[1:20] Tim Rice: The series continued until 2006, under the excellent guiding hand of David Roberts.

[1:26] Tim Rice: But the fact that no book along these lines has appeared since then, or at least none that are aimed at the general public, tends to support the view that the music charts don't really matter to contemporary music followers these days.

[1:40] Tim Rice: Back in the swinging 60s, there was enormous excitement every time a new record made it to the top spot.

[1:46] Tim Rice: A feat which often merited national newspaper coverage.

[1:50] Tim Rice: Record success was then the starting point and a number one, the golden pinnacle for virtually every career in popular music.

[1:58] Tim Rice: Fifty or 60 years later, even a string of number ones passes by gently in the breeze of indifference in a top of the pops less world.

[2:08] Tim Rice: Nonetheless, the official charts company still churns out top 100s every week for both singles and albums, in addition to charts for almost any other category you can imagine.

[2:19] Tim Rice: It must be quite hard not to make the charts these days, even if it's only in the indie vinyl metal Afrobeat crossover charts.

[2:27] Tim Rice: It's probably a good thing that the charts don't have the enormous sway they did, as long as the music itself still makes its mark.

[2:35] Tim Rice: I'm certainly not implying that the standard of the best popular music has declined.

[2:40] Tim Rice: It hasn't.

[2:41] Tim Rice: It can't afford to, because recorded sound now has so many more rivals for the teenage buyer in particular, and that recorded sound is so instantly available, usually for free, that it cannot help but lose some of its exclusive and special appeal, unless it's brilliant.

[3:00] Tim Rice: Anyway, enough of my ill-informed theories about the record business these days.

[3:06] Tim Rice: Like many pop music fans of my generation, the best sellers' record charts, especially the new Musical Express top 30 singles list, were the perfect accompaniment to actually playing the records.

[3:18] Tim Rice: We tended to spend as much time studying and analysing the charts as we did actually listening to the music.

[3:25] Tim Rice: Radio play for the sort of music we liked was so limited that it was quite an achievement, even to have heard everything in the top 30, let alone own selections from it.

[3:35] Tim Rice: To have heard more than half a dozen of the American top 20 was almost impossible.

[3:40] Tim Rice: Despite, or because of this deprivation, many of us would compile lists of hits, and it crossed my mind on more than one occasion that a book that did the same would have a large appeal.

[3:51] Tim Rice: No such tome existed.

[3:53] Tim Rice: If you wanted to find out what they'd been in the charts a year earlier, or how many hits Cliff and the Shadows had had since 1958, it was almost impossible unless you'd kept profuse notes or kept all your old NMEs.

[4:06] Tim Rice: I did both.

[4:12] Tim Rice: Articles to a firm of solicitors in London, and really, without a clue what I wanted to do with my life, I began compiling a detailed history of the pop charts in my bedroom, going back to the time when I first bought the NME and my first pop single, Singing the Blues, a number one for Tommy Steele at the very beginning of 1957.

[5:09] Tim Rice: You got to sing in the blue.

[5:15] Tim Rice: The stars no longer shine.

[5:17] Tim Rice: The dream is gone, I thought it was mine.

[5:21] Tim Rice: There's nothing left for me to do.

[5:26] Tim Rice: Over you nothing more like running away.

[5:33] Tim Rice: Why should I go like and stay without you?

[5:39] Tim Rice: You got to sing in the blues.

[6:00] Tim Rice: I never thought you love me.

[6:05] Tim Rice: What to do this way?

[6:15] Tim Rice: Nothing ain't right without you.

[6:19] Tim Rice: You got to sing the blues.

[6:23] Tim Rice: Moon and stars no longer shine.

[6:27] Tim Rice: The dream is gone, I thought was mine.

[6:30] Tim Rice: There's nothing left for me to do.

[6:33] Tim Rice: But cry over you.

[6:43] Tim Rice: Why should I go?

[6:44] Tim Rice: Cause I couldn't stay without you.

[6:48] Tim Rice: You gotta sing the blues.

[6:53] Tim Rice: The great Sir Tommy Steele and his excellent cover of Guy Mitchell's US original, Singing the Blues.

[7:00] Tim Rice: In the mid-sixties, my mother, Joan, had become quite a successful short story writer.

[7:05] Tim Rice: Her romantic tales were published in various women's magazines.

[7:09] Tim Rice: And she also wrote amusing articles on daily life.

[7:13] Tim Rice: Too often for my liking featuring her teenage offspring.

[7:16] Tim Rice: And these were taken by The Times, Punch Magazine, and even by BBC Woman's Hour.

[7:22] Tim Rice: Thanks to all this, she met a young, up and coming book publisher and literary agent named Desmond Elliott at a literary gathering and mentioned that her son, me, had an idea for a book.

[7:34] Tim Rice: Mr. Elliott graciously agreed to see me.

[7:37] Tim Rice: I arrived at his office in Arlington Street, just off Piccadilly in the heart of London, armed with my lists of everything that had hit the chart since Tommy Steele, which singularly failed to impress him.

[7:48] Tim Rice: As Arlington Books, Desmond Elliott was already making his mark in the publishing world with authors such as Gilly Cooper and Leslie Thomas, and he informed me that if he couldn't sell books about what Mick Jagger ate for breakfast, then he was highly unlikely to be able to sell lists of Mick Jagger's records.

[8:06] Tim Rice: This was a total non sequitur in my view.

[8:09] Tim Rice: Desmond was not alone then in feeling that rock and pop music was not an art form that could actually ever have a serious history.

[8:17] Tim Rice: I knew that many followers of the music of the time would be just as interested, if not more interested, in the facts and figures about performers' work than in flimsy details of their personal lives.

[8:29] Tim Rice: The label and number of a hit record was of far more interest to the average fan than the colour of the bass player's underpants.

[8:37] Tim Rice: Plus, people like lists.

[8:40] Tim Rice: Lists of almost anything sell.

[8:43] Tim Rice: But this didn't wash with Desmond.

[8:45] Tim Rice: He asked me what else I did, and I told him I just had a song I'd written recorded by a rock group, which I happened to have bought with me.

[8:52] Tim Rice: The song for which I wrote both words and music was entitled That's My Story, and the group was called The Night Shift.

[8:59] Tim Rice: It's available on my very first podcast.

[9:02] Tim Rice: Desmond played it and said he didn't like that any more than my book idea.

[9:06] Tim Rice: But he did recommend that I meet a young songwriter he was looking after.

[9:10] Tim Rice: He was named Andrew Lloyd Webber, and that recommendation changed my life.

[9:17] Tim Rice: My work and good fortune with Andrew put my history of the charts book idea onto the back burner for many years, but it remained something I talked about with my brother Joe, and of course, by the end of the 60s, rock music and its related disciplines was clearly an art form that was here to stay.

[9:34] Tim Rice: Our chart book idea received a major boost when a bright young UK-based American journalist and broadcaster named Paul Gambaccini interviewed me and Andrew about Jesus Christ Superstar in 1971 for the British edition of Rolling Stone magazine.

[9:50] Tim Rice: After the interview, Paul and I found we had a mutual fascination with the history of pop, and that we both owned an extremely obscure paperback U.S. chart reference work by a gent named Joel Whitburn.

[10:03] Tim Rice: This volume simply listed all the hit singles that had ever reached the American bestsellers, famously known as the Billboard Hot 100.

[10:12] Tim Rice: Whitburn's book had no pictures, no commentary, no opinions, no artwork, just a magic list.

[10:20] Tim Rice: We were certain that an English equivalent would be a winner, especially if it were dressed up with a decent cover and a few photographs, especially if it did not express any opinions, which would instantly annoy as many readers as they pleased.

[10:34] Tim Rice: Facts were all we proposed to assemble.

[10:38] Tim Rice: It took us some time to get it all together, but eventually we did assemble all the raw material for the research, every pop chart from 1952, and acquired a fourth author, my old chum Mick Reed, by now beginning to move rapidly up the radio ladder, as Mike Reed.

[10:55] Tim Rice: We formed a new company, GurrBooks, G R R R Gambacini Rice Rice Reed, with a growling boxer dog logo and spent more than two years collating the huge amount of information.

[11:08] Tim Rice: In that pre-computer era, everything was entered on cards and extremely large handwritten spreadsheets.

[11:15] Tim Rice: Joe by this time was living and working in Japan, so any contact we made on this or other artistic matters with him in that pre-fax era was usually done by telex.

[11:27] Tim Rice: It was not until late 1975 that we felt able to approach a major publishing company with the idea.

[11:34] Tim Rice: We first went to Michael Joseph, as an old school friend of mine was a big cheese there, having had a big personal success with his discovery of the country diary of an Edwardian lady, a mega seller of that decade.

[11:47] Tim Rice: However, Michael Joseph didn't really get it, and we then went to the outfit we should have gone to in the first place, Guinness Superlatives, the undisputed leader in the field of reference books.

[11:58] Tim Rice: I called them out of the blue and asked to speak to either Norris or Ross McWerter, identical twin founders of the hugely successful imprint launched by the Guinness Book of Records in 1955.

[12:11] Tim Rice: To my surprise, I was put straight through to Norris, who may well have recalled that Jesus Christ Superstar had featured in the Guinness Book of Records for a while as the biggest-selling British LP of all time.

[12:23] Tim Rice: It probably really was the biggest by the end of 1971, though long since surpassed by many others.

[12:30] Tim Rice: Norris expressed immediate and great interest in our idea.

[12:33] Tim Rice: Our delight was dashed only days later with the terrible news of Ross McWerta's murder by the IRA.

[12:40] Tim Rice: It was at least three months before we felt able to recontact Guinness Superlatives, who fortunately told us Norris wanted business as usual, and that our book was definitely still part of their plans.

[12:57] Tim Rice: It proved to be the forerunner of more than 30 best-selling books that we authored during the subsequent 20 years.

[13:04] Tim Rice: We even topped the best-selling book charts on a couple of occasions.

[13:07] Tim Rice: Before we called it a day in 1996, we'd sold around one and a half million books, all but about half a dozen in the UK.

[13:16] Tim Rice: Once the books got going, they became accepted as the Bibles of the British charts.

[13:21] Tim Rice: We were therefore able to host several star-studded gatherings when launching each new edition.

[13:26] Tim Rice: One of the most memorable, including a galaxy of chart names, ranging from 50s bestsellers Dame Vera Lynn, Johnny Ray, Russ Conway and David Whitfield, through to 60s idols such as Cliff and the Shadows, Paul Jones and Dave Dee, 70s icons such as Elton John and Errol Brown, and then comparatively new names onto the scene, such as Bob Geldof and Kate Bush, all gathered together by us.

[13:52] Tim Rice: Kate Bush had recently become the first solo female artist to have written and performed a number one.

[14:08] ♪ Musical number: "Wuthering Heights" — performed by Kate Bush ♪

[15:55] Tim Rice: So maybe for another launch, we took over studio two at Abbey Road, chosen because more number one records had been recorded there than at any other studio, inviting all who'd ever had a number one wherever it was recorded.

[18:34] Tim Rice: Paul McCartney came to that one, as did to my particular delight, Julie Covington, not known to be a social animal, whose wonderful vocals on Don't Cry for Me, Argentina had given me my first taste of the top of the charts for one glorious week.

[18:50] Tim Rice: In America, Joel Whitburn, whose flimsy paperback had proved such an important inspiration to us, has expanded his chart reference book into record research, a veritable empire based in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, that has published over 200 books on American music history as recorded by the best-selling lists that he has traced back to 1890.

[19:15] Tim Rice: Produced, packaged, and illustrated, and thus very heavy to take down from the shelf.

[19:20] Tim Rice: His website will enable you to find out anything that has even had the merest sniff of the Billboard charts, which themselves have been going in one form or another since 1913, although Joel's staggering research goes well back into the 19th century.

[19:37] Tim Rice: In my twilight years, I find learning about and then hearing hits from the first half of the 20th century, the half I don't remember in the flesh, as fascinating as recalling the many, many wonderful records of my youth and middle years.

[19:51] Tim Rice: And I'm clearly not alone.

[19:52] Tim Rice: My spell with Joe, Paul, and Mike as a chronicler of my own era has led me to greater interest in those that came before, even if I've slightly lost track of some of those who followed.

[20:05] Tim Rice: When we had our Abbey Road party for artists who'd made it to number one, we invited one special guest, who was the most successful hit parade star who never once got to the very top spot.

[20:17] Tim Rice: He had more hits than most chart toppers, and he was truly one of the most popular recording stars of his era.

[20:23] Tim Rice: To this day he retains a huge following, and like other well-known Liverpudlian musicians, he is honored with a statue in his hometown.

[20:31] Tim Rice: Having the chance to talk to him at our number one's party in 1982 was one of the highlights of my entire Guinness Books Association.

[20:39] Tim Rice: He was a delightful man and a great talent, who saddened me by telling me at that party that he didn't expect to be around for much longer, which I refused to accept.

[20:50] Tim Rice: But tragically, he was correct.

[20:53] Tim Rice: Here is the unforgettable Billy Fury.

[23:00] ♪ Musical number: "So Near, Yet So Far" — performed by Billy Fury ♪

[23:16] Tim Rice: So that was episode forty-one of my podcast, Get Onto My Cloud. Written and presented by me, Tim Rice, and produced, come to Joe by Peter Hobbes.