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

[0:01] Tim Rice: Welcome to episode 27 of Get On to My Cloud.

[0:16] Tim Rice: In this episode of Get On to My Cloud, I thought I'd return to my early days of songwriting, which means Andrew Lloyd Webber.

[0:25] Tim Rice: We met in March 1965, and by the end of April had written most of a new musical about Dr. Bernardo entitled The Likes of Us and one or two pop songs, as we were convinced we would be the next Peter and Gordon.

[0:38] Tim Rice: Perhaps I should mention here that Peter Asher and the late Gordon Waller were a vocal duo who enjoyed considerable success in the mid-60s on both sides of the Atlantic.

[0:48] Tim Rice: They were actually at school with Andrew, and in later years we all became very good friends.

[0:53] Tim Rice: I saw Peter recently, just before lockdown, in Los Angeles, and he was in fine form.

[0:59] Tim Rice: His career in the music business, post-Peter and Gordon, as a record producer, artist manager, and record company executive, has been hugely successful.

[1:08] Tim Rice: Gordon first came into my life on a personal level when I was working as assistant to the great record producer Norrie Paramour.

[1:15] Tim Rice: Gordon had a marvellous voice, but sad to say, none of the tracks he cut with Norrie were commercially successful.

[1:22] Tim Rice: Although one track in particular, the Jimmy Webb song Rose Cran's Boulevard, deserved to be.

[1:28] Tim Rice: Gordon had a Presley-like dramatic timbre to his voice, and he proved to be an excellent King Pharaoh in various productions of Joseph in the 70s.

[1:38] Tim Rice: But I digress.

[1:40] Tim Rice: Although writing musicals was still our number one ambition, we were enthusiastically writing one-off songs as well.

[1:46] Tim Rice: Here is the first Lloyd Webber Rice song to be commercially recorded and let loose on an unsuspecting public.

[1:53] Tim Rice: The singer is Ross Hanneman, joint Evening Standard Girl of the Year 1967, and the song is called Down Through Summer.

[2:02] Tim Rice: Evita fans may be familiar with certain sections of the melody.

[2:17] ♪ Musical number: "Down Through Summer" — performed by Ross Hanneman ♪

[5:02] Tim Rice: The first ever Weber Rice song to be inflicted upon British record buyers, who unfortunately didn't buy it.

[5:08] Tim Rice: We also wrote the B side of the single, which was called I'll Give All My Love to South End.

[5:13] Tim Rice: I don't feel I should detain you any further, as far as that number is concerned.

[5:17] Tim Rice: The recordings with Ross came about because I was a very junior worker at EMI Records, which I joined as a management trainee in 1966.

[5:26] Tim Rice: Both Andrew, who was by then studying orchestration at the Guildhall School of Music, and I saw this as an opportunity to meet stars that would be desperate to record our songs.

[5:37] Tim Rice: These proved rather hard to find, but Ross Hanneman gamely gave our stuff a go.

[5:42] Tim Rice: We recorded a second single with her, which did no better than the first, after which she was snapped up both professionally and personally by Mark Wirtz, the creator of Excerpt from a Teenage Opera, a big hit in that summer of love, 1967.

[5:58] Tim Rice: And we lost our entire artist recording roster, understandably, to a much more successful producer and writer.

[6:05] Tim Rice: Norrie Paramour was at that time the most senior record producer or A&R man as they were known back then, artists and repertoire, A&R man at EMI.

[6:14] Tim Rice: But in late 1967, he decided to go out on his own and set up the Norrie Paramour Organization to continue working with artists, both established and new, but under his own umbrella.

[6:26] Tim Rice: He invited me to leave EMI with him as his personal assistant.

[6:29] Tim Rice: This was a terrific break for me and thus indirectly for the Weber Rice writing team.

[6:34] Tim Rice: After all, Norrie was still in charge of records by such major acts as Cliff Richard, The Shadows, Frank Ifield and Sasha Distel.

[6:42] Tim Rice: Plus, he was on the lookout for new talent, which was largely my job to discover.

[6:46] Tim Rice: Surely, now that I had such close contact with major recording artists, one of them would be keen to try our material.

[6:53] Tim Rice: The first mega hit that the Norrie Paramour Organisation produced was Congratulations by Cliff Richard for the Eurovision Song Contest.

[7:00] Tim Rice: It went to number one in early 1968.

[7:03] Tim Rice: Another number one for Norrie later that year was Lily the Pink by the Scaffold, a highly sophisticated and original comedy pop poetry trio consisting of Roger McGough, Paul McCartney's brother, Mike McGear, and John Gorman.

[7:17] Tim Rice: I helped out in a minor way on some of the Lily the Pink sessions, and indeed sang on some of the choruses, but this did not advance our songwriting ambitions, one iota.

[7:28] Tim Rice: We had by this time accepted an invitation to write a piece for a school concert in Hammersmith, which we decided to base on the story of Joseph and his coat of many colours.

[7:36] Tim Rice: But we did not see this immediately as a gateway to theatrical or pop success.

[7:42] Tim Rice: Norrie had some continental stars on his books, including French heartthrob Sasha Distel, and he did record one of our songs in English, which was by no means the worst track on a singularly unsuccessful album.

[7:54] Tim Rice: Then there was Rita Pavoni, a young Italian singer who, by the age of 20, had achieved considerable success beyond the boundaries of her home country where she was a superstar.

[8:05] Tim Rice: After witnessing at first hand the Eurovision success of Cliff in 1968, Andrew and I decided to submit a song for the 1969 Eurovision competition for which Lulu was representing the UK.

[8:18] Tim Rice: The song we submitted was entitled Try It and See.

[8:21] Tim Rice: It never got near the finals, so Lulu never recorded it.

[8:25] Tim Rice: But thanks to Norrie, Rita Pavoni did.

[8:44] ♪ Musical number: "Try It and See" — performed by Rita Pavoni ♪

[10:14] Tim Rice: The more alert listeners to this podcast might have noticed a similarity melodically between Try It and See and King Herod's song in Jesus Christ Superstar.

[10:22] Tim Rice: Indeed, it's the same tune.

[10:24] Tim Rice: Eighteen months later, when we were working on Jesus Christ Superstar and needed a sinister but instantly catchy tune for Herod, we realized that Try It and See, musically, fitted the bill perfectly.

[10:36] Tim Rice: Obviously, not with those words.

[10:38] Tim Rice: As a result, Norrie Paramour's publishing company gained a copyright interest in Superstar.

[10:43] Tim Rice: And one or two early pressings of the album in America wrongly and confusingly implied the song was called Try It and See.

[10:51] Tim Rice: I left Norrie Paramour in May 1969, simultaneously with regrets and with excitement.

[10:58] Tim Rice: The school children's piece we'd written for Colly Court School had been recorded by Norrie's company, although we were allowed to produce the sessions, and although not a huge commercial success, had brought us to the attention of a management company, New Ventures, run by David Land and Sefton Myers.

[11:13] Tim Rice: They made us an offer, which in the end we could not refuse, initially 40 quid a week each, considerably more than I'd ever earned anywhere, and a lot more than Andrew's earnings to date, viz. nil.

[11:24] Tim Rice: We would now be able to devote all our time to writing, knowing that we had a guarantee of three years' wages, even if we did nothing else but go to the pub.

[11:33] Tim Rice: I was very reluctant to leave Norrie, who'd been very good to me and was a vital part of my fledgling career.

[11:39] Tim Rice: But in the end, I decided to throw in my lot with David and Sefton, and of course, with Andrew.

[11:44] Tim Rice: And it turned out to be the right decision.

[11:47] Tim Rice: The first major project we embarked upon was the album of Jesus Christ Superstar, which was the work that really got us going.

[11:54] Tim Rice: First, with the Murray Head single of the song Superstar in late 1969, and then with a double album in late 1970, exactly half a century before the recording of this podcast.

[12:06] Tim Rice: I've already featured one or two tracks from Superstar in previous podcasts, which are all to this day easily available, but as with all recording projects, there were various outtakes and jokey late-night sessions that produced an occasional accidental gem, albeit not suitable for the project, or indeed for anything.

[12:22] Tim Rice: One evening at Olympic Studios, where we recorded Superstar, Andrew produced a very pretty new tune for possible inclusion in whatever project we were working on at the time.

[12:31] Tim Rice: I think it was at the fag end of a Superstar session, although Andrew thinks it dates from 1973, maybe from a session connected with the JCS movie, which was shot that year.

[12:42] Tim Rice: Whenever we wrote a song, or indeed a show together, the tune came first 90% of the time and would be presented to me initially with nonsense lyrics that fitted the melody to help me come up with suitable words that fitted the tune and thus complete the song.

[12:56] Tim Rice: On this occasion, I happened to have a copy of Billboard magazine with me, which included a news item about a legal tiff between Paul McCartney and Robert Stigwood. Robert, among other things, being the producer of Jesus Christ Superstar, both of the show and of the movie, and therefore a friend of ours. I simply sang this news item, which seemed to fit the tune perfectly. I don't think the melody ever appeared anywhere in one of Andrew's shows, certainly not with my lyrics anyway. However, we did keep the demo, which was eventually issued on an Andrew Lloyd Webber compilation album in 2001. With a nod to the Ballad of John and Yoko, we called the item the Ballad of Robert and Peter, Peter being Peter Brown, who featured both in the lyrics of the Beatles, The Ballad of John and Yoko, and in the Billboard news item, as you will now hear.

[13:55] Tim Rice: Paul McCartney has announced he will take all necessary steps to prevent the stage production of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, recently revealed by Robert Stigwood and show creators Tom O'Hogan and Robin Wagner. Paul McCartney's initial statement denied any authorization of the package by him or John. Paul McCartney's allegations have been countered by Peter Brown. He asserted that the rights to all the songs on the album had been purchased by Robert Stigwood from Paul, hope Northern Songs and remember Peter Addid. Paul McCartney's US lawyer, John Eastman of Eastman and Eastman has rejected Peter's statements regarding who owns what and how, and he said to Robert Stigwood, my client Paul McCartney still got the rights. What will happen? Read your Billboard now next week to see who wins the fight. Robert Stigwood might, Paul McCartney might. That was me late at night in the studio nearly half a century ago.

[16:49] Tim Rice: I'm not quite sure who the gent at the end was who shouted his approval in fairly earthy terms, not me, Gov. Over the years we've had literally hundreds of cover versions of the songs from Superstar and quite a few of the entire work. One of the more interesting ones was by the actress and singer Sandra Bernhard, who created a medley of Everything's All Right from Superstar with Manic Depression by Jimi Hendrix, calling her track Manic Superstar. The late guitar genius was almost certainly never aware of JC Superstar as he died in September 1970, a few weeks before the album came out. But I think he would have approved of this intriguing combination of Weber, Rice and Hendrix, as unlikely a trio as they come.

[17:39] ♪ Musical number: "Manic Superstar" — performed by Sandra Bernhard ♪

[20:24] Tim Rice: Jimmy's bassist, Noel Redding did wander once into a session of Superstar by mistake in late 1969, so maybe he mentioned it to his boss. Probably not, though. Finally, for this podcast anyway, the Weber Rice song that was recorded by the King. By 1974, we were fairly well established, with Superstar having done very well in almost every conceivable format. I'd got to know Elvis's music publisher, Freddie Beanstock, well, and Freddie had on several occasions suggested that if we wrote something that he considered suitable for Elvis, he would make sure that the living legend heard it. We wrote a couple of songs. A ballad, It's Easy For You, and a rocker entitled Please Don't Let Lorraine Come Down.

The latter was a Chuck Berry type number about a lady called Lorraine of ill repute living on the floor above. It's Easy For You was aimed to appeal to Elvis as it dealt with marital problems. Freddie got our demos to Elvis, who finally got around to recording It's Easy For You in his studio at Graceland in 1976. The thought that Elvis must have spent at least 15 minutes studying our words and music is still hard to take in. Freddie thought Elvis might also have had a shot at Please Don't Let the Rain Come Down, but it's not yet surfaced, and as virtually everything Elvis ever sung, spoke, or grunted near a tape machine has been issued in the 40 plus years since his death, I feel sure that he never got around to our second effort.

It's Easy For You was eventually issued as the final track on the last album issued in his lifetime, Moody Blue. Almost as soon as we were celebrating its release, we were mourning his death. Who better to close this brief survey of some ancient Andrew and Tim numbers than Elvis?

[22:20] ♪ Musical number ♪

[24:48] Tim Rice: You only have to call me.

[25:01] Tim Rice: You only have to call me.

[25:07] Tim Rice: It's easy for you.

[25:32] Tim Rice: That was episode twenty-seven of Get Onto My Cloud. Written and presented by me, Tim Rice, and produced by Peter Holmes.