by Mike Read
When the media wolves later descended on the fold, they triumphantly declared that the musical closed after one night. Good headline stuff, but a myth: we’d had a week of runs before the press night and audiences were healthy. The cast had a well-deserved day off before the proper opening night, which is when the demons set in. On the opening night itself, our sound man told me that the beautiful and perfect balance had been destroyed by forces unknown. Some head microphones had also been seriously tampered with and others were missing.
My questioning began as calmly as I could muster. The repeated answer to my enquiry as to who had been in the theatre the previous day was ‘No one’. I was paying for the damn place, so that should have been the correct answer. I knew it wasn’t. I’m an easy-going guy, but my face got increasingly closer to the head honcho, who wasn’t unaware of my physical presence either. After five minutes of protestation I eventually pushed the truth out of him. Unbelievably, they’d allowed a twenty-piece Brazilian jazz-rock outfit in behind our backs and wrecked our sound. On top of that, this amateurish theatre only had one, hired-in, machine for processing tickets, meaning that every ticket holder, including celebrities and, crucially, journalists, had to wait for ages in a long, long queue that straggled down the street. Once again, the delightful Merlin Holland had agreed to say a few words before the performance on behalf of his grandfather, but someone from the adjacent hotel made such a long and tedious speech that there was no time for him. The sound on stage and in the auditorium was atrocious and with some of the head microphones not working properly, many of the cast were understandably thrown, despite their professionalism. I spent much of the performance walking the street.
I pulled the show. I had to. The press destroyed it. The TV crews, newspapers and magazines who’d been invisible when I needed the publicity suddenly manifested themselves and showed an unbelievably keen interest in the show. Funny how everybody loves a failure. One of the lines reflected that ‘they adore a persecution, but abhor an absolution’. Oscar would have enjoyed a fine example of life imitating art.
I didn’t shirk the attack. It came from all fronts, with everyone jumping gleefully on the bandwagon. I was happy to justify anything except my stupidity, as Oscar might have said, but didn’t. As well as answering the press, I agreed to be interviewed on several TV shows, including one where a journalist attacked the rhyming couplets. ‘Good enough for Shakespeare,’ I retorted, which brought a gasp of horror that I dared compare myself to the Bard. I wasn’t, I was merely pointing out that many of the greatest and most durable plays in the English language employed rhyming couplets from time to time. Then I had the audacity to liken some of the script to Gilbert and Sullivan. I wasn’t saying that I was as good as G&S, but was simply alluding to an accepted style for which I was now being criticised.
Remember the clairvoyant who announced that one day the musical would be known globally? He was right. I had calls of sympathy from Australia, the United States, South America, South Africa, Spain and all points east and west. The global cuttings laid flat reached floor to ceiling several times over. Bad news travels fast, but smirking, self-satisfied, lead-him-to-the-scaffold news travels at Mach 2 with an upgrade. I got the upgrade. I’d been hoping for the Lew Grade.
Wouldn’t you think that after that I’d leave it alone? I’d capitulate, surrender to the barbarians at the gate and desert the Oscar who’d served me so ill? Nope. Against all odds, there were still believers who knew the piece would work. Peter Kosta, who had worked tirelessly on the production at the Shaw, pushed for the show to do a week off Broadway. His determination paid off, and with him and musical director Michael Reed on board we flew to New York for another crack at it. The York Theatre and the cast were terrific, but it proved tricky to get producers there in what was an icy, snowy March with some biting winds whipping off the Hudson River. I fondly imagined that staging it in the States for a week would mean no UK media attention, but I really don’t learn. They were onto it in a nanosecond, but this time round not quite all the coverage was negative. The Independent called me the Stephen Sondheim du jour, and reckoned that Oscar was ‘monstrously underrated’.
At least it proved there was life after the Shaw Theatre. Unlike Genesis’s Lamb, Oscar wouldn’t lie down on Broadway or anywhere else and continues to periodically twitch and kick. The continued interest means that it will re-appear, sometime, somewhere, probably with the strapline ‘The musical that dare not speak its name’.
A coincidental culinary ménage à quatre occurred during the time we did Oscar in the Big Apple when Tim Rice called me, only to find that we were walking down adjacent streets of the city. Another call revealed that our choreographer friend Anthony Van Laast was also in town, checking on the city’s production of Mamma Mia. With Michael Reed, who’d worked extensively with all three of us, making the fourth corner, we had a rather jolly evening being excessively and deliberately Englishmen in New York. Luckily it was a night off, unlike the night the legendary guitarist Les Paul played just around the corner. It coincided with a major rehearsal and my bitterest regret while there was not getting to see and hear him.
In the late summer of 1991 I’d had a call from Slade, who were in the studio putting down a new track that they thought just might put them back in the top twenty (where they rightfully belonged). They felt that the song, ‘Radio Wall of Sound’, needed a punchy American-style DJ delivery to give it some pace, but it wasn’t really working with any of them doing it, so they asked if I’d pop up to the studio in north London. No problem. They already had a few phrases, I scribbled a few more and after a few playbacks of the track, I was able to push some hard-hitting US-style lines into the gaps. The more I heard Jim Lea’s song, the more I thought it was going to be a monster. It had a great tempo and a seriously catchy chorus, and was a terrific idea overall. The band graciously asked me to appear in the video, which was great fun, with me recording the studio scenes at Broadcasting House. It’s not easy to lip-synch at speed when you’ve forgotten what the hell you babbled about at the original recording session. The video was brilliantly shot and, like the single, laden with atmosphere. I didn’t see how this could fail to put them back in the chart. Their last top twenty hit had been in 1984 with ‘All Join Hands’. ‘Radio Wall of Sound’ did climb to number twenty-one, their highest position for seven years, but I honestly felt that it was going all the way. It remains a radio favourite and re-emerges periodically on greatest-hits albums. Dave Hill later approached me with a view to writing a musical as a vehicle for Slade’s hits, much like We Will Rock You and Mamma Mia, and I worked on an angle for a possible script for a while, but nothing has come to fruition. Dave and I still discuss it from time to time, so who knows? Dave and Don Powell are still out there on the road, playing Slade’s great catalogue of hits and enjoying every minute of it.
During 1992, Peter Powell, encouraged Apollo Leisure to look seriously at two Dickens-based musicals for which I’d written all the songs, A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations. Rather decently, they saw the value in them and we began auditioning for a run at Theatr Clwyd at the end of the year. After spending a heck of a lot of time in the recording studio and finely honing the numbers, I went up for the opening night of A Christmas Carol, or rather, the opening matinee. I was staggered at one point to hear the audience singing along to one of the songs. How could this be? The songs were new. Had I unwittingly plagiarised some classic? To my relief, I discovered I hadn’t. The theatre had rather cleverly sent out four of the songs on a cassette to various local schools, so they could learn the story, hear the music and be encouraged to read Dickens. By the time they came to the show, they were almost word perfect. Smart marketing. Chris Corcoran took the role of Scrooge and expertly played the part to include humour, fear, contrition and pathos. Not all went smoothly for our talented if sometimes volatile director, Christopher G. Sandford, as one of the cast, in a fit of pique over something, sneaked back one night and cut up every single wig with a l
arge pair of scissors. Cue the understudy. I discovered only recently from a member of the cast that another of the team was putting several noses out of joint to such an extent that a few tins of cold custard were wilfully poured into his boots just before he was due on stage. He apparently squelched his way through the whole scene, with the viscous yellow liquid slopping onto the stage and making a rather decent slide for the rest of the cast.
A Christmas Carol later re-appeared for a healthy run at the Theatre Royal, Nottingham with the great Anton Rodgers playing Scrooge. It nearly didn’t happen, though. With a hectic schedule at Capital Radio and busy writing new material and film scripts, I hadn’t had time to get to rehearsals and work through the songs as I would normally have done. When I heard the rough demos that the cast had laid down I went ballistic. Several melodies had been changed by the arranger, with the blessing of our director, who then had the gall to insist on a royalty. I’m sorry, but you can’t simply change someone else’s songs just like that, and then claim part ownership. I was livid. There were long and angry phone calls, but I made damned sure that I got my way. It’s like defending and fighting for your children.
At the end of 1993, Great Expectations also made its debut at Theatr Clwyd. Prior to the opening, and with the musical having been cast, we took all the performers into a studio by Wembley Stadium to record all the songs. They arrived not having heard a single note, so we had to rehearse, routine and record from scratch. It was chaotic and frenetic, but we got everything down. Of course, later, when everyone had bedded in and knew the numbers intimately, they wanted to go back in and do them again, but it was not to be. The album was released in that form. Having forked out a not insubstantial amount of loot for the scenery, Apollo Leisure then decided that the show should go on tour. Great news, except for the fact that this scenery wouldn’t fit the venues. So new scenery was built and more costs incurred. But it was very good, I have to say, even if not quite to the standard of Frank Lloyd Wright. In fact Great Expectations toured twice. On the first tour Darren Day played Pip, with Nyree Dawn Porter and Brian Glover portraying Miss Havisham and Magwitch. Hello! magazine gave us a wonderful double page spread. Nyree said, ‘I consider it an honour.’
For the second tour, Darren and Nyree were back, and Brian was replaced by Colin Baker, making an effortless transition from Dr Who to Magwitch. Colin graciously wrote to me after the run: ‘I would just like to thank you, both for providing such a splendid show for me to lurk and menace in and for turning up to see it from time to time so that we felt that someone out there cared.’ On the last point, certainly, Colin was right. You don’t bring a child into the world, nurture it, educate it and then ignore it. Nor should one with a musical. As in life, show a keen interest and keep touching the tiller imperceptibly. Don’t let the boat hit the bank before you try to correct your course.
For the national tours we re-recorded four of the songs, ‘Great Expectations’, ‘The Loneliest Night in the World’, ‘Estella’ and ‘Heart of Stone’, for release. ‘The Loneliest Night in the World’ emerged on the 1998 compilation Musicals of the Night, alongside songs from Miss Saigon, West Side Story, Phantom of the Opera and My Fair Lady. The tracks were laid down at Abbey Road with a full orchestra and my great pal Michael Reed as musical supervisor and arranger, which he also had been for the tours. We always refer to each other as ‘Your Majesty’. I should probably explain. I heard that every time the switchboard operator at Buckingham Palace connected the Queen with the Queen Mother, because they had the same Christian name, his official line had to be, ‘Your Majesty, Her Majesty, Your Majesty.’ As Michael and I had the same name I started using the line on our phone calls and it stuck, eventually being shortened to ‘Your Majesty’. It certainly makes people look up when the mobile goes in a public place and you answer in respectful and regal tones, ‘Your Majesty.’
The Mail on Sunday magazine proclaimed that it could ‘see no reason why he [Read] can’t take the West End by storm’. By storm? Even by bus would have been good. The paper’s theatre critic, Baz Bamigboye, seemed confident that it would be staged in London: ‘Mr Read has become a one-man music industry, with productions of his various shows touring the country. Now there are plans for his Great Expectations to hit the West End later this year.’
One night I was driving back home from Nottingham, after watching the show. There had been dense fog the whole way and I had had to concentrate intensely. I was only a few miles from home, then in deepest Sussex, when my thoughts began to run a second or two ahead of themselves. I knew what I was going to think a brief moment before I thought it. It’s a tough symptom to describe, but that’s the best I can muster. You might counteract with the rational response, ‘Well, you’ve just thought it – the “premonition” is the actual thought, so the repeat is simply an echo.’ It wasn’t that, though, and it scared the hell out of me. I’ve tried to rationalise whatever happened to me many times, even putting the blame on eating a whole bag of liquorice allsorts during the journey. I’ve since have been assured by experts that it wasn’t the liquorice. I know they say that the brain always runs slightly ahead of itself, but this was a very different and scary feeling. I pulled over several times before making it back to the farm. Alison had come round for supper and was rather bewildered at my state. It certainly shook me up. I can only assume that my level of concentration had been such, peering into thick fog for some hours, that it affected my thought process in some way. Maybe the brain slowed down to the speed of consciousness and thus had a problem dealing with the surroundings and conditions.
CHAPTER 10
WRITER IN THE SUN
BY THE MID ’90s I was on the Classic FM breakfast show, where one of the regular features was the Morning March. In fact the station trumpeted, ‘The Pope is Catholic, Judith Chalmers has a passport, and just after 7.30 a.m. on Classic FM you can hear a good, rousing march.’
The Morning March had become one of the favourite features of the breakfast show, attracting an audience of devotees that included celebrities, journalists and even the odd MP. I thought it odd that no composer had ever written a tune called ‘The Morning March’, but maybe pre-prandial marching wasn’t too popular. Jogging or walking alone is socially acceptable. Marching alone, with or without uniform, is considered weird and makes the watcher feel marginally uncomfortable. I had some workings for a march that I was going to use in the Young Apollo musical, so I suggested to the station that I might finish it and call it ‘The Morning March’. They loved the idea, which led to HM Band of the Royal Marines, who’d played live at Classic FM, recording it. I journeyed to Portsmouth for the occasion, under the beckoning baton of Lieutenant Colonel Richard Waterer and the watchful eye of the arranger, Mike MacDermott. What a thrill it was to be later invited into Richard Waterer’s box at the Royal Albert Hall to hear the Massed Bands of Her Majesty’s Royal Marines play ‘The Morning March’ to a very responsive audience, for the Mountbatten Festival of Music 1998. Being on the same bill as Rossini, Delibes and Bach wasn’t rock & roll, but I liked it.
It was an equally big thrill when the piece was included on Classic FM’s successful Morning March CD, alongside works by Elgar, Prokofiev, Verdi, Strauss, Dvořák and Sibelius. A bonus came when it was also featured on a Radio Times classical CD and I found myself joining the ranks of Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Rimsky-Korsakov and Bruch. It was definitely my ‘Roll over Beethoven and tell Tchaikovsky the news’ moment.
Let it not be said that I merely mingled and rubbed shoulders with the ghosts of the revered creatives of old; I also had the current crop in my sights. An old friend from Weybridge, Bob Grace, by then one of the country’s leading publishers, suggested a writing session with Albert Hammond. It’d take a few pages to list all the great songs that Albert has written, although my favourite is ‘99 Miles from LA’, and he did have a couple of classic hits of his own with ‘Free Electric Band’ and ‘It Never Rains in Southern California’, so I was delighted to have the opportunity
to write with him. I arrived at his London flat in Holland Park, probably looking a little too eager and clutching my guitar case. I was tuned and ready to go – let’s start writing those hits, Albert. But I sensed a lack of urgency from my co-writer as he flicked on the TV.
‘Do you like football?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Great. There’s a match I want to watch.’
Ah well, that’ll be a hitless hour and three quarters, then. We might have knocked off our first album in that time. My hopes rose again as the final whistle blew, but there was a further question. ‘I’m really hungry, aren’t you?’
I could be, I suppose. Off we trotted to Julie’s Wine Bar, normally a favourite, but tonight a mild frustration. By something past midnight we were back outside Albert’s place. Super chap, great supper, decent match, no songs. ‘Well, goodnight.’ I managed a weak smile, slightly embarrassed by the unused guitar that I had toted around all evening like an expectant child.
‘Coffee, tea?’
Why not? Tea finished and the clock gathering pace towards sunrise, there was a third question. ‘Got any ideas, then?’ I think I beat the dawn home, but at least we’d written a song. ‘The Power of Life’ is parked on a shelf, and may not be the greatest song ever written, but it still stands up pretty well.