Actually we both liked John. That holiday he was learning the fiendishly difficult last movement of Prokofiev’s seventh piano sonata, a bravura tour de force in 7/8 time. I turned the pages for him. I became obsessed with the mesmeric possibilities of that oddball time signature … try counting in seven, here’s a tip: count one two three, one two, one two in a row without a break. Next try counting one two, one two three, one two and vary it from there. You’ll be popular in the subway. Every musical I have written has a section in 7/8 time. There’s even a joke about it in Phantom which, so far as I know, has only been laughed at once – by the conductor Lorin Maazel who found it hilarious.
I suspect John would laugh at it too. He and I share a similar sense of musical humour. A few years later we went to a concert of unusual instruments in St Pancras Town Hall. The big draw was Vaughan Williams’s Tuba Concerto. Unfortunately it was preceded by Vivaldi’s Concerto for Sopranino and Orchestra. A huge man with the biggest hands I have ever seen ascended the stage with no visible instrument in sight. The conductor raised his baton. The goliath raised his chubby palms mouthwards from which emanated a sound so piercing and high that every dog and bat in the vicinity must have been begging scalpers for front row seats. To make things worse Vivaldi was, put it this way, not on peak form when he knocked up this particular epic. John and I got the giggles, which ended in my getting hiccups when a serious woman with glasses in front of us who was deeply studying a music score turned round and said “It may be funny but it’s not that funny.” When next up a diminutive chap staggered onto the stage dwarfed by an enormous tuba, an usher less than politely suggested that we left. Was this the first and only time a Tchaikovsky Prize winner has been ejected from a classical concert? On another occasion John told me that he once by mistake turned over a page twice when he was premiering a Philip Glass piano epic. After his performance, Glass congratulated him on his fabulous interpretation. In short I grew to like John very much. With hindsight, my problem was never with John. It was with my mother’s obsession with him.
I can’t speak for Dad but I suspect that he felt the same way too. Back in that summer of 1962 things must have become way too much for him. To everyone’s amazement he announced that he was going to stay with Vi and George in Italy. Dad had never been “abroad” in his life. Mum had no intention of tagging on and a plan was hatched that he would spend a week with my aunt and uncle while I was to fly out a few days later.
My first memory of Nice Côte d’Azur Airport is of my father being freighted through the departure lounge, his speech slurred, his pale skin frazzled and peeling, giggling hysterically about girls’ bottoms. Clearly the sun and the local brews had made an impression on him. My first memory of La Promenade des Anglais is that Dad’s argument had a lot going for it. In those days bikinis hadn’t had much of an outing in the dank mists of Britain. Soon we were motoring past the grand villas on the Bas Corniche and past Cap Ferrat through a then low-rise Monaco to the French border and a world of scents and colours, actors and wine, parmigiano and olive oil, famous film directors, David Niven and his pool built in metres when he had specified feet, artists and their partners who were always the same people but in different combinations every holiday, Aunt Vi’s azur-painted piano and her plumbago-covered terrace with the purple bougainvillea etched against the deep blue of the Mediterranean Sea, La Punta, the dreamy little fish restaurant on the shore which you could only reach on foot, the Hanbury Gardens and La Mortola restaurant where Winston Churchill had a celebration lunch after Germany surrendered … I could go on forever about a now vanished world that totally infused my life.
FROM THEN ONWARDS VI’S house became my second home. It’s not surprising therefore that pitching up to board at Westminster on a grey autumn afternoon was a shock to the system. Worse, because of the way boys in my new house were grouped by age, I lost a whole year of privileges. Because I was so young when I had arrived at the school I had been at the school for two years, the same length of time as the boys grouped above me. I protested to deaf ears. It seemed terribly unfair. All this paled into total insignificance a few weeks later. October 1962 was the month of the Cuban Missile Crisis. For several nights we would look out of our dormitory window onto the Houses of Parliament and wonder whether that would be the last time we’d see them. There wasn’t one of us who truthfully didn’t want a hug from our parents at thirteen successive bedtimes. The one thing that consoled us was that our Westminster address meant our end would be swift.
My demotion caused a big problem with rehearsals. The first consequent crisis erupted over rehearsals for my old house’s Christmas pantomime. This had already become a musical called Socrates Swings and the partnership of Robin Barrow and Lloyd Webber had much to live up to. Just because I’d changed houses, I couldn’t let the old side down. The issue was that rehearsals mainly took place after junior boys’ bedtime and I was now a junior again. Robin, being a prefect himself, sorted matters out with his opposite number in my new house who reluctantly went along with my extended bedtime but subsequently got the opportunity to make me pay for it by beating me horrendously hard for something I didn’t do. Thus I accompanied our Socrates Swings atop a three-inch cushion. Mum and Dad came to a performance and I think it was then the penny dropped that I was not going to be a model history scholar.
A couple of weeks before the world premiere of Socrates Swings, the London premiere of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem was given at Westminster Abbey. A few Queen’s Scholars were chosen to be ushers and I was one of them. It was a thick “peasouper” foggy night and it was impossible to see more than a few feet, even inside the Abbey, so how the performers followed the conductor was a miracle. How anyone got to the Abbey was even more so, proving how in those pre-air-pollution-control days Londoners were inured to massive fogs.
The performance made a profound impression on me. The War Requiem is a piece of breathtaking theatricality with its juxtaposition of Wilfred Owen war poems and the Latin Requiem Mass. As ever with Britten his orchestrations are a master class, perhaps never more so than here since he uses three elements – a full orchestra, a chamber orchestra and a “positive” organ (an organ used by early Baroque composers like Purcell with a very particular sound) to accompany his detached, ethereal boys’ choir. It was that performance that led me to Britten’s operas, Peter Grimes and The Turn of the Screw. Britten’s use of a single brushstroke on a snare drum to describe the sound of a tug in Death in Venice is genius personified.
AT THE END OF the same week as the War Requiem’s London premiere, another debut occurred. That Christmas a song called “Love Me Do” by a relatively unknown Liverpool band named The Beatles entered the pop charts. It only got to No. 17 but it was the harbinger of 1963, the year when The Beatles had the first of their seemingly infinite run of No. 1 hits and pop music was changed forever. Liverpool’s Mersey Sound erupted and Swinging London was born. Westminster was right in London’s epicentre, only a walk away from the music publishers of Tin Pan Alley* and the clubs and concert venues where everything was happening. All I wanted was to be a part of this new music scene and there it was, a mere hop and a skip from my enforced cloistered doorstep via a short cut through the Abbey. I was desperate to prove that I too, not just John Lill, could be a success.
Maybe because my father had seen my Christmas 1962 two-performance smash Socrates Swings and thought I needed help, or perhaps because we had found something in common re La Promenade des Anglais in Nice, in the spring of 1963 he decided to send me part-time to a specialist music college in the school holidays. The “college” actually was a place that taught musically illiterate songwriters how to put their efforts on paper. It was run by a guy who, it transpired, Dad had known in student days called Eric Gilder and Dad thought I’d pick up a few practical tips. Indeed Mr Gilder did show me a rather nifty key change trick which I occasionally still use. It makes a change from the usual half-step upwards. The most valuable thing Gilder taught me was how to prepare the piano