The story as previously told goes as follows. Back in 1966 I used to frequent a shop in the nether regions of the Fulham Road which sold cheap copies of current LPs that somehow had fallen off the back of a lorry. Nearby was a bric-a-brac shop. One day I saw a filthy dirty canvas in its window which looked remarkably like Lord Leighton’s Flaming June, probably one of the most famous of all Victorian paintings. Even though Victorian pictures were still considered nearly worthless, the £50 that the shop owner was asking for it seemed cheap to me. (Today £890.) So I begged Granny to let me borrow the money. When she asked what it was for she opined that she wasn’t going to have Victorian rubbish in her flat.
The way I have been telling the story is that it was bought by the pioneering Victorian picture dealer Jeremy Maas. He then sold it to a Puerto Rican cement baron called Luis A. Ferré who was starting a museum in Ponce, his home town on the south of the island. Apparently Ferré had a policy of never paying more than $5000 for anything. In those days you could buy several acres of Victorian canvases for $5000 and consequently Mr Ferré hoovered up some great paintings such as Burne-Jones’s masterpiece Arthur in Avalon. It is ironic that such important “aesthetic movement” paintings created in the pursuit of beauty should have found their home in an island so cruelly treated by nature. Today Flaming June is billed as “The Mona Lisa of the Southern Hemisphere,” has been in the Tate Gallery, the Frick, you name it, and is worth millions. Thus Granny denied me a Victorian masterpiece. I’ve been writing and dining out on this for decades.
Unfortunately I was wrong. I recently learned that Jeremy Maas bought the real thing from his barber a few years earlier. So I take this opportunity to grovel with apology for a falsehood that I even perpetuated in a Royal Academy exhibition catalogue and revel in the fact that I didn’t lose out on a great deal after all.
IT WAS AROUND EASTER when Bob Kingston, boss of the London office of Southern Music, called me into his office. I am not the only one who should be eternally grateful for what he told me. Everyone from Tim Rice to all those who made tons of money out of our early shows should erect a monument to him. Without it the rest of this book would be completely different, not to mention the rest of my life – and probably that of countless others. Bob Kingston was the first person to tell me about Grand Rights. The meeting came about because either Desmond Elliott or Ernest Hecht had had a faintly encouraging response from Harry Secombe’s management to The
Based on an over optimistic chat with the excitable Desmond, Bob felt it was time to sit me down and explain the music business facts of life. In those days income from songwriting came from three sources. First was record sales. Second were fees from performances on radio, TV and public places. Third was “sheet music” sales, i.e. printed song copies. The publisher split the income from the first two categories 50/50 with the writers and doled out 10% of the proceeds from the third. Income from international sources was split 50/50 based on what the local publisher remitted to the UK publisher. Naturally all the major publishers set up their own local firms who skimmed off a big cut of a song’s income with the result that the publisher in practice could end up with a far bigger share of the income than the authors. For example, a song earns $100 in the US. The US publisher (owned by the UK publisher) takes a 50% cut, remits 50% to the British publisher who splits that 50/50 with the writers. Thus many writers at that time only received 25% of the gross international income. This practice has long since been challenged, but it was the norm in 1966. Bob explained that these three income streams are called Small Rights.
What Bob then spelt out was that there is another rights category, Grand Rights. He told me that Tin Pan Alley publishers rarely understood what they were. Grand Rights are the royalties that arise whenever an entire dramatic work is performed on the stage or on film. Bob felt it was not morally right for a pop music publisher to participate in this income. The agreement Tim and I had been given for The Likes of Us was a standard contract whose wording implied that we had signed away absolutely everything to Southern Music. Bob proposed giving us back our Grand Rights. The Likes of Us was never to earn a penny, but the advice Bob gave me that morning was unquestionably the most precious of my entire career.
THAT MAY TIM’S BOSSES at the law firm Pettit and Westlake told him to destroy some highly sensitive legal documents. Unfortunately he shredded the wrong ones. This caused Tim’s law career to come into question and so his father Hugh lent on some contacts he had at electronic giant EMI with the result that in June Tim joined EMI Records as a management trainee. Almost immediately Tim was assigned to the A&R department, A&R standing for artists and repertoire, the department responsible for finding artists, choosing their songs and overseeing their recording careers.
Today the initials EMI mean little even in the music business. But in 1966 EMI was the undisputed giant of the record industry. It owned a vast litany of artists headed by The Beatles, an unequalled roster of classical musicians, a huge manufacturing base not only of the software but the hardware of the music business, plus the world’s most famous recording studio complex at Abbey Road. It is hard to believe that today this once proud company’s initials survive only in the names Sony/ATV/EMI Publishing and Virgin/EMI Records. In 2012 the then owners, venture capitalists Terra Firma, became infamously infirm as the giant turned into a munchkin. After complex shenanigans, Japanese giant Sony acquired the music publishing and the record division was swallowed up by Universal Music, who merged it with the Virgin label.
At almost exactly the same time as Tim started at EMI I got a letter from Magdalen. It got straight to the point. The college bigwigs had heard that I was working on a musical. They wished me luck but hoped I realized that when I returned I was expected to concentrate on my studies. If I wanted I could discuss changing the course I was reading, but if I returned they expected me to live up to my exhibitioner status.
Reality had caught up with me big time. I thought about switching from History to Music. My father knew Dr Bernard Rose, the highly regarded director of Magdalen College’s fabled choir. But Dad was hugely against my studying music. He felt that the Oxford course would be far too academic for me. So my only future at Oxford was to return and read history seriously. Even give or take a little bit, realistically I would have to take a three-year break from musical theatre or at least from attempting any professional involvement.
Meantime Tim, nearly four years older than me and understandably ambitious for his own future, was starting a job in the creative department of the world’s top record company. Even if Tim was at the bottom of the ladder, he had his foot in the door. Tim could easily have a hit on his own or with another writer. He might easily lose interest in a younger hopeful whose real interest was theatre, a world far away from chart-obsessed EMI and the white-hot heat of Swinging London. Furthermore I knew full well that Oxford offered nobody who could hold a candle to his lyrics.
Should I go back to Oxford or leave? It was the biggest decision of my life and there was nobody I felt I could turn to for advice. My family would point to two dismal A-level results as my only academic qualifications. I had the odd music grade, but no way was I a performer so there was no hope down that alley. The most anyone could say about me was that I wrote tunes, had an oddball love of musicals and a bizarre love of architecture and medieval history. I knew that my family would be appalled if I chucked in the lifeline that Magdalen had offered me.
I took myself away to agonize. What if musicals were on the way out? What if I was no good at them anyway? I knew I was no lyricist. So was it not lunacy to try a career where my music was greatly dependent on the words that went with it and stories that might be lousy? What if the writer of those words, in this case Tim, no longer wanted to work with me? What if that writer didn’t come up with the goods? Most musicals are