Jacob had two wives and twelve sons. Joseph, his favourite and a dreamer, irritatingly predicts to his brothers that one day he will rise above the lot of them. When Jacob gives Joseph a coat of many colours it is the final straw. They decide to kill him. Luring Joseph into the desert, they encounter some roving Ishmaelites. A sudden twinge of remorse and a chance to make a shekel or two prompts them to sell Joseph as a slave to be taken to Egypt. They dip Joseph’s coat in goat’s blood, telling his grieving dad he was killed bravely fighting. Joseph gets chucked into gaol, presumably as an illegal alien, where he sings his big ballad “Close Every Door.” His interpretation of his cellmates’ dreams catches the attention of Pharaoh who is having nightmares. Joseph interprets these as signifying seven years of impending food glut, followed by seven of famine. Pharaoh makes Joseph boss of a rationing scheme to provide for the bad years. Joseph’s famine-stricken brothers pitch up in Egypt, begging for food. They don’t recognize their brother but he recognizes them and puts them to a test: he plants a cup in Benjamin, the youngest brother’s, food sack, accusing him of stealing. The brothers rally to his defence, offering themselves up for punishment instead. Realizing they are now responsible citizens, Joseph reveals to his astonished siblings who he is. Jacob is brought to Egypt to be reunited with the son he thought was dead. A happy ending is enjoyed by all.
This simple primal tale had everything. Tim had made a brilliant choice. I didn’t realize it at the time, but in my attempt to write music that would never allow its kid performers to get bored, I was unwittingly creating what was to become my trademark, a “through-sung” musical, i.e. a score with little or no spoken dialogue where the musical structure, the musical key relationships, rhythms and use of time signatures, not just the melodies, are vital to its success. Nothing in Joseph was random. I wrote it by instinct as I had no experience. But the fact that there was no spoken dialogue meant that I was in the driving seat. Once Tim and I had agreed the essential elements of the plot and we had decided where the key songs would go, it was down to me to control the rhythm of the piece. Of course spoken dialogue can be invaluable – on many occasions it is by far the best way to express dramatic situations – but for me my through-composed shows are the most satisfying.
It is the strength of the heart of Joseph that allowed it to expand like Topsy into a stage musical with its various pastiche set pieces. This central core has its own, if naive, musical style and above all a real emotional centre. The only pastiche in the Colet Court version was “Song of the King” which turned Pharaoh into Elvis. I have to claim that as my idea. I thought we needed something to lighten the mood after Joseph’s “Close Every Door” in which Joseph sings that Children of Israel are never alone, one of the simple central messages of the piece. Unusually the title was also my idea, although hardly original. It was inspired by the Alan Price single “Simon Smith and His Amazing Dancing Bear.” “Technicolour” got added as it seemed a cool way of saying “many colours.” Moreover Technicolor dreams, with all their 1960s connotations were definitely the stuff of the moment.
Thrillingly, after the concert there was an on-the-spot offer of publication. Unbeknown to Tim and me, Alan Doggett had invited the team from Novello and Co., the top classical music publisher who had strayed highly successfully into the educational market with The Daniel Jazz. They also published much of my father’s church music and I wonder if he too had a hand in their giving up a Friday afternoon to hear our effort. Anyhow they wanted to sign Joseph there and then. We referred them to Desmond Elliott.
DESMOND HAD SHOWN SCANT interest in our pop cantata. In fact he had shown scant interest in anything I was doing. For a long while his attention had been more or less exclusively devoted to a school friend of Tim’s called Adam Diment. Adam was a novelist who had written a couple of alternative James Bond type books with titles like The Dolly Dolly Spy and The Bang Bang Birds featuring a character not unlike Austin Powers. Desmond persuaded Adam to grow his hair, got publishers Michael Joseph in such a tizzy about him that they paid him a massive advance and then fielded him on TV chat shows around the English-speaking world dressed in “mod” outfits. London bus sides proclaimed “If you can’t read Adam Diment love him.” For a brief while Adam made a heap of money and was quite a celebrity.
It was not surprising then that having a young, good looking male pop star author of his own creation under his belt so to speak, Desmond was no longer as enthused about me as he once was. So when he negotiated a £100 advance for both Tim and me out of Novello’s, peanuts to what Adam Diment was making, he assumed my father (the legal age you could sign a contract in 1968 was 21) would ink the agreement immediately. (Today £1670.) Fortunately Bob Kingston’s homily echoed round my skull and I added the words “excluding Grand Rights” to the document, which I got Dad to initial as well as adding his moniker.
The resulting explosion in Desmond’s St James’s Street office could be heard above the teatime quartet in the palm court of the neighbouring Ritz Hotel. How could I be so stupid as to jeopardize this deal? I was wasting his time. Anyway there never would be Grand Rights involved with a 20-minute pop cantata. Nobody would perform it in a theatre. He ended a diatribe of a letter to my father with “enough is enough.” Tim stood back aloof from the fray, possibly savouring the saga. I stood my ground. I argued that Novello’s would hardly be bothered about Grand Rights income if there was never going to be any, so let’s leave the wording in, just in case. I was right: Novello’s didn’t even murmur. The contracts were signed excluding Grand Rights. My relationship with Desmond was never the same again.
The clamour for a repeat performance of Joseph simmered just enough for Tim, Alan and me to take it seriously. The problem was a venue. Here my father stepped in. He suggested a performance at the Central Hall, Westminster after the 6:30 pm Sunday service. There were two snags. The Central Hall, Westminster is big – three thousand or so seats. Could we fill it? Secondly Joseph was only 22 minutes long. There would have to be something else to go with it. Now my mother surfaced. The first half of the concert could be classical. Julian could do a bit, Dad could play the organ and John Lill would be the Act 1 closer. May 12 was fixed as the big night. There’s a strange coincidence in this. May 12 was also the date of the first public performance of Jesus Christ Superstar in Pittsburgh three years later.
Rehearsals went just about OK. The vastness of the Central Hall swallowed up the Mixed Bag and without a proper PA system I got very worried David Daltrey’s vocals would be lost. Alan Doggett had never conducted in a hall of this size and didn’t have the control that an experienced musical director would have had. I got so nervous that I wanted to cancel the performance and Tim’s laid-back approach to the issues wound me up still further, something not lost on him. I found the playing untogether and feared it was all going to be too amateurish for a performance open to the public.
I need not have been so stressed. Despite the classical first half being way, way overlong, the joy of Joseph and the infectious enthusiasm of its young performers carried all before it. Although it was past most of the kids’ bedtimes, there were once again several ecstatically received encores, a harbinger of what was to happen to Joseph in the future. Desmond Elliott at last showed some interest, although I don’t think he saw a future in Joseph beyond schools. We had made one alteration. In a quest to make what possibly could be a single on the lines of the hugely successful “Excerpt from ‘A Teenage Opera’” the previous summer, we lengthened the sequence in which Pharaoh makes Joseph his second in command. We also added a “teenage opera”-style hooky kids chorus. “Joseph how can we ever say all that we want to about you.” This has become one of the central themes of today’s Joseph, although we were soon to rework this whole section.
But thoughts like that were a million miles away after the huge reaction to the performance. I wanted that night to go on forever. Would there ever be another performance of Joseph like this?