Unmasked by Andrew Lloyd Webber

Author:Andrew Lloyd Webber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2018-02-16T05:00:00+00:00

THROUGHOUT THE SUMMER MY lovely PA Biddy Hayward was having a whale of a time juggling requests for Evita house seats with David Land, who kept crowing “There’s nothing that a hit can’t cure,” whilst playing a ridiculous record he had made of Evita’s opening night applause. One request had to be handled discreetly. The leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition proved particularly partial to Eva’s big set pieces with adoring crowds at the end of Act 1 and the top of Act 2. This involved sneaking the Right Honourable Margaret Thatcher into the back of the stalls after curtain-up, then into the bar of Wheelers opposite the theatre during the interval and back for “Don’t Cry for Me” and “Rainbow High.” A few years later at a dinner in her Downing Street flat she joked that I should compose her some entrance music for the next Tory party conference like Eva’s on the balcony of the Casa Rosada. Well, I think she was joking.*

David Land was getting heaps of offers about turning Variations into half of a dance show. I started to take my settings of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats rather more seriously. What if the cat poems became a “dance combined with poetry” curtain-raiser? In the meantime poor Thomas the Tank Engine hit the buffers. Johnnie Hamp at Granada had finished overseeing the animation of the pilot episode. His bosses loved it but animation in 1978 was labour-intensive and colossally expensive. Computer animation was still very much in its embryo. The Granada honchos felt Thomas was too British to appeal outside the UK and they couldn’t justify spending a fortune on what they thought would only be a local children’s TV series. Little did they or I think that simply filming the stories with model railway trains and a voiceover by an ex-Beatle would turn Thomas into an international franchise. So I did something the opposite of really useful, allowed the rights of Thomas to revert back to its publishers and let a no-brainer of a smash hit slip through my fingers.

But I still had the name the Really Useful Company and I wasn’t about to let my singing steam trains evaporate. I had heard on a recording session a guy with a most interesting party trick. He could sing three notes at once in the exact pitch of an American steam locomotive whistle. His name was Earl Jordan. Perhaps my train story should be set in America? And surely anyone who could sing three notes at once could at least front a novelty single? Peter Reeves and I wrote a song called “Engine of Love” and once again Roy Featherstone swallowed the bait. The Sydmonton Festival was fast looming, but I promised Roy “Engine of Love” would steam away as soon as Sydmonton had strutted its stuff.

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