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.

Some writers like to work together and kick ideas around while others work independently of each other, returning with their latest contribution as and when. The song I wrote with Andrew Lloyd Webber in the summer of 1997 was one of the latter. I was having lunch at Sydmonton to discuss something or other and after we’d watched Venus Williams doing amazing things with yellow balls at Wimbledon, Andrew mentioned a couple of songs he had that needed lyrics. If he sent me his rough instrumental could I have a go at some words? I could indeed. Nothing turned up for a couple of weeks so I assumed he’d forgotten. I was pottering around a local mill that had once been the home of the composer John Ireland, when, by interesting coincidence, Andrew called to say one of the tracks was in the post. With Peter Ainsworth, then an MP, I’d been suggesting turning the mill into a South Downs musical museum, for the likes of Ireland, Havergal Brian, Hubert Parry, William Blake and Edward Elgar. The excuse that was given for not being able to do it was that the surrounding area was landfill and therefore the ground (and the mill) could be unsafe, apart from any noxious gases that might emanate from the area. That, however, didn’t affect the tune from ALW. I pounced on a good title almost immediately, ‘No Smoke without Fire’. The lyric took shape, but I really needed to play with the tune and add a middle eight. I knew Andrew well enough to ask him if I could move his melody around where necessary and he readily and graciously agreed. I was definitely pleased with the result and did a pretty good demo, much in the style of UB40. Andrew loved it too, which was good news, and decided to have it performed at the next Sydmonton Festival, along with his workshop for Whistle Down The Wind. It went down very well and Andrew was confident that our song was going to be a huge hit. Any congratulations from those present that came my way were tempered by experience. Andrew was so busy that today’s great idea might well slip down the chart of priority within a week or two, plunge even further after a month and then slide under the radar and off into the ether. I didn’t want to be right, but I was.

Fast forward to the launch of Tim Rice’s autobiography. After the event, Andrew and I headed back to his London house to watch an England match. It won’t have escaped the more astute among you that there is a theme here, with songwriters inviting me round to watch football. The screen was so large that at times I felt that I was playing in midfield, especially after a glass or two from Andrew’s cellar. After the game we listened to some Bollywood music of which he had become enamoured, before he treated me to some tunes on the piano from his forthcoming musical The Beautiful Game. Andrew is a great writer of melodies, no doubt about that.

A month or two later I had calls from a couple of friends, delighted that the song I had written with Andrew was in his new musical. Was it? No one told me. Someone played it to me. That was it, all right, with different and to my mind inferior lyrics (no offence to the hugely talented Ben Elton, whose name was on the credit) but the same re-structured melody. I mentioned it to Tim, who wasn’t unduly surprised, and I wondered if Andrew would bring it up. He never has. I’ve seen him on many occasions since then, but not a squeak. My publisher suggested suing him. I laughed. Not that ‘hollow, mocking laugh’ used by crime writers to create an atmosphere, just a normal laugh with no hidden agenda. I wasn’t going to go down that road, for several reasons: I’ve known Andrew for ever, he wouldn’t have done it deliberately, it would cause a rift in an old friendship, it was only one song in a musical that wasn’t one of his blockbusters, and frankly I didn’t mind. The original ‘No Smoke without Fire’ still sounds good. When Andrew stages Pyrotechny, The Musical, the song will come into its own.

Like me, Andrew is a big Bobby Vee aficionado, Bobby having performed at various of his functions in the ’90s, but the press jumped the gun rather by announcing that I planned a musical about the early ’60s US heart-throb. They announced that Bobby would play himself in the show, but in reality it had got no further than drawing-board stage, with him and me kicking round a few ideas. The idea was for Bobby to have been the pivotal narrator with a young singer portraying him from the day he stepped in for Buddy Holly and through the ’60s. Back when I bought his records, I never imagined I’d get to meet him, let alone to be able to call him a friend and that he would call me whenever he was in the UK. A lovely man, with a lovely family, though sadly he’s not in the best of health now.

I’d also been a fan of Ricky Nelson’s records. He sang in a range that was achievable by chaps such as myself, and had dozens of hits and a great image. He’d also been a child star on his parents’ long-running TV and radio series across the States, Ozzie and Harriet. Tragically, he died in a plane crash on New Year’s Eve 1985 when only in his mid-forties. The news came through on the car radio while driving back from a party with Janet Ellis, whom I went out with a few times. I was so shocked that I cried. She was probably shocked that I did. Later I began work on an idea for a stage musical on Ricky, using the title Teenage Idol. By 1995 The Buddy Holly Story was in its seventh year as a stage musical and had grossed an incredible £100 million worldwide, so there was clearly a market for shows like this. While the Bobby Vee one hadn’t worked out, perhaps this one would. While I was working on it, Andrew Lloyd Webber, also a Ricky Nelson fan, said that he’d like to stage it at Sydmonton. Again, we had a lot of press coverage up front, including a double-page spread in the Daily Express, where I gave my reasons for choosing this subject: ‘The story has it all … fame, success, glamour and tragedy. It’s a gripping subject. In America, by the end of the ’50s, not only young people adored him but their parents did as well.’ It seemed reasonable. He was a pop star at seventeen and sold millions of records.

I took a gamble on the unknown Richard Sharp, then just twenty, in the lead role and Tony Rivers and his boys as the backing vocalists, also singing radio jingles. We rehearsed in Chelsea with director Nicola Treherne and got up to speed before heading off to Andrew’s for the show. It was a busy weekend for me as the Sunday morning service at the local church (as part of the Sydmonton Festival) featured the choir performing my setting of Rupert Brooke’s war sonnets. Ricky Nelson – Teenage Idol was well received by an audience that included Charlie and Martin Sheen, George Martin and Don Black. I’m sure it was daunting for Richard, who’d never acted before in his life, but he pulled it off and the piece was a success. As I’ve never been certain what to do with it after Sydmonton, that remains its only performance.

One musical play that didn’t even make it to the stage was my adaptation of Alan Sillitoe’s classic Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. I used music from the period and met with Alan, who liked the adaptation and gave me permission to go ahead. That was good news. More good news was that Bill Kenwright called, wanting to stage it. But back comes that old phrase, ‘life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans’, and somehow it slipped away, despite me renewing the rights to stage it for several years. I did write a title song, with Chris Eaton, but despite being a strong song, that too remains on the shelf, hopefully waiting for its moment to shine. I’m convinced that ‘shelf’ will give way one day under the not inconsiderable strain.

I mentioned the Rupert Brooke sonnets as in 1996 there was action on the Rupert Brooke front. Imagining I’d need music for the film, I had set Brooke’s five war sonnets to music. I’d written a film script and there was a heck of a lot of interest from production companies, with letters flying backwards and forwards and meetings galore. Pleased with the result after a few months, I’d asked Ralph to work on the arrangements, which turned out splendidly. From there we played my demos to the head of music at King’s College, Cambridge, Stephen Cleobury, who agreed that the King’s College Choir could record them. I organised the recordings to be filmed, fondly imagining the choir to be dressed accordingly, looking angelic and with candles guttering to throw wild and fanciful shapes across the fan vaulting of King’s College Chapel. I hadn’t reckoned on casual dress – rock T-shirts, jeans and trainers – but we filmed everything anyway, including Stephen ticking off one lad whose shirt was hanging out. The cameras were still rolling as he reluctantly and sullenly made his way outside, only to re-appear with it tucked in in a token manner. Henry VI had first instigated a choir here in the mid-1400s a few years after what was initially known as Our College Royal of Nicholas opened its doors to scholars, and here we were more than 500 years later with microphones suspended at every angle. What would Henry (incidentally our youngest-ever king, at nine months) have made of that? Stephen Cleobury made me realise how lucky I was to be having my songs recorded here when he reminded me how much of the music sung in the chapel was by greats that had long departed such as Mozart, Bach, Tallis and Taverner. The Eton College Choir later performed the Brooke settings from the chapel for a BBC World Service programme, in which I was one of the readers of the secular and non-secular narrative linking the pieces.

In the mid ’90s, Simon May had been commissioned to write the music for a new comedy film, Caught in the Act, and he asked me to come up with some ideas for a title track. I needed no second bidding and soon knocked up a demo that included a basic melody for Simon as a starting point. It failed to start, although listening to it years later, it’s pretty damn good. As happens with films, the idea for a title was sidelined and instead there would be an opening operatic dream sequence. Fine, getting onside with a soupçon of W. S. Gilbert wouldn’t be a problem. What was a problem, though, was this. They wanted the lyrics in Italian. ‘Sorry,’ said Simon, ‘but that’s what they want. I’ll have to find an Italian lyricist.’

‘I can do it.’

‘I didn’t know you could speak Italian.’

‘You give me the tune and I’ll give you a great Italian lyric.’

‘If you’re sure.’

I was sure. I didn’t actually say that I spoke the language, simply that I was capable of writing the words. The nearest I got to speaking it was ordering a Four Seasons at Pizza Hut. Undeterred, I lashed out £6.99 on a Collins Italian dictionary and a few quid on a teach-yourself publication, Beginners’ Italian. I made a list of all the words that might come in useful, familiarised myself with the way tenses were constructed and knuckled down to it. I decided that ‘Ci vediamo’ (‘We’ll Meet’) might be a good title and that as the opening sequence was an over-the-top spoof that I could easily get away with a cheesy, over-the-top lyric. Bizarrely it flowed quite well, with lines like ‘Nella luce della luna’ (‘In the moonlight’) and ‘E in tutti il mondo | Tutte le stelle scintilleranno (‘And all over the world | All the stars will shine’). It was heady stuff, you must agree. Had I been born in Venice in 1823 I might have paddled the operatic gondola big-time. As it was, the opening sequence was shot in Wimbledon, with my moving lyric, ‘Non vedo niente solo te’ (‘I won’t see anything but you’), ringing out across SW19. It sounded jolly clever in Italian. In English it would have sounded ghastly. Before submitting my lyric, I’d run the whole thing past an Italian acquaintance who pointed out certain errors that might lead to his country declaring war on me. The film won the Jury Award of Excellence at the Laguna Festival in the USA. Probably because of an all-star cast that included Lesley Phillips, Nadia Sawalha and Sarah Crowe, rather than my Italian lyric.

In 2000, I re-visited a musical show I’d previously put together featuring music and news through the centuries, Journey through Music, to raise funds for a new clock in Pulborough village close to where I was living. We bounded like eager musical puppies through the centuries, playing a variety of instruments usual and unusual, and extolling the virtues of folk, blues, jazz, skiffle, pop and the like. It’s only clock & roll but we love it.

Another show I regularly compered and often sang at was Songs from the Shows, organised by the aforementioned Michael (‘Your Majesty’) Reed and staged in his rolling acres in the shadow of his historic mansion Prince Hill House. I was normally consigned to some fun song from the West End, but I once got to read a serious piece, in the form of Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’. In World War One uniform I strode purposefully out to centre stage. Move over, Sir Larry. But I was baffled at the audience’s response to my incredibly moving declamation of Brooke’s classic poem. They were laughing. I mean really laughing. Many couldn’t contain themselves. Tears of mirth fell from their eyes, as did the scales from mine, eventually. Other things nearly fell as well. In my rush to change, I’d forgotten to do up the buttons on my trousers and a piece of shirt was sticking through the large gap. The seriousness of the poem made it all the more hilarious for the crowd. I even had my own room at Prince Hill House as a host of folk stayed on the show weekends. After one spectacularly late night, I stirred at some unearthly hour as the grey fingers of dawn were afoot. (Mixed metaphor intended.) Was that a figure squatting at the end of my bed? It was. Were they naked? They appeared to be. I might not have been fully compos mentis but it was definitely female. And … oh no … going to the toilet.

‘Stop … don’t do it … not here.’

‘But answer came there none.’

She squatted, soaked the carpet and was gone. Like a relief in the night.

For one of the shows (with trousers securely fastened) Michael and I wrote a millennium hymn, ‘2,000 Years’, which was performed brilliantly by the local choir, and also another Italian song emerged. I used the same trick – non c’è problema. I was becoming an old hand now. This time I checked my past participles and adjectival agreements with a waitress in an Italian restaurant in Devizes, as you do. The song, ‘È stato amore’ (delicious with a glass of Perrier-Jouet), along with ‘Ci vediamo’ (on or off the bone), could become the foundation for my first Italian album. No, wait! There’s a third I’d completely forgotten about. When we had the group Amber on the go, way back when, Dave, our drummer, and Martin, our bass player, had this wheeze that it might be easy to get a recording deal in Italy. Not only did they have a contact there, but Martin’s father was a director of KLM Airlines, which enabled them to procure a couple of very cheap flights. They said that songs with English lyrics were perfectly acceptable, but it might be the icing on the cake if we had one in Italian. I don’t remember forgoing food to buy an Italian dictionary back then, and there was no internet, so I have no idea how I managed it. Their destination was Milan, so I wrote a song with a title that might impress, which when translated meant ‘People of Milan, we love you’. I didn’t know the inhabitants of the city, nor was I cognizant of their behaviour, but suddenly I felt close to them. I’m not even sure of the spelling now, but it phonetically it was something like ‘Milanese noi amore, Milanese noi amore, noi piacca on y giorno, tutta cosa da qui et buono’ and so on. Heaven knows what it meant after we got past the title, but with a little brushing up, a following wind and the English-Italian dictionary it could be the third track on my ever-growing Italian CD. Of course we didn’t get a deal from the Milan record company, who obviously saw through my rather thin and weedy plan, but the guys did come back with a case full of free airport sugar and condiments, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.

In the mid to late ’90s I began to write the songs that would become the second Betjeman album. There was no real plan or sense of purpose, they simply started emerging and were written on a beaten-up guitar, lying around at Alison’s flat, that wouldn’t even tune up properly. It’s odd that I used a severely impaired instrument when I had plenty of good ones, but that’s how it goes sometimes. It’s not the guitar, it’s what’s inside your head that’s important, and indeed whether you can extract it to satisfaction. I was introduced to producer Jon Sweet, who got what I was doing straight away, so it seemed natural for him to work with me on the album. Most of the demos were done in his studio at Yeovil and there was a feeling that something really creative was happening. There was a vibe, as they say in more cosmic moments.

Again, as we were working we talked about who could sing certain tracks, but as with the first album I’d only approach an artist if I felt that the song was absolutely right for them. The power and pace of ‘Narcissus’ seemed ideal for Marc Almond and to my delight he delivered a really dramatic and highly polished performance. Colin Blunstone bravely took on two songs, ‘In Memory’ and ‘Peggy’, and was sensitive and unique as always, while the late Paul Young, of Sad Café and Mike and the Mechanics fame, was equally superb on ‘Greenaway’. Leo Sayer rushed into the studio having hardly had time to listen to his song properly, but pulled out the stops to sing in a very different style for him, amid trumpets and Spanish guitars. Richard Sharp (who you’ll recall from Ricky Nelson – Teenage Idol), still relatively unknown, really delivered on the Byrds-esque ‘Pershore Station’.

The melody for Cliff’s song, ‘November Night’, I wrote at Jon Sweet’s house on the morning of the funeral of the Princess of Wales. I woke while it was still dark and felt this compulsion to get up and write. By the time Jon emerged I’d completed it. I played it to him and he agreed that it was right up Cliff’s street. He was an ideal judge, having written ‘Ocean Deep’, one of Cliff’s most enduring songs. Cliff got into the spirit of it and we shot a moody-ish video for it at a church at Bakewell in Derbyshire followed by a slap-up tea with what we were told were Bakewell puddings, not Bakewell tarts. It was worth going, for that knowledge alone.

The album also included another version of ‘Myfanwy’, this time sung by Gene Pitney, and again we did a video for it. It was meant to be set on the Cherwell at Oxford, but due to Gene’s commitments, we had to make it on the Granta at Grantchester. Thanks to my friend Robin Callan I was able to use the Orchard Tea Garden, bag a punt and shoot on that section of the river. Here was the guy who’d had hits with ‘Twenty-Four Hours from Tulsa’ and ‘Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart’ singing in the garden where Philby, Burgess and Maclean had plotted over tea, where Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Lytton Strachey and Rupert Brooke discussed literature and where Wittgenstein and Russell wrestled with the problems of the day. Another moment to add to the tableau of the Orchard’s rich history.

Gene had recorded the vocal in the States, calling me up every twenty minutes so that he could get his head around Betjeman words that belonged to a time long gone. Much of the lyric would have baffled many Englishmen, let alone a boy from Connecticut. I explained more lines with every call. What a professional: not for him just singing them, he needed to understand them. At last he felt that he’d cottoned on to ’20s Oxford-speak. ‘Hey Mike, I got one. I worked it out. You ready?

I was indeed, ready.

‘The line “Tom and his 101 at nine”.’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s a cricket score, right?’

I had to disappoint him. I felt bad. He’d been so sure of it. I guess I could have pretended, but that’s not my way. ‘Sorry, Gene, it’s not.’

‘I was so certain. What the heck is it then?’

‘Well, the Tom in the poem is Great Tom in St Aldate’s in Oxford, which is the main entrance to Christ Church. The bell is rung 101 times for the 100 original scholars at the college, plus one, which was added in 1663. It’s rung at five past nine every night, corresponding with what was nine o’clock in old Oxford time.’

‘You sure it’s not a cricket score?’

Another wonderful singer taken far too soon.

One of the most atmospheric tracks on the album turned out to be ‘Youth and Age’. We pitched the demo very high as I felt that’s where it should be, so my thoughts strayed to counter-tenors and one of the finest at the time in my book, Andreas Scholl. The young German singer had recorded a stunning version of the old ballad ‘Barbara Allen’, which I’d been playing a lot on the Classic FM breakfast show. I then decided that a classically trained singer might make it too rigid, but how many pop singers had a voice in that range? I didn’t exactly smite my head with the palm of my hand Homer Simpson style and shout ‘D’oh!’, but suddenly I knew exactly who I wanted. I’d always loved Yes and the unique voice of their singer, Jon Anderson. I was given an address in the States for Jon and duly, with little hope to be honest, sent him a demo of the track. A week or two later a note from Jon snaked out of my fax machine (what sweet old-fashioned things they seem now) saying that he loved the song and would record it next time he was in England. That time came round and he arrived at the studio, full of apologies that he wouldn’t be able to sing it as the key was too high, but if I lowered it he’d come back next week and do it. I wasn’t going to let him go. He might not come back. I thought with the speed of a good guy in a radio serial trussed up by the villain with little chance of escape. ‘It would help…’ I began, not exactly sure where I was going. ‘It would help … if … you … er … that is, it’d help me … if … er, you could possibly … just go through the vocal in the current key so that I can see how much I need to lower it.’ Genius. We ran through it once, the key was perfect and Jon sounded fantastic. He surely couldn’t have doubted himself.

Jon Sweet thought we should get his vocal down quickly in case there was some sort of problem we didn’t know about. The purity of his tone gave us goose-bumps. I heard what was needed. ‘We must get him to do a trademark three-part harmony in the B section.’

‘No, we’ll put that on later.’

‘It won’t sound the same. Jon harmonising with himself will have a magic we won’t be able to get.’

‘Best not to ask him, it might be pushing him too far.’

I was about to ask anyway and pressed the talkback button to speak to him, but he got in first. ‘Mike, I think it’d sound good if I did a three-part harmony in the B section.’

Another result, especially as ‘Survival’ by Yes, with Jon on vocals of course, is my all-time favourite song.

I was very surprised that Don McLean agreed to sing one of the songs on the album. His own songs were of such a high standard that he rarely recorded other people’s numbers, but he was up for it and I was delighted. We had to fit in with his UK tour schedule which meant taking the Stones Mobile to Liverpool. Don’s agent, Malcolm Feld, did warn me that Don was very much his own man and we might or might not get a recording from him that day. The latter began to look very much more likely. He didn’t appear to be leaving his hotel. Apparently he was watching TV.

‘What do we do?’

‘You could call him,’ said Malcolm, with some hesitation.

I tried to interpret the hesitation part. Then I called Don. ‘Hi Don, How’s it going?’

‘Hi Mike, yeah, good, just hanging out looking at some TV.’

Had he forgotten? Had he changed his mind? Maybe he just wasn’t in the mood.

‘Nothing much on in the afternoon, Don.’

It wasn’t a lie: even fifteen years back, there wasn’t the choice there is now.

‘No kidding? What kinda stuff do they show?’

‘Oh, children’s shows, cartoons for the very young and probably a chunk of horseracing from some distant course like Kelso.’

‘That doesn’t sound too good. What else is happening?’

‘Well, we’ve got the Rolling Stones Mobile here, we could always record that song you wanted to do, “Farewell”. Better than being influenced by sub-standard TV.’

‘Too right. I’m on my way.’

Don treated the song as if it were his own. He made it appear effortless. And to think we nearly lost him to the 3.30 maiden handicap at Kelso. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

The remaining song, ‘Distant View’, I ended up singing by default, as we couldn’t find a singer that really fitted it. I think I got away with it.

This second album faced an early and enormous hurdle, unwittingly brought about by the second Betjeman charity evening, in aid of the Children with Leukaemia Trust (see Chapter 9). I’d already had one or two very pleasant meetings with Betjeman’s agent, Desmond Elliott, over tea at Fortnum and Mason at which I kept him abreast of the album’s progress. We would discuss his early connection with Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber and their first attempt at a musical with The Likes of Us, nibble on a few splendid gateaux, and get outside several pots of Earl Grey. OK so far, but the invitations to the charity evening went out while I was away at a tennis centre for a few days and by a complete oversight Desmond failed to receive his. When I returned from pounding tennis balls for a few hours a day I was too busy with the show to check that everybody had received their invitations. We’d got the great news that some twenty radio stations would be featuring the album and that many of those had even made it album of the week. Everyone involved felt that this was going to be a major success. Then the sky fell in. Desmond Elliott had stopped the album he’d been so keen on a week or two earlier dead in its tracks. My baffled and bemused solicitor was contacted and the project slithered to a halt. Toys were not only thrown out of the pram, they were thrown in my direction. At first he refused to take my calls, despite an apology for the oversight with regard to his invitation. When I did speak to him, he was sharp and bad tempered, insisting that I should stop calling him Desmond and refer to him in the future as ‘Mr Elliott’.

I wanted the album out, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to grovel. If a man can’t accept an honest apology in good faith he’s not much of a man in my book. His unreasonable and intransigent stance made the release of the album impossible at that time, despite a year’s hard work, creativity, time, money and an opportunity for John Betjeman’s wonderful poems to reach younger generations. By the time the album was released, much later, the momentum had been lost. I feel I should balance my opinion by stating that he was very highly thought of in the industry but we can’t all see eye to eye.

From poetic rock I lurched headily again into clergy rock as my musical settings of Rupert Brooke’s war sonnets were featured along with Elgar, Parry and Betjeman during an Armistice evening at the church of St Andrew and St Mary in Grantchester. Never commercially released, they’ve certainly had live airings from four or five choirs.

In 2002 I worked with five really talented Russian girls, two of whom were gifted classical pianists. They were here doing some shows and recorded three of my songs, ‘City to City’, ‘Moscow Nights’ and ‘The House of Usher’. Great tracks but as they weren’t in the UK permanently it was tricky to know what to do with both the songs and the girls. I recorded them under the name of Russia, with the ‘R’ turned backwards. I guess I must have misguidedly thought that it looked vaguely Russian. It did to me, but probably not to Russians. They performed at both of Cliff Richard’s Christmas shows that year, the Tennis Foundation dinner at Hampton Court and the big bash with tennis and music at the Indoor Arena at Birmingham.

Early in 2004, while still languishing in Australia following I’m a Celebrity and enjoying summer barbecues at Peter Andre’s family home, I thought it might be an idea to record something with a jungle feel. I didn’t recall anything similar from previous series and wondered why no one had thought of it. Now when you’re watching I’m a Celebrity from the relative safety of your sofa, it’s not uncommon for the sound to be muted and an apology to slide along the bottom of the screen. ‘Smut,’ you might think, ‘scandal.’ There is clearly a dark, unfathomable reason why this deeply personal conversation is not fit for transmission. Not so, say I. It’s usually because the happy campers have launched into a campfire sing-song and no one wants to pay for the right to broadcast the music. Simple as that. It was during these quiet moments that Razor Ruddock would trawl the Gilbert O’Sullivan songbook and treat us to his gruff but passable bass rendition of something like ‘Alone Again’. This was a man who’d accidentally floored the odd referee and broken the occasional leg… Who was I to argue with his impeccable taste? One of Razor’s ambitions was to be on Top of the Pops, and Charlie Brocket concurred, with something along the lines of ‘I say, what a spiffing idea.’ How could I deny my two new acquaintances?

The idea didn’t exactly come to me in the Versace Hotel bathtub, but I seem to remember that I was within feet of it, which almost makes it a ‘Eureka’ moment. Hank Mizell’s ‘Jungle Rock!’ I could re-write the lyric to include a bunch of indigenous Australian animals and do a deal with a record label. I was sure they’d bite (a record company, that is, not the animals). I called Woolworths (and no, it wasn’t our fault they went under) and they went for it, with the promise of a follow-up. I found a studio, got the track down and the song was ready for release by the time we touched down in Blighty, with our version of ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ as a second track and the I’m a Celebrity theme as a third. Top value! When we first performed it on This Morning, Peter Andre was part of the gang, but his label also planned a release so he had to put all his marketing and PR into that.

We got plenty of TV, including a morning show that Terry Wogan was presenting and Top of the Pops, and a bucketload of radio plays. Our studio performance for This Morning was brilliantly edited into a video for the single, complete with odd creatures … yes, and animals from the jungle. I took to the road doing signing sessions, being joined at some by Charlie. We were delighted when it made the top thirty and I was able to inform Charlie that he was now the second most successful peer of the realm in the history of the singles chart, sandwiched between (Lord) David Dundas and Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tufnel, Christopher Guest (Baron Haden-Guest). The single loitered on the listings for a heady five weeks, before sliding off to the great archive in the ether.

We performed at various charity events, including the Chase Children’s Hospice, CLIC Sergeant Cancer Charity and the Cliff Richard Tennis Foundation. We also performed at the Roy Castle Foundation Dinner in London, where, much to the delight of Razor, Cliff joined us on stage for the performance, while former jungle boy Uri Geller swelled our ranks for yet another charity gig. Of course Uri played spoons, promising to bend them at the end of the song and also to break one of my guitar strings simply by staring at it. On cue, the spoons bent and the string broke.

For the follow-up we recorded our version of Mungo Jerry’s ‘In the Summertime’. No new lyrics needed here, apart from amending the line, ‘Have a drink, have a drive’ and changing ‘We’re not dirty people’ to ‘We are jungle people’. OK, it may not be Byron or Keats, but it worked. We had a riot making the video at Brighton (see YouTube to gauge levels of riotousness) and the CD slipped into the chart at number seventy-two. It slipped out again the following week. At least it charted, gave us a second hit, pushed the Jungle Boys’ number of weeks on chart up to six and gave the song its first appearance on the chart since 1970. It also appeared briefly in the ringtone top twenty. Listen, all charts count, trust me. There was no third single. Jungle Boy mania, if it ever existed outside our own minds, was over. The screams subsided and lovers of good music were blissfully unaware of the group’s passing.

In the spring of 2004 I appeared in a short run of the stage musical American Patrol, alongside John Altman as Glenn Miller, but of course wrote none of the music. Later that year I found myself directing, rather than writing, a stage musical. I’d been asked by Mike Bennett, one-time member of the Fall and a damned fine actor, if I’d take the wheel of his satirical musical play, White Wedding, a look back at the ’80s. It was certainly different and received many plaudits, Blues & Soul magazine calling it ‘a comic triumph!’ Thank goodness it was meant to be funny. I wasn’t absolutely sure that I understood it, despite getting good reviews, including plaudits from, of all periodicals, Lloyd’s List: ‘More power to the elbow of such companies when they allow full rein to the skills of directors like the prolific Mike Read.’ ‘Mr Newsagent,’ I said, marching into my local shop, ‘add Lloyd’s List to my regular order as well as the Beano. It’s a ripping good read.’

In 2003 I teamed up with my pal Trevor Payne, the singer/director behind the phenomenally successful show That’ll Be the Day, to put together a musical on Cliff Richard. It would feature a wagonload of hits woven together by a fictional story. In this case the storyline was based around the eve of Cliff’s eightieth birthday, as he and his butler, (Bruce) Welch, plan the festivities and go through a list of songs for possible inclusion in the celebrations. As Cliff muses over various highlights of his long career, the story goes back in time to include scenes from Summer Holiday, Oh Boy!, Eurovision, Blind Date, Sunday Night at the London Palladium, Wimbledon and more. The action, apart from the retrospective scenes, took place at Cliff’s residence, the Keith Richards Health Farm.

We featured four Cliffs with me playing Lord Cliff, initially in a platinum wig, until the heat forced the producers to march me to the hairdressers to have dozens of streaks put into my own hair. We did a lot of TV, radio and press, but even more rehearsing, under the eagle eye of Trevor Payne and the pitch-perfect ear of our musical director, Steve Etherington. The dancing was the worst. I’ve never been a natural dancer. I’ve not even been an unnatural dancer. It took weeks of gruelling, cruel and agonising dance routines until I could get away with it.

I’d had plenty of amateur dramatic experience as a kid with audiences that were not too discerning as they comprised friends, relatives, schoolmates, local burghers and those enforced by a three-line whip or press gang. We’d generally be playing to about sixty-seven people and a few rows of empty chairs. We’ll find our way back to Cliff the Musical in a moment. Even while at Radio One and Classic FM, I was still treading the odd board. I once played Pharaoh in a production of Joseph at Dauntsey’s School in Wiltshire, dressed in giant blue suede shoes, an unfeasibly large fake quiff, a drape jacket and other extraordinary garb. Despite being in this insane outfit I was still working while not on stage. During rehearsals I dodged off to interview legendary rock & roll songwriters Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman down the line. With Potiphar and co. bashing out a song over and over again, the quietest spot I could find was in the middle of the cricket square. Trying to conduct a sensible interview with a 2-foot plastic quiff dangling in front of you and 2-foot-long clown shoes making you look incredibly foolish was pretty tricky. The weird thing was that Pharaoh was based on Elvis and here was I as Pharaoh, talking to two guys who’d written countless classics for the King. Cliff also recorded some of their songs and my next stage appearance would be Cliff the Musical playing to theatres that could hold 1,000 or 1,500, and those that turned up would have forked out serious money.