One of the more bizarre moments in my music business career came about in 1984. This particular incident should have made the Guinness Book of Records.
It had been a pretty typical Monday morning in October. From my vantage point at 1 Hyde Park Place, overlooking the park, I was made particularly aware of the onset of winter. The lofty oaks were turning into a pyramid of bronze, enhanced in their beauty by the copper, yellow and fading greens – a vast swathe of colour stretching across Hyde Park. Each area of tree stepped in front of the other, like some multi-scenic stage set, where the only way of creating the optical illusion of depth was by layering the props. Yes, winter was on its way.
The thoughts of winter led me to stomach-warming feelings of Christmas, which in turn led me to thinking about festive songs and carols.
Suddenly, donner und blitzen! I dashed away, but only as far as the nearest telephone. Within thirty minutes, I had rung a dozen songwriters asking each the same question.
‘Do you by any chance have an unpublished Christmas song?’
Each time the answer came back as an unqualified, ‘No!’
My inquiries had started at about 12 noon and, by 1.30 p.m., I was washed up. I thumbed through my telephone book looking for other names of writers who might be able to conjure up that elusive song, but to no avail. The clock ticked to 2.30 p.m. when, out of the blue, one of the writers whom I had phoned, Mike Leander, rang me back.
As a writer, arranger and producer, Mike had enjoyed huge success in the sixties and seventies with many smash hit songs, and unbeknown to me, he would later feature quite prominently in my life.
The essence of Mike’s phone call was that since speaking to me two hours earlier he’d had the gem of an idea for a new Christmas song.
‘Give me an idea of the melody.’
Mike sung me the first part of a song.
‘Sounds good to me,’ I said.
‘Great, I’ll work on it for another hour or so. Would you be interested in hearing it at about four o’clock this afternoon?’
‘Sure, let me know when you’re ready.’
He arrived a few hours later, beaming from ear to ear.
‘I’ve got it. I hope you like it.’
He hummed the tune, showed me a partly finished lyric and asked me if I would pay a couple of hundred pounds to get a demo of it done that very evening. ‘Yeah, go for it,’ I replied.
On the Tuesday morning, Mike played me the demo and we both knew that we had a hit. Now all we needed was a singer. With this, Mike came out with a wonderful suggestion, well, wonderful at the time. He had written many a smash hit for Gary Glitter in the early seventies. Gary’s career had been in a bit of a slump of late, so it seemed like the perfect combination. We whisked the demo immediately round to Gary Glitter, and his answer was, ‘When can we do it?’
The studio was booked for 7 p.m. that evening and by early morning the next day – less than thirty-six hours from its conception – we had a finished master that we all knew would be a huge success.
On Wednesday morning, I went to see David Simone, who was then the managing director of Arista Records, and a deal was quickly struck.
And so, a piece of pop history had been made. A song that had existed only in someone’s mind was now written, recorded, with a finished master, and a deal struck for its release all within forty-eight hours.
The record was released a month later and, by Christmas 1984, Gary Glitter’s record, ‘Another Rock and Roll Christmas’ had reached number 7 in the charts. The song has since gone on to become a perennial Christmas favourite and has sold in excess of 4,500,000 units worldwide.
It was always a dream of mine to put on a musical on the West End stage, but finding the right subject was always going to be the problem. One day Mike Leander came to see me with the idea of a musical based on the life of a great Spanish bullfighter called El Cordobés, who had become a superstar in the sixties with his audacity in the bullring, his smouldering good looks, and his stylish haircut, which led the press to refer to him as the fifth Beatle.
My imagination was sparked by all the potential elements of Spain – flamenco dancing, heat and dust, Don Quixote and the bullfight. They were all there and, combined with Spanish music, it seemed too great an opportunity to miss.
Mike had started writing the musical with his lyricist, Eddie Seago, in 1983. I sat and listened to a few of his demos. They were absolutely fantastic. One song in particular, ‘A Boy from Nowhere’, sounded like a masterpiece, with the potential to be a signature tune, like ‘My Way’ had become for Frank Sinatra.
A few months later, Dick Leahy and I, along with Sony Records, became the principal investors in this new musical, which was to be called Matador.
The first thing the show needed was a star. The female lead had to be in the mould of the fifties film star Ava Gardner, who had lived and loved the bullfight. Who better than my great friend Stefanie Powers. Stef had even studied to become a novillero, a junior bullfighter, and knew more about the blood lines of Spanish bulls than most aficionados.
We had considered Tom Jones for the lead. He would have been perfect for the part of the matador, as he was already an established star and would have attracted many thousands of customers. But we needed the bullfighter to be in his late teens and, although Tom has always looked younger than his age, even he would have struggled to convince the public that he was under twenty-one. The leading male role was given to John Barrowman, a little-known actor at that time, but one with great potential.
However, Tom did perform a number of songs on the concept album that was released in 1987 – my favourite of which, ‘A Boy from Nowhere’, went to number 2 in the charts. It also went a long way to re-energising Tom’s career at that time.
On the night Matador opened at the Queen’s Theatre in 1991, I took the Duchess of York as my guest. It received polarised reviews from the critics, some glorious and some damning; however, I thought it was wonderful. Its main aggressor turned out not to be the critics, but the Gulf War. It changed the plans of many thousands of tourists who were, and still are, the backbone of the British theatrical industry.
The war started one week before our opening night, when it was too late for us to stop the process. Without this international incident, which stopped American tourists in particular coming to London, we might have had ‘sold out’ signs up every night. But it was not to be, and sadly the show closed after only three months.
Despite losing a small fortune, one of the best aspects to come out of the show was Matador winning a Laurence Olivier Award – British theatre’s equivalent to an Oscar – for best choreography. It was for an absolutely terrific sequence, featuring a dancing bull made up of seven Spanish dancers.
The music still lives on and, hopefully, one day it will return to the West End stage.
• • •
Mike Leander is best known as the producer and co-writer of eleven consecutive Top 10 hits in the early seventies for Gary Glitter, including three number ones. ‘Another Rock and Roll Christmas’ was Glitter’s final hit in 1984, before his subsequent imprisonment on sexual abuse charges.
In the sixties, Leander had worked as a producer, arranger and songwriter for some of the biggest stars of the day, such as Marianne Faithfull, Billy Fury, Lulu, Shirley Bassey, Van Morrison, Roy Orbison and Gene Pitney. In 1964 Atlantic Records invited him to work with the legendary Ben E. King and the Drifters in the USA, where he had an immediate number one hit with ‘Under the Boardwalk’. He also scored, arranged and produced the soundtrack for the film Privilege, starring Paul Jones.
In 1967 Paul McCartney asked Leander to write the orchestral score for ‘She’s Leaving Home’ on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, because the Beatles’ producer and arranger George Martin was busy working with Cilla Black. This was said to have caused Martin to be genuinely upset with the Fab Four, although he did produce the recording using Leander’s score. This made Mike Leander the only orchestral arranger apart from George Martin to work on an original track by the Beatles.