Unmasked

Murray provided indefatigable guide vocals. A gospel choir, the Trinidad Singers, was hired for the chorus and the “soul trio” were a pair of seasoned white session girls, Sue and Sunny, augmented by Lesley Duncan, the singer-songwriter who later famously duetted with Elton John. Ironically the white soul singers at first sounded blacker than the gospel choir who seemed rather overawed and kicked off more Ascot Gavotte than Caribbean. But when it all eventually started to cook, everyone was astonishing. I tried several variations of the final choruses with the band, but on the master take Alan and Bruce took things into their own hands and played syncopations that defied gravity. Afterwards I wrote them all out, but although I’ve got rock sections to replicate what they did, it never sounds quite the same.

The timekeeping problem did prove a nightmare for the orchestra. I had scored the big “Superstar” chords in full Guildhall School of Music textbook “Also Sprach Zarathustra” overdrive. Recording that was easy. But recording the linking bridge section, where the full orchestra plays syncopated phrases precisely in time with the rock section, might have had my father’s Methodist minister craving a sip of Dad’s so-called water bottle. With the session clock ticking, we finally got a great take, only for Alan O’Duffy to announce to the whole studio that he had failed to put the tape machine into record. I went nuts. Calmly he got the orchestra to do another take and miraculously it too was perfect.

When the 70-odd players had gone Alan asked if I would like to hear back my orchestra. The sod had recorded them twice. My 70-piece orchestra now numbered 140. Maybe it was this naughty rock’n’roll Heath Robinson vibe in the studio, maybe the sheer adrenaline that comes when you create something spontaneously that you can’t really write down or maybe the vocal creativity that Murray brought to take after take, but whatever the reason that original recording of “Superstar” has never been bettered.

The B-side was orchestral and in two sections. The first was a very Richard Straussian arrangement for heavily divided strings of the melody that eventually became “Gethsemane.” I already knew what I would compose for the crucifixion and my instinct was that this music would become its coda. I wanted the antithesis to the stark horror of Jesus’s death, something overripe and more stained-glass window than wood and nails, that hinted at how Jesus became sentimentalized in paintings like Holman Hunt’s Light of the World or the Baroque excesses of southern Italy. Tim dubbed the music “John 19:41” after the verse in St John’s Gospel describing Jesus’s body resting in his tomb. The second part never made it to the final “opera.” It was a fun tune in 7/8 time which I thought might come in handy if we wanted something celebratory, possibly after Jesus’s triumphant return to Jerusalem. We didn’t.

When Tim, David Land and I played the single to Mike Leander and Brian Brolly, Brian was euphoric. He truly thought it was a major – he even used the word “cathartic” – breakthrough for pop. He pronounced that his American masters would unquestionably finance the rest of the unwritten “rock opera,” as it was decided the non-existent opus would be billed. David Land kept mumbling about what he would say at some friend’s son’s imminent barmitzvah, but the discussion quickly centred on what the single should be called. We settled on “‘Superstar’ from the Rock Opera ‘Jesus Christ.’”

Everyone agreed that we needed a leading clergyman to endorse the single. An obvious target was Martin Sullivan at St Paul’s Cathedral. Martin was delighted to help and wrote, “There are some people who may be shocked by this record. I ask them to listen to it and think again. It is a desperate cry. Who are you, Jesus Christ? is the urgent enquiry and a very proper one at that.” Martin immediately offered St Paul’s Cathedral for the premiere if and when we finished “Jesus Christ.” We never took up the offer. Events overtook us. But he did give us this advice. Strict, or as he put it, fringe Christians would be bound to denounce our work, but that didn’t bother him. He was certain that most Christians would actively embrace it. His concern was that we could inadvertently offend Jews.

We were taken aback. We were supported by two Jewish businessmen and this possibility had never been touched on. It was not on our radar to write anything that could be remotely interpreted that way. Tim told Martin that his take would spring from whether history had treated the motives of Judas Iscariot and Pontius Pilate unfairly and that he couldn’t see how that could be offensive to anyone. I added that Sefton and David, plus their many connections in London’s Jewish community, would surely flag any problem. For years Martin’s warning seemed unfounded. It wasn’t until the film of Jesus Christ Superstar was released in the US that it proved real.

BRIAN BROLLY WENT INTO overdrive. “Superstar” would lurch out in the UK on November 21. He secured releases in every major territory and a few I’d never heard of. Of course the most important was the USA where Brian’s ultimate boss Mike Maitland quickly became the project’s unstinting champion. The American release was set for December 1. Back in the UK there was high excitement because we were offered a live performance on David Frost’s Saturday night ITV show. This had two consequences: outraged viewers jamming the ITV switchboard and the beginning of my deep friendship with David that continued up to his far too early death in the summer of 2013.

A rather irritating storm was fabricated by the Daily Express. A creative journalist managed to get quotes that implied we had asked John Lennon to play Jesus. This was ludicrous. For openers there was no score or script to show him. Even today this fabricated rubbish persists as fact. But despite the huge TV plug and this mini furore, the UK reaction was disappointingly ho-hum. Britain wasn’t ready for the single that Brian Brolly hailed as “cathartic” and, it turned out, nor was the USA. True there was a ripple of interest, but the big Christmas releases and the subject matter meant airplay was minimal. Thankfully the single did take off in a strange assortment of territories like Holland and Brazil and Brian Brolly confirmed a then massive budget of £20,000 for us to record our “rock opera.” (Today £318,000.)

Having got this nod from MCA we realized we’d better write it. My relative new wealth meant that I had tried most of London’s gastronomic hotspots, so I thought it time to get our creative juices flowing in the countryside. I alighted on a then ace watering hole, Stoke Edith House Hotel in deepest rural Herefordshire, having checked out there was an annex with a grand piano and that it served duck “en croute,” a dish whose pastry, Auntie Vi opined, would taste like “clotted greasy bollocks.” Tim remembers that we didn’t do too much writing. I certainly remember scouring every record shop in a damp Christmassy Hereford for our single without much success. I also remember writing a rude note in the Hereford Cathedral visitors’ book cursing the Dean and Chapter for heinously chucking out the superb nineteenth-century chancel screen by Gilbert Scott. Their crass, insensitive stupidity can be gauged in the Victoria & Albert Museum where the screen now lives. Hopefully one day it will be returned.

What we did do was map out the storyline of what was now confirmed as a double album. Overriding everything was that we were telling our story in sound and sound alone. We had none of the visual elements of theatre and film to fall back on. A cast-iron musical and dramatic structure was the key. In my department, rhythm, orchestral textures, time signatures and melody had to be deployed to keep our listeners’ styluses in the grooves. Crucially important was how to reprise and pace material for dramatic effect. Dialogue had no place on a record, so the music and lyrics had to carry everything.

We did take one major decision in Herefordshire which was an important first step in creating the musical structure. It was where to put the pre-existing single “Superstar.” One thought which we rejected was to use it as a prologue to the album. I suggested that, if ever our work was staged, it could accompany Jesus’s journey from the place of his trial before Pilate to Golgotha where he was crucified. Thus Judas would become a narrator commenting on a version of the Stations of the Cross. In any event it felt completely right for Tim’s questions to come towards the end of the piece and before Jesus’s ultimate sacrifice.

This decision meant that the big “Superstar” chords had to be the climax of the trial. I had an instinct that whatever I composed for the trial should be condensed and become the overture. Also I figured that the overture had to show off my hugely varied musical forces of synthesizers, orchestra, rock group and choir in two minutes. The overture does this in precisely that order. It is indeed an edited version of the trial with the questioning motif that ends the opera sung by the choir as a prelude to Judas setting out his stall with “Heaven on Their Minds.” Tim comes straight to the point. “My mind is clearer now / [ … ] if you strip away the myth from the man / You can see where we all soon will be / Jesus you’ve started to believe / The things they say of you / You really do believe / This talk of God is true” before begging the man who he admires and even loves not to let his followers get so far out of hand that the occupying Romans crush them once and for all.

In truth we were writing a musical radio play. Ultimately this gave us one enormous advantage. Audiences came to know our recording so well that no future director or producer could add musical passages for scene changes or tamper with the construction. The score had become set in stone. There is a famous story regarding my Cats collaborator Trevor Nunn directing Mozart’s Idomeneo at Glyndebourne Opera. During a rehearsal he asked conductor Simon Rattle if he could repeat a section to cover a complicated stage move. Rattle shot back, “This is Mozart not Andrew Lloyd Webber.” Thanks to the record not even Trevor could ask this of Superstar. Actually on second thoughts I am not so sure.

The New Year dawned with young American conscripts still being killed in Vietnam. Back home the troubles in Northern Ireland were festering, although on the mainland we were then still pretty much unaware of them, and there was a divisive General Election looming. But there was little inkling of this that winter. Brian Brolly wanted the double album for release in the fall of 1970. We set ourselves a target to complete the writing by Easter with my target to have the orchestration finished by May. In fact we finished way earlier which was just as well. For there was, as P.G. Wodehouse put it, a fly in an otherwise unsullied ointment. I fell deeply, passionately, head over heels in love.

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