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Some Enchanted Ruin

The three great passions that were to shape my life – art, musical theatre and architecture – surfaced early. My love of architecture kicked off with a weird romantic obsession with ruined castles and abbeys which began as early as I can remember. By my teens this led to a full-blown love of architecture of all sorts. Quite where this came from is a mystery; the visual arts don’t feature in the Lloyd Webber family DNA.

In the case of theatre and pop music, it is easy to explain why. My family had an annual Christmas outing to the London Palladium pantomime.* Everything captivated me. In those days the Palladium was synonymous with popular variety theatre. All the big names played there. The pantomime was a combination of big names, big sets and contemporary pop songs that must have been a heady mix to this five-year-old. One such pantomime, Aladdin, contained a line that I still cherish:

Aladdin rubs lamp. Up pops genie.

“What is your wish, sir?”

“To hear Alma Cogan singing ‘Sugar in the Morning.’”

Curtain parts to reveal Alma Cogan singing “Sugar in the Morning.”

Very soon I had built my first toy theatre. This was first an adapted version of a Pollock’s toy theatre but eventually became a vast construction made out of play bricks baptized the Harrington Pavilion. Over the years its technical ambitions grew to such an extent that its stage acquired a revolve made from an old gramophone turntable. That revolve was a direct result of my aping the famous closing scene of TV’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium. All the stars used to line up on the legendary Palladium revolve waving good night to millions in Britain for whom that show was the television show of the late 1950s and early ’60s. To Britain it was as big as The Ed Sullivan Show in the USA. I pinch myself every morning knowing that today I own the theatre that turned me on to theatre.

London Palladium inspired pantomime and variety seasons at the Harrington Pavilion were short lived. Christmas holidays 1958 brought me full frontal with musicals for the first time. It was a baptism and a half. I saw My Fair Lady and West Side Story plus the movies of Gigi and South Pacific all in the space of four game-changing weeks. 1958 also coincided with the arrival of Harrington Court’s first long-playing gramophone. With it came an LP of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite. Unfortunately for Dad the other side was Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges Suite whose gloriously dissonant chaotic start much appealed to Julian and me. The famous march had us dancing on our bed with joy. Thus began my lifelong love of Prokofiev, in my opinion one of the greatest melodists of the twentieth century.

My Fair Lady was the talk of London throughout 1958. The legendary musical based on Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion had opened on Broadway two years earlier to ecstatic reviews, apart from one Alan Jay Lerner told me about in Variety that said there were no memorable songs. The producers did a brilliant hyping job in Britain by banning the music from being heard or performed until just before the London production opened, with the result that the Broadway cast album was the ultimate in chic contraband. Naturally Auntie Vi had one, so by the time I saw the show I knew the score backwards and had long pondered whether Rex Harrison’s semi-spoken song delivery had a place at the Harrington Pavilion. London’s lather frothed even further as the three Broadway leads, Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews and Stanley Holloway, repeated their starring roles at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane and I was lucky enough to have a ticket to see all three – actually two because Stanley Holloway was off. It’s funny how a disappointment like that stays with you forever. In my case that and the rustling front cloth depicting the exterior of Wimpole Street as Freddy Eynsford-Hill warbled “On the Street Where You Live” are what I remember most about that December Saturday matinee – apart from my showing off by singing along with the songs to show I knew them.

My love of the score took me to the movie of Gigi, the now impossibly un-PC story about a girl being groomed as a courtesan. Can you imagine what would happen if you pitched a Hollywood studio today a song sung by an old man entitled “Thank Heaven for Little Girls”? Thank heaven I was young enough only to agree and even today the overture from Gigi is something I relish hearing.

Curiously it was Granny Molly who banged on about West Side Story and it was she who took me to it. The American cast’s dancing was like nothing I’d seen before. That two stage musicals could be so different, yet equally spellbinding, had me in a tailspin. Granny bought me the Broadway cast album for Christmas and pretty soon it was my favourite of the two. I related to Bernstein’s score much as I did to Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges.

However what completely pulverized me was the film of South Pacific. I went with Mum and Dad and I remember the afternoon I saw it as vividly as the legendary colour filters that would have clobbered a lesser score. I had to wait until my birthday the following March for the soundtrack album. I still treasure my battered worn copy – incidentally it is the only album to have been No. 1 in the UK charts for a whole calendar year. By Christmas 1961 I knew the scores of Carousel, The King and I and Oklahoma! and had seen the South Pacific movie four times. But there was one other movie. It only had a few songs but it grabbed me nonetheless. Elvis in Jailhouse Rock. The “Jailhouse Rock” sequence had me standing on my seat. I still have the worn-out 45 rpm single that drove my parents to distraction.

Musicals were soon the staple diet of the Harrington Pavilion. I wrote tons of dreadful ones. An audience of bored parents, friends, relatives and anyone I could find would gather for the latest offering with Julian and me on vocals, and me alternating as pianist and scene-shifter. At its zenith the theatre’s stage, were it to have been built lifesize, would have dwarfed that of the new Paris opera house at the Bastille. Subjects included everything from The Importance of Being Earnest to The Queen of Sheba. A whole fantasy town developed around the theatre. Everyone in this town was somehow dependent upon the theatre’s well-being. The Harrington Pavilion had a box office through which the townspeople booked tickets. Hits or turkeys were assessed by the reaction of the audience of bored parents and friends.

I developed with Julian a complete world in which I could hide and where I was truly happy, a make-believe world with one common denominator, musical theatre. There were stars who came and went, made comebacks or passed into oblivion with billing to match. There were pretend directors, designers and programmes, even souvenir brochures, for I was very impressed by the stiff-covered job that went with My Fair Lady. There were special train services that ferried audiences from the fantasy town to the theatre on show nights and, when I was given my first tape recorder, original cast albums were quick to follow.

Praise be to the good Lord that the tape recorder in question was incompatible with any other. For some reason it had its own peculiar tape speed. Thus my prepubescent warblings, along with the gismo that recorded them, are mercifully lost to posterity. However I own up that two of the tunes survive in other guises. From Ernest! billed modestly as “A Musical of Gigantic Importance,” one became “Chained and Bound” in Joseph. The main melody of “Chanson d’Enfance,” appropriately titled under the circumstances, in Aspects of Love also came from this show. Quite how the latter could possibly have made sense dramatically in a musical based on Wilde’s timeless comedy eludes me.

However my burgeoning love of medieval cathedrals, ruins and churches affected me equally as deeply. I built a vast play-brick Gothic cathedral (dedicated to St Elvis) at the other end of the nursery to cope with the Harrington Pavilion theatregoers’ spiritual needs. St Elvis’s Cathedral fell victim to the wrecker’s ball and chain, i.e. Julian in a fit of rage knocked it down. But for many years the Harrington Pavilion, being glued together, survived unscathed. In the Sixties when I left home, my toy theatre was carefully dismantled and stored. But sadly it went missing when I moved house in 1974. All I have now are a very few photographs.

WITH THE TOY THEATRE shows came an increasing interest in me from Auntie Vi. Mum, frankly, whilst not disapproving of my puerile jingles, didn’t exactly approve either. She had transferred her ambition for a classical musician of a son onto three-year-old Julian, for whom she had bought a baby-sized cello. Dad, however, was starting to show an interest in what I was up to. When I was ten he took some of my tunes, arranged them very simply for the piano, and had them published under my name in a magazine called The Music Teacher with the title “The Toy Theatre.” Every now and again when I was experimenting away at the piano he’d come in and ask me how I had discovered some chord or another. I suppose that wasn’t surprising: my father, for all his grand title of Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music, truly loved melody. In fact he was the most open bloke about melody there could be.

Thus in addition to hearing all the current musicals, specially when I went to visit Auntie Vi, my father would play me music of all sorts, albeit with a heavy leaning towards Rachmaninov. Dad’s taste in “serious” music did not embrace the modernists. He did, however, admire Benjamin Britten’s orchestrations, though he would wave his cocktail-shaker in anger that Britten left for America in the Second World War as a conscientious objector. Dad repeatedly moaned that Britten thus gained a massive unfair advantage over composers like himself who stayed in bomb blitzed London and did their bit for the war effort.

In 1958 Dad decided to hit the organ keyboards again. He had given up his post at All Saints Margaret Street after the war to teach composition at the Royal College of Music. Now, a decade later, he was appointed musical director of the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster. The Central Hall services were polar opposite to the High Church trappings of All Saints. I gather his move caused quite a stir in circles where incense is a key conduit to God. But Mum was delighted. She distrusted Catholics. Catholics believe animals have no souls. The truth was that the Central Hall had one of the finest organs in Britain and Dad was itching to play publicly again. My cellist brother Julian tells me that performing was where Dad showed a steely side. Early in his career Julian asked Dad how he could overcome his pre-performance nerves. Dad rounded on him, saying if he had prepared himself properly he wouldn’t be nervous.

Apart from the occasional blood and thunder sermon or rousing free-church hymn, the ray of sunshine in the colourless services that Julian and I were now dragged to every Sunday was the moment Dad goosed up proceedings with one of his organ improvisations. Of course Methodists are teetotallers so I hope nobody examined the mineral water bottle Dad had beside him in his organ console and which, after a swig, miraculously transported him to ever greater inspirational freedom.

2014 saw the centenary of my father’s birth and there has been a welcome flurry of interest in him as a composer. This has been much encouraged by Julian’s discovery of many pieces he wrote but kept under wraps because he openly felt his music was out of step with the contemporary serious music world. It was. But, rather as late Victorian painters continued in sub Pre-Raphaelite style long after the advent of Impressionism, Cubism and the like, today we see these artists still had something to offer even if it was out of its time. I feel the same way about Dad’s music. He could have been a fantastic film composer. His work is crammed with wonderful big melodies, quite alien of course to anything in contemporary classical music, but of a scale and dramatic breadth equal to many of the famous twentieth-century film composers. I believe he knew it but couldn’t bring himself to consider going down that road.

First, in the 1930s it would have seemed like a heinous case of letting the side down for a working-class boy who had won every sort of academic gong to demean himself in the world of “commercial” music.

Secondly, he loved a fixed routine. He could never have coped with overnight rewrites demanded by a temperamental director who wanted a musical rethink like yesterday. But listen to Dad’s orchestral tone poem Aurora. I played it once for the movie director Ken Russell, who pronounced it an erotic, supercharged mini-masterpiece. The director of Women in Love should know.

I have one very vivid memory of Dad. Before we went to the movie of South Pacific he played me the Mario Lanza recording of “Some Enchanted Evening.” Three times he played it, tears streaming down his face. The third time around he muttered something about how Richard Rodgers’ publisher told him that this song would kick off the postwar baby boom.* When the record finally stopped he looked me straight in the face.

“Andrew,” he said, “if you ever write a tune half as good as this I shall be very, very proud of you.”

On that evening my love affair with Richard Rodgers’s music began. I went to bed heady with melody. Sadly, however, Dad never raised the issue of whether in my later career I’d come even halfway to equalling “Some Enchanted Evening.”

MUM, MEANWHILE, WAS DETERMINED that I should be a prodigy in something or other. So when I went to the junior department of Westminster School, known as the Under School, my mother’s eagle-eye supervision of my homework meant that I rose through the school far too fast. By the time I was eleven I was in a grade where some of the class were nearly two years older than me.

Considering I was smaller than the other boys, useless at sport, still played classical music and was the school swot, it’s not surprising that I was bullied. I needed a big idea. It came about in an unlikely way. Westminster Under School was in those days in a square that was walkable from Victoria station, two stops down the underground from “South Ken” station. Heaven knows what today’s parents would think of a journey to school involving packed trains, a walk past a shop selling “Iron Jelloids” and the Biograph, London’s first gay movie house, but that’s the journey I took twice daily. On the morning in question a saddo tried to fondle me undercover of the tight standing crush on the underground train. I was too shocked to make a fuss. But I was furious, so furious that it gave me an idea that maybe was big enough to call an epiphany. Whatever, it changed my schoolboy life.

That afternoon was the end of term concert. I was slated to play some boring piano piece by Haydn. It was time to ring the changes. I ascended the stage to a deafening yawn and announced a change of programme. There was a small flicker of interest.

“Today,” I intoned, “I am going to play some tunes I have written that describe every master in the school.”

The flicker of interest was now a flame – on the small side, but a flame nonetheless. So I dedicated to each master one of the tunes I had written for the Harrington Pavilion. After the first there was baffled applause. After the second it was heading towards strongish. During the fourth song the school was clapping along and when, before the sixth, I turned to the headmaster and said, “This one is for you,” even the other masters applauded.

At the end there was uproar. Boys were shouting “Lloydy, Lloydy!”

I was no longer the little school swot. I was Andrew. And I had become Andrew through music.

IT WOULD GREATLY SIMPLIFY writing this tome were I to claim that this was the moment I knew my destiny was to write music. But the truth is, it wasn’t. Music was an increasingly important part of my life, my safety valve in fact, but it wasn’t my overriding passion. Equal first was still architecture with art a close third.

My love of ruined castles and abbeys must have started very young because I have a scrapbook put together when I can’t have been more than six. It is stuffed with guidebooks and postcards and very childish writing about the abbeys and castles around Southampton and Portsmouth. This figures, because my father’s sister Marley lived around these parts in one of those twentieth-century houses which, like most of the sprawl on the English south coast, should be demolished forthwith.

I am pretty sure that my passion for architecture kicked off at Westminster Abbey. A few years ago I was invited to a meeting about some very exciting plans for the Abbey’s future. The Dean of Westminster produced a letter that the Abbey archivist had found which he proceeded to read. It was from me aged seven offering my pocket money to the Abbey fabric fund. “Precocious brat” was written all over the faces around the table. I have had many discussions about getting involved with the Abbey subsequently, but they always stall over my insistence that the utterly inappropriate chandeliers that were hung in the church in the 1960s are sold to a hotel in Vegas.

I shall forever have a debt to my parents for indulging my childhood obsession. Every family holiday was somewhere in Britain where there were buildings I wanted to see. One summer the family found itself in a rented house near the massive steelworks of Port Talbot in Wales because I wanted to be near a place called Margam Abbey – which, by the way, has a great orangery. The best holiday was in Yorkshire. You have to be made of Yorkshire granite not to be moved by the stunning evocative ruins of Fountains Abbey. My favourite was Rievaulx. What did the abbey look like before Henry VIII’s minions did an ISIS job on this medieval masterpiece? The imagination runs riot. The vistas to the abbey from the glorious mid-eighteenth-century park on the hill above Rievaulx are England at its Arcadian best.

What emphatically was not Arcadian was an incident still embedded irrevocably in my skull. My parents took me and Perseus the cat to Richmond Castle. The place was pretty empty, so Mum let Perseus off his dog lead. Out of the blue a bunch of cadets from the local army camp tramped into the castle courtyard as noisily as their boots would allow, caught sight of our terrified cat and chased him up the spiral staircase of one of the towers. Dad, of course, ran for cover. Even today I have a real paranoia of the army. Certainly it fuelled my childhood fear of conscription, which was still in action in Britain at that time, and ten years later heightened my sympathy with the pressganged US conscripts of the Vietnam War. That incident and the constant fearmongering headlines in the press about war over the Suez Canal throughout that hot 1955 summer led me to the dark thought that forces I could never control would some day destroy me and my little world of theatre and medieval buildings. It was during that otherwise idyllic holiday that I first prayed at bedtime.

VERY SOON THEATRES JOINED the list of abbeys, cathedrals, country houses and the like that so dominated my childhood. The 1950s saw the arrival of television. Soon the variety theatres that were so much a part of pre-war British life became sad, redundant, twitching corpses. Theatre after theatre succumbed to the wrecker’s ball. I found their plight irresistible. Some theatres literally had become ruins. I remember prising my way into the derelict Bedford Theatre in London’s Camden Town, a theatre made famous by the early twentieth-century artist Walter Sickert who painted it brimming full of vibrant life. Rain was pouring through a gaping hole in the roof. Two years later it was a memory.

Some of the lucky ones had a stay of execution by being turned into TV studios. The Chelsea Palace was one such. I was taken to a transmission of a then massive TV comedy series, The Army Game. The stalls had been raised to the level of the stage to create a huge flat floor on which the dinosaur TV cameras ducked and dived around teeny little sets. In the late 1950s that sort of show was broadcast live. For a brief period, the Harrington Pavilion was turned into a TV studio with a similar flat floor, but mercifully common sense prevailed and live theatrical performances resumed PDQ with a massive hit musical called The Weird Sisters based on Macbeth. Now the Chelsea Palace is yet another Kings Road shopping centre. What would a theatre producer give for such a wonderful building in that location now?

HOWEVER THE TV PROGRAMME that really game-changingly gripped me was a Saturday night rock’n’roll show called Oh Boy! It thrillingly made a virtue of being filmed in a theatre, a wonderful old variety house called the Hackney Empire, which intriguingly was designed by the same architect as the London Palladium, Frank Matcham. It was directed by Jack Good who went on to helm Catch My Soul, the rock Othello. He used the auditorium as if it were part of the set. Cameras swooped onto the stage over hysterical girls screaming at Brit male stars who all had surnames like Wilde, Eager or Fury. Equally great was the backing band Lord Rockingham’s XI with their intriguing choreographed instrument moves. I moaned to my mother that Brahms would be much enhanced if classical orchestras would only do this sort of thing. Years later Cliff Richard confirmed to me just how staged each show was and how he had been directed down to the last camera eyeball.

Oh Boy! made a most profound impression on me. From then on the words rock’n’roll were synonymous with musical theatre and the Harrington Pavilion was soon ablaze with rock shows.

BY THE TIME I hit double figures my brother Julian was becoming a star on his half-size cello. The word “prodigy” was bellowed above the traffic din at 10 Harrington Court and unsurprisingly Mum’s main interest switched to my younger sibling. Notwithstanding this, we both entered the Saturday morning junior school at the Royal College of Music, me toting my shiny french horn.

But as far as Mum was concerned I was at best a conundrum and so she gave up on my academic career and, buoyed by events at the school concert, I gave up on it too. Thoughts of my being the youngest ever Queen’s Scholar at Westminster Great (i.e. senior) School evaporated. I wasn’t even entered for the scholarship exam called “the Challenge.” Mum’s sole consolation prize was that I entered Westminster aged twelve, a full year earlier than usual. Meantime I was getting closer and closer to my deliciously naughty Aunt Vi.