Dave Caruso: “You might
not recognize the name of our first guest. As he once told me, that’s
often the fate of the non-performing songwriter.
There’s no ‘Tony Macaulay Greatest Hits’ album available, since his songs
were recorded by a variety of artists, on a variety of different record
labels.
But if you like melodic pop music in the classic songwriting style, you’ll
probably recognize his music. Let’s listen:”
[AUDIO CLIP: OPENING MEDLEY]
Build Me Up, Buttercup (The Foundations)
(Last Night) I Didn’t Get To Sleep At All (The Fifth Dimension)
Love Grows
(Where My Rosemary Goes) (Edison Lighthouse)
(It's Like a)
Sad Old Kinda Movie (Pickettywich)
Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again (The Fortunes)
Don’t Give Up On Us (David Soul)
Baby, Now That I’ve Found You (The Foundations)
Smile A Little Smile For Me (The Flying Machine)
“Tony Macaulay is a songwriter and music producer who, in 1967, went from
nowhere to number one in the U.K., with a song he co-wrote, called, ‘Baby,
Now That I’ve Found You.’ He followed that with a long string of pop
releases that he co-wrote, wrote or produced, as recorded by artists such
as The Foundations, The Fifth Dimension, David Soul, The Fortunes, The
Hollies, Glen Campbell, Andy Williams, Elvis Presley, The Drifters, Tom
Jones, Donna Summer, Aretha Franklin, Gladys Knight, Johnny Mathis, Olivia
Newton John, and Engelbert Humperdinck.
In this episode, you’ll hear the stories behind some of Mr. Macaulay’s
songs. We’ll talk about his songwriting process and we’ll get to know some
of the artists with whom he worked and some of his songwriting
collaborators. We’ll even get some valuable tips on songwriting for the
theater. I couldn’t have asked for a more interesting or accommodating
guest for our inaugural show.”
DC: “Tony Macaulay, welcome to Songwriter Stories, and let’s talk about
songwriting!”
DC: “Whoever wrote that biography on your website did a tremendous job!”
Tony Macaulay: [Laughs]
DC: “I learned a lot. I also learned things on Wikipedia about you. One of
the things I learned is you were born as Anthony Gordon Instone. Is that
correct?”
TM: “Yes, that’s right.”
DC: “And what made you change it to Macaulay?
TM: “Well, when I started in the business I was a promotion man or a
‘plugger’ is what they called them then (I think they still do). And that
is someone who goes around radio stations trying to get records played for
a publisher or a record company.
But in those days in the UK, apart from the
pirate ships, there was only
the BBC that mattered. And the
British Broadcasting Corporation was our
national station. We hadn’t got commercial stations when I started out in
the mid-‘60s. And a high-up, executive in the company was a distant
relative of mine by the name [Anna] ‘Instone,’ (which is actually a derivation of
‘Einstein’ — Albert Einstein the scientist was my grandfather’s cousin).
It was such an unusual name and also she wasn’t much liked, this woman.
She used to enjoy the bottle; they called her ‘Anna GIN-stone.’ And it was
thought nepotistic if I had the same name as a promotion man, and so they
said, would I change my name.
And in those days, as in New York and many other cities, the exchanges
didn’t have numbers — the
telephone exchanges had *names*, like in New
York — ‘Judson 4760,’ you know. And the same thing was in England. And
Macaulay was the name of a telephone exchange. But anyway, I only got
through the first page and there were the names of the various exchanges
and ‘Tony Macaulay’ had a ring to it and that was that.”
DC: “OK! You were song plugging at Essex [Publishing], but then you started eventually
producing at
Pye
[Records]. Was that around 1967?”
TM: “Yes. Yes. I only ever wanted to become a record producer and
songwriter, and I soon realized that my only hope of dong that was trying
to approach it from the inside of the industry, not from the outside. In
those days, there were no more than about a dozen record producers in the
whole industry. Nearly all were contracted directly to record companies.
The only way of ever becoming a record producer was if somebody got fired
and they were looking for someone new. And I worked my way up from a music
publishing company called
EMI Records and from there I went sideways and
went from being a promotion man to a junior record producer.
And eventually got around to recording my own songs. I’d lost faith in my
own songs, somewhat by then. But as soon as I started recording my own
songs, I started having hits. After that, things got better and better.”
DC: “Did Essex and Pye have any kind of relationship?”
TM: “No. I had the offer of being a plugger at Essex and I seized it with
both hands. I had no idea what a plugger even was. I just knew I was going
to be salaried to a proper entity within the music industry, and once I
was on the inside, I would hear the sort of jobs I wanted to get. And I
used every means possible.
I got lots of favors from studios; used time when nobody was booked in
there for nothing to make all sorts of records and recordings — none of
which were successful but they got better and better and more and more
accomplished, to the point that I felt brave enough to play them to record
companies to show that I could produce records.”
DC: “‘Baby, Now That I’ve Found You’ was one of the first successes you
had?”
TM: “Yeah, it was a tune we’d had for a long time. And the truth of the
matter is, I got a phone call from over at the studio at Pye Records and
they said, ‘What are you doing at home? You’ve booked this band in for an
audition.’ And I thought, oh, my God, I had! And I was so hung over, when
I got to the studio, and I really couldn’t tell whether they were any good
or not — it was just a bloody awful noise in my head, the band. So [I gave
them] the benefit of the doubt, and agreed to rehearse the song with them.
We went to a pub, in a room above a pub, 70, 80, a hundred years before it
had been the home of Karl Marx, the man who invented Communism, this room
we rehearsed in.
I hadn’t even really finished the song. I had so little faith in the song
and so little faith in them. And myself, really, at the time, which is why
the lyric is so incredibly repetitive. And I had a lot of trouble making
it.
I had to re-dub the bass ‘cause the guy couldn’t play and [the guy]
couldn’t sing the line before the chorus — ‘Darlin’, I just can’t let
you,’ — he just couldn’t get that, so we got backing singers to sing that.
Then that sounded ridiculous all on its own so we wrote all sorts of other
vocal backing parts. I did hand claps and God knows what else, and at the
end of it all it really did sound like a hit.”
DC: “You know, I would never have known that there was a reason for the
background vocals to sing that part. I noticed that they did, but I didn’t
realize that there was a story behind it, so that’s great.
‘John
Macleod’ [also spelled 'McLeod'] — am I pronouncing his name correctly?”
TM: “Yeah.”
DC: “I read that he was your mentor at Pye.”
TM: “I met him the day I joined the business, several years before. He was
my father’s generation, he’d been through the war. He was an extremely
good arranger — one of the best I ever worked with. And also a pretty good
harmonist and pianist, you know. I only played the guitar at that point.
And I watched him play and we started writing songs together. And when we
finished writing a song, he’d show me how to play it on the piano. And
very gradually I learned — I spent hours and hours locked away after work,
teaching myself the piano.
I learned an awful lot of music from him. But as with all these things,
there came a point when really... the chemistry was no longer working.
After a couple of years, I was fortunate enough to be in demand to write
with all the best people in the business. And all sorts of pop acts wanted
to write with me and so on, and I was anxious to get out in the field. I
didn’t think he was contributing as much — he was certainly doing
wonderful arrangements but I felt I was writing a lot on the guitar on my
own and on the piano on my own. It came to a natural end, really but
there’s no question about it — I learned an enormous amount of music from
him that, had I been working with someone who was as musically ignorant as
I was, I would never have probably developed the technique that I did over
the years.
When it came to business, he was as naive as I was. He’d never had any
success as a songwriter until I came along, when he was in his 50s. So
consequently, we did as almost all writers did in those days, we signed a
pretty obnoxious contract with some pretty obnoxious publishers who were
(like so many music publishers in those days) completely and utterly
bent.”
DC: “Which of your co-writers were also at Pye?”
TM: “None. Almost everybody I wrote with had been successful for a decade
before I even came along. So they’re all about ten years older than me.
And these people, that I’d been buying their records they’d written loving
their songs for years suddenly became my friends and people I was writing
with.”
DC: “I wondered about that because when I look at your co-writers’ work
without you, I would say it’s generationally a little bit older-sounding
than yours.”
TM: “Well I was the sort of — at that particular point, all those years
ago, — the sort of new kid on the block. And being a record producer for a
major record company also helped. But most of the songwriters of that era
*were* record producers. And the good thing was that we all had acts we
were recording, many of which were successful acts. And so if you wrote
with another songwriter / record producer, the song would immediately be
eaten up by one or other of us, to be at the very least an album track.
But obviously we were trying to write as many singles as we could.”
DC: “Which artists were you the most heavily involved with as a songwriter
or producer or both?”
TM: “What period are you talking about?”
DC: “Well, we’re really looking at like, I think the late 60s, early 70s
right now.”
TM: “Well, till 1969 the only acts that matter for this conversation were
The Foundations,
Long John Baldry (who I had a number one hit with in
England, it was my second hit), a little group called ‘Paper Dolls’ I had
a top-five hit with called ‘Something Here in My Heart’ (I offered it to
Scott Walker, The Hollies and a number of other people), we had a hit with
a group called Pickettywitch called ‘Same Old Feeling,’ which was Top 5.
And it was really only when I left Pye and the first record after that was
‘Love Grows [(Where My Rosemary Goes)]’ with Edison Lighthouse that I started really just recording
my own acts and really wrote with everyone that I could, you know.”
DC: “Did you play or sing on any of the songs you produced?”
TM: “Oh, God yeah.”
DC: “Any examples of that that we might be able to
hear?”
TM: “Yes. I sang vocal backups. Strangely enough, my voice has
actually got better and better over the years but at the time it really
wasn’t all that good at all. I could sing in tune, but it wasn’t a sound
you wanted to listen to. And whenever I did
demonstration records to sell
my songs to people I always used top session singers. I never thought my
voice was good enough. Strangely enough, it’s actually [laughs] really not
too bad these days but I sang vocal backups on a lot of tracks, I played
all sorts of percussion instruments all sorts of overdubs from bass
guitar, guitar — whatever was missing that I could play, I played, dubbed
on myself, you know.
[On] ‘Build Me Up, Buttercup’ I added little organ licks which are key to
the song and added vocal backing and played the tambourine, all sorts of
stuff.”
DC: “You write on piano and guitar now, ever since you started adding
piano to your arsenal, right?”
TM: “Yeah.”
DC: “At what point in your songwriting process do you reach for your
instrument? I like to do it late in the process. I don’t do it
early.”
TM: “What do you mean?”
DC: “I start it in my head, melodically and chord-ally, before I touch any
instrument. Do you do the same thing or do...”
TM: “I *have* done, yeah, some big songs I wrote walking down the street
and came home and found out the chords were quite good and they all had
some integrity when you actually played them. But in general, I’m just
playing, for whatever reason, sitting down at the piano in the right mood
or with guitar, things tend to....
In the period you’re talking about, through the ‘60s & ‘70s, it often
depended on having a good title, or someone having asked you — some star
name having asked you — to write something for them and therefore you
having their voice and their particular style in your head at the time.
Having a piece of melody that you thought was good but you didn’t have a
lyric for... It was nearly always we started with a hook melody and once
we got the hook really sounding great, we wrote all the other elements to
it and would work out guitar licks and opening riffs and things like that.
So everything was pretty meticulously done.
By the time it got to the end of the first chorus, I’d always know whether
it was going to be a hit or not. I think about a half a dozen times in my
whole career when I was [laughs] resolutely wrong. But in general — often
when I got to the end of the first chorus, I thought ‘well that’s an album
track, that’s never a hit.’ Or it’s a B-side or something.
Only a percentage of the songs you wrote screamed at you that they were
hits. And sometimes songs were borderline, where we said, well, if that
was an unknown artist it wouldn’t be a hit but if I recorded it with major
stars who were big at the time, that probably *would* be a hit. That name
would help carry it. So there were a lot of considerations.”
DC: “In an interview once you said that you’ve contributed both music and
lyrics to every collaborative experience you’ve had.”
TM: “That’s right, yeah. The only case where that wasn’t true was the
first big musical I wrote. They brought in an American who’d just won a
Tony on Broadway and they thought that would help. And it did. But in
general, I’ve never written lyrics to anyone else’s tune because my brain
doesn’t work that way around.”
DC: ”Okay, so you’ve also collaborated
with a *wide* variety of partners, whereas most people have one or two or
three partners...”
TM: “Well, I was a musical whore, you know. [Laughs.] Every time I sit
down with somebody new, they’ll have a snippet of melody inspires me or a
bit of lyric or just some element that gets us going and that’s turned out
to be true.”
DC: “Well, despite all of this variety and versatility, many of your songs
manage to have something in common, to my ears. And it’s more than just
the era they came from. I’m specifically speaking of the late ‘60s and
early ‘70s portion of your catalogue. To me, it seems to begin with the
types of melodies and chord changes, which are written, some would say, in
a ‘classic’ songwriting style. What would *you* say contributes to ‘the
Tony Macaulay sound?’”
TM: “Well,
Clive Davis, who was a great mentor for so many of us right
until Simon Cowell — Simon Cowell was mentored by Clive Davis and he was
the head of CBS Records, then he was head of Arista. And he had... the
list of artists that he has mentored is staggering. And he was one of the
great gurus of pop music. He used to say that a great pop song has a
conversational verse and an anthemesque chorus. And there’s a huge amount
of truth in that. It’s not true of every song. There is no formula for
writing songs.
But to me, the first four measures of the chorus of any song should have
all the magic in the world. It doesn’t matter how much magic is in the
rest of the song. If that doesn’t give you a kick the first time you hear
it, then something’s wrong or the song doesn’t have it. And I’m very, very
conscious of the chords and the bass line and the rhythm and the tempo,
and all the things that may give a song a commercial feel. So I don’t even
bother starting a song unless I can get a kick out of it every time I play
the chorus.
Very often, I just have the first four bars of melody and a dummy lyric
just to have words to sing. Paul McCartney used to say the dummy lyric for
Yesterday was ‘Scrambled Eggs.’ ‘Scarmbled eggs... all I really need is
scrambled eggs.’ So you have a dummy lyric. And often the test of it will
be if I wake up the following morning and it’s on my mind and that would
be a very good test. And it kept on coming back to me. Sometimes it comes
back to you in slightly refined form.
So the next thing I would do is put it in the highest key that it was
feasible to sing it in. Because when you get to the chorus, you want the
song to really have some impact. And in order for it to sound like the
singer is putting as much emotion into it as possible, it’s very often the
best idea to take a leaf out of opera and put the song in the highest key
the singer can hit at that point. If you do that, then it gives you all
the rest of the scale to write the rest of the song in a lower range, so
you can set the chorus up properly. Whereas if you just make the mistake
of so many songwriters do of singing it in the key you’re most familiar
with, or most comfortable with, the song flatlines — it doesn’t have any
dynamic shift. It doesn’t change gear in the chorus.”
DC: “You build emotionally and dramatically toward the chorus.”
TM: “Yeah, that’s everything. So, the interaction, the transition out of
the verse into the chorus is the most important part of the song. So not
only would I be looking at what the verse says lyrically in order to set
the chorus lyric up, and melodically so that it starts well, builds into
the chorus, I’ll be looking at all the ‘musical engineering,’ [laughs] you
might call it. All the modulation possibilities, especially later on, but
a lot of my songs have modulations in them. And they’re all designed to
set up, to give the song the maximum amount of excitement. So when you get
to the chorus, there’s a sense of going somewhere.
And we didn’t always get it right. Often I’d have to go back and re-record
a song again with a different verse, because sometimes we were so excited
about the chorus that we sloughed the verse off, didn’t give it enough
thought. The most important thing then was to routine the song and that
was having a tremendous amount of discussion.
And if it was going to be an unknown artist you were going to do the song
with, then you needed to give the listener (i.e. the disc jockey or the
radio show producer) some bloody good to hear right really quick. And so
we’d often start with the chorus and hit them over the head as hard as we
could in the first forty-five seconds of the song.
If it was going to be a star name, where people were gonna be somewhat
more patient, and wait a minute or two to decide whether they liked it or
not, then we might decide to start with the verse. Or perhaps just half a
chorus — a verse and then into the chorus. Even then, we tried to keep the
verses fairly to the point. So we got to the chorus pretty quickly.
And in that event, we might put in a really impactive intro — something
with a strong guitar lick or some string line or something that made you
think, ‘Hey, this sounds interesting.’
So a lot of thought went into how you laid the song out. And record,
rehearsing it with the artist to find out the perfect pieces to it — not
just for them but also for the orchestra for the guitars or all the
strings and all of these things taken into account. And so on and so
forth.”
DC: “You covered everything I was gonna cover. I wanted to you to cover
orchestration because there’s horns in a lot of The Foundations songs, and
you’ve got strings in a lot of the songs. And you also talked about
modulation. And I wanted to mention real quick for the listeners that in
‘Don’t Give Up On Us, Baby,’ in the David Soul version, you sort of —
maybe it was intentional and maybe it wasn’t — but you sort of do an
‘almost key change,’ at the end of the bridge when you’re on the V [five] chord
and you...”
TM: [Laughs] “Yeah, it’s a fake, it adds a bit of tension.
DC: “Yep, and then later...”
TM: “Yeah, it just adds a bit of tension. But when we came to the proper
key change, it goes up a half step towards the end, he couldn’t sing that.
He just couldn’t hear it. And so what you hear is you hear three other
voices double-tracked singing that — ‘don’t... give...’ — it moves up a
half step and I just dubbed them in that one section to cover the fact
that he couldn’t hear the key change.”
DC: “It came out great. It came out great. Now let’s talk about
collaboration a little bit, if you don’t mind.”
TM: “Well, in the pop era, it wasn’t until we got ‘(Last Night) I Didn’t
Get To Sleep At All’ and ‘Don’t Give Up On Us’ and so on that I started
having hits on my own. But when I was writing so much... one of the
reasons I collaborate is to just bring somebody else in with a fresh set
of ideas. Cause when you become a one-man song factory, you need all the
help you can get.
So in those years I collaborated, largely collaborated. It wasn’t until I
started doing musicals and things later on I started doing things alone
entirely. I don’t enjoy collaborating at all anymore. I mean, it sounds
arrogant, but usually if anything’s gonna work, it works pretty quickly.
And also, some songwriters, I remember one particular songwriter who shall
be nameless saying to me, ‘Come on, the football starts in an hour. We can
get this done by then.’ And I said, ‘I don’t give a damn about the
football, the song’s finished when it’s finished.’
And I can labor on the lyrics for weeks, months sometimes, getting to the
perfect line or the perfect rhyme or the perfect rhythm. A lot of
collaborators just want the thing done, after a period of time. A song’s
never done till it’s done, you know.
Talking about the theater particularly, they say ‘If it ain’t on the page,
it ain’t on the stage,’ and that’s absolutely true, isn’t it?”
DC: “Well, in those early days with The Masons [Barry
Mason] and
Roger Cook and
Roger Greenaway and John
Macleod and...”
TM: “Well those were writers... you know, in those days, if we met to
write, then we could start at ten o’clock in the morning and by
(frequently) afternoon, we’d have a complete song done. Or we’d split up
at the end of the day and then meet for an hour or two a week later and
just finish the lyric or something. Because you know, with me playing the
guitar after about seven or eight hours my fingers were pretty tired.”
DC: “Gotcha. Were some of them [not] musicians?”
TM: “Yes. They all were, but I always played. Don’t ask me why, but I
always did.”
DC: “Did each of you bring something to the table to start a song? Each of
you would...”
TM: “Well, I mean
Geoff Stephens, who was an ex-schoolmaster, only plays
in the key of ‘C’ but my God he was an incredible, natural composer. Talk
about writing tunes in your head, I mean he had an extraordinary natural
ability to come up with melodies. And pop songwriting is not like other
music forms. A lot of it’s instinct. Understanding the market and the
right emotional attachment to pop music, feeling it in the right way
and... I think knowing some music makes a hell of a difference, but I
think the spark, the original birth of the song often comes from the kind
of mind that *doesn’t* actually know a lot of music.”
DC: “Well, let’s do a little bit of free association. I’ll name an artist
or a song title and just see what happens. Is that okay?”
TM:
“Yeah.”
DC: “I have a couple... I might steer ya a bit, but I might just
take what you give me.
Johnny Mathis. I know he recorded at least two
songs of yours, ‘Don’t Give Up On Us’ and ‘(Last Night) I Didn’t Get [To
Sleep At All].’
TM: “I actually met him when I was a junior producer and he was pretty
rude to me, which affected quite a lot in terms of how his voice sounded
to me ever after that. I remember saying, ‘Oh, I really... I’m a
tremendous fan. I bought... A Certain Smile is one of the first records I
bought....’ And he said, ‘Well, shows you how much you know about music. I
was out of tune for the first sixteen bars.”
DC: “Aw...”
TM: “I didn’t like him at all. And therefore... To me he has a very fine
voice but it sounds so clinical. The emotions sound fake to me, there’s no
real... it’s a *great* instrument, but there’s no real connection.”
DC:
“Well, let’s go from Johnny Mathis to
Andy Williams.”
TM: “Andy Williams was the most delightful man. I mean, a lot of pop
singers turn into monsters but I spent quite a lot of time with Andy in
Vegas when I was recording him for CBS. He was a charming man with a
hundred stories about everyone from Humphry Bogart to Marilyn Monroe, you
know.
And he was a consummate professional in the studio. And because he’d come
from brothers who were in a harmony group with him, his sense of singing
harmonies was extraordinary.
The only difficulty was that he liked having a lot of reverb on his voice,
which I hated. You know, in a lot of my early records I used no reverb at
all, because I thought it distanced the vocalists from the singer. And he
would always say ‘Turn up the reverb’ and it just made him sound like he
was singing through a wind tunnel to me. But he was a delightful man.”
DC: “The Drifters.”
TM: “Well they were really a franchise more than a band, and I don’t think
I ever saw the same lineup of The Drifters once and I had three big hits
with them in the UK.
Johnny Moore was one of the singers, who took over
from the original, Ben E. King, who had that wonderful, ‘Saturday Night at
the Movies’ voice. You know, that voice that the instant you heard it,
sent certain a message. The expression in the industry was ‘instant vocal
recognition,’ and he had that. In the minute you heard one bar of that
voice, you know who the band was.
And they had such a set style, the expression was ‘situation / location’
songs. ‘At a place, doing something.’ And all the early Drifters [songs]
are like that. We had the opportunity to put the group back together again
in the mid-seventies. The first record we did was such a clone of those
early songs. We used all the old recording techniques to make it sound
like it was recorded in 1957, 58. Great fun.”
DC: “Well ‘Love Grows’ was originally recorded by Edison Lighthouse and
it’s one of my favorite songs in the world and I ever get tired of it. But
have you heard
Freedy Johnston’s version?”
TM: “Who?”
DC: “His name is Freedy Johnston.”
TM: “Freedy Johnston. No, I’ll look it up. That sounds interes... no I
haven’t.”
DC: “It’s Freedy with two ‘E’s. I really recommend it to you, he did a
tremendous job of...”
TM: “Alright, I’ll look it up. Freedy Johnston”
DC: “...doing it in a modern style but keeping all the original things.”
TM: “Well that was a certain idea is that what would happen if you
condense a whole song into eight bars. What happens if you had a verse of
four and a chorus of four? So it goes:
‘She ain’t got no money, her clothes are kinda funny, hair is kinda wild &
free’
That’s the verse. Then in come the strings []
‘Oh but love grows where my Rosemarie goes and nobody knows like me’
So there’s the whole song in eight bars. It was an experiment to see if it
could be done. And the whole thing was written in about two or three
hours.
And then I had some time left on the big recording session I had coming
up. So in the last twenty minutes of the session I just did that backing
track.
And that morning, while I was having a shave, I came up with the famous
intro:
‘Bum bah-dah bum bum, bah dah-dah...’
So, that was not the intro on the track. So I [] the guitar quickly got
everyone to write that down — there’s no harmony parts or anything
[laughs]. It’s just everybody [] then the brass play it, then the strings
play it.”
[AUDIO CLIP: “Love Grows”]
“When I heard the backing track back, with that riff, that rowing riff,
and then the strings coming in — that sound is called ‘Ada
Marcato.’ As
you know, it’s strings in two octaves, octaves apart, with the bows bowing
every note. Makes it very rhythmic. It’s an old Motown trick.
Anyway, it sounded like a hit to me, even without a vocal on. And when I
put the vocals on, it shone into the thing. But I felt it was less a song
and more a production, so I pulled the voice quite back into the track to
make sure those guitars were *really* pushing the song forward — they’re
actually the loudest thing on the track. Because I thought when it was
mixed with a normal mix, it just didn’t sound like a hit. A soon as I
pulled those guitars forward, you’ve got all that excitement, then it
really did sound something.
DC: “There’s just a million things I like about it. How ‘bout
Elvis
Presley? You did about three songs with him?”
TM: “I was never particularly a Presley fan. I’m a
Buddy Holly fan through
and through and the two are mutually exclusive, I think. Presley was kind
of a jock’s hero when you talk to the men. Whereas Buddy Holly was more or
less sort of a nerd’s hero, you know, the guys who did not, who weren’t in
the [laughs] ‘A’ football team, you know. And Buddy Holly was the voice
that was a big influence on me and the people like that.
But I knew Presley’s music publisher so he asked me to write some songs.
And I sorta walked around the house making Presley noises at myself and my
manager said, ‘Why don’t you try and write White Christmas again?’ And so
I did. [laughs] It’s about men in Viet Nam, really, the song. And I ran
some other things by him and I met Presley out in Memphis and I went to
Graceland and so on.”
DC: “So no special requirements on the exclusivity or anything? You just
did your thing?”
TM: “I had my own publishing free by then. So I published a song with
Presley’s company in America, yeah.”
DC: “Great.”
TM: “I mean a lot of these artists, they wouldn’t record your song unless
they had the music publishing.”
DC: “Of all the list of people that you list on your website that have
sung your songs, Frank Sinatra was the one I could not find a song title
for.“
TM: “There was one recorded by him, a song called, ‘Oh My Joe.’ I can’t
find it anywhere. I only heard it halfway through and I took it off.
They’d done, it’s actually, when I say it’s in swing feel, ‘pop swing’
feel, as is ‘Build Me Up, Buttercup,’ for example. But it isn’t in ‘Billy
May /
Nelson Riddle swing’ feel. And I just... *hated* what they did with
it.
I was brought up with Sinatra. I have to say that Andy Williams told me a
lot of stories about Sinatra. And at the end of that I never wanted to
hear Sinatra again [laughs]. Let’s leave it at that.”
DC: “Okay.
Sylvia McNeill. I didn’t know who she was...”
TM: “Sylvia McNeill was a very beautiful young girl with a wonderful,
throaty, deep voice and I thought she should be a star. You know, I have
my successes, I have my failures. I tried quite hard with her. I did one
record with her I really believed in, but it had all the trait things
about it should have had, it just wan’t enough. I heard it again the other
day and it’s alright. It was better than I remember it being, but it
wasn’t great.”
DC: “Well there’s
a 1971 photo of you and her on the web, on opposite
sides of a recording console, when you were producing her...”
TM: “Yeah, I remember it.”
DC: “...*love* that photo.
I’m gonna throw you a ringer:
Bobby Sherman.”
TM: “Uh... Bobby Sherman... Don’t even know who he is.”
DC: “That’s fine. He’s a pop star, a bubblegum pop star that had his own
TV show that was sort of ‘Monkees-style.’ But he covered the ‘Pony
Express’ song.”
TM: “Oh, did he?
DC: “Yeah.”
TM: “I’ll have to look that up.”
DC: “I found it accidentally. Well... it’s not anywhere the same quality
as the
Johnny Johnson one.”
[AUDIO CLIP: ‘Blame It on the Pony Express’ by Johnny Johnson]
TM: “Well, that was gonna be the followup to ‘Love Grows,’ because the
band that I put together to be ‘Edison Lighthouse’ (a studio group), the
lead singer just couldn’t make it happen. And so, Johnny Johnston, who had
had a hit with ‘Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache,” I’d had a small hit
with him already in England, so I did it with him. And he had that
‘instant party’ in his voice, I mean he had the most amazing voice. I was
able to take the whole song up a full step. And I think I played the
guitar on it — that riff at the beginning, on the original record. And
that was very much the same kinda thing — I felt it was more of a
production than a song.
I’d seen a movie on TV called, ‘Pony Express.’ And [Roger] Greenaway came
to the writing session with me and he looked all this stuff up in an
encyclopedia about how the pony express worked and we got it all into the
song.
But there again, the chorus was very kind of on that rolling sort of style
rhythm. And again, the voice is quite far back in the track.
Singing on all those tracks are Greenaway and [Roger] Cook and two girls,
called
Sue and Sunny. The world first heard them on “A Little Help From My
Friends” with Joe Cocker. And I remember approaching them at a TV show,
saying, ‘Hey, you girls should do sessions.’ They never looked back after
that. I used them on everything. They’re on ‘Love Grows’ — that’s them in
the background. Most of my hits, really, from about 1970 onwards.
DC: “Alright, here’s another group that’s probably more British than
American. I’ve never heard of them.
Marmalade.”
TM: “Marmalade had a string of hits in England, about ten hits. Big, big
group.”
DC: “‘Baby Make it Soon’ is one of yours that I love.”
TM: “And I did ‘Baby Make it Soon’ which I wrote — I never thought it
would be a hit, to be honest. And the recording is much like the demo. I
mean, I quite like the song. It’s quite appealing. It’s very repetitive
and very simple, but I quite like it.
And then when the group reformed with a different lead singer, I had a
top-ten hit with them called ‘Falling Apart at the Seams,’ which
stylistically was a complete lift of The Four Seasons’ sound. Ironically,
never having anything to do with The Four Seasons, I got a phone call from
Bob Gaudio, about a month after the song came out, asking if I had
anything for Frankie Valli. By that time I’d already done a deal on the
song in America and it was too late.”
DC: “It looks like
Bones Howe produced ‘(Last Night) I Didn’t Get To Sleep
At All’ when it was recorded by The Fifth Dimension. I know you gave it to
The Carpenters, I don’t know if you *wrote* it for The Carpenters. But I
hear, in that ‘no— no___’ — that breathiness?...”
TM: “That’s right...”
DC: “I feel like he was aiming for that...”
TM: “I gave the— I was in Japan with The Carpenters. I met them there and
I wrote that and the reason I — ‘(Last Night) I Didn’t Get To Sleep At
All’ the time had changed about twelve hours. Oh, I can’t rem— ten or
twelve, something on that order, and it just slaughtered me, so I was
dopey all day there and awake all night. Hence ‘(Last Night) I Didn’t Get
To Sleep At All.’
And I thought it was a verse — the melody. I just thought it was leading —
for ages and ages I looked for a chorus for it to go to and it only
occurred to me that really that was the melody — it’s just that eight-bar
phrase.
And so I finished the song off and I remember I was going into the city
with a group. And it was Saturday night — it was the only time we could
get studio time [laughs]. I actually realized I hadn’t finished the
lyrics. I wrote most of the lyric in the taxi going to the studio, very
quickly. Recorded it, and it certainly wasn’t a hit single for England,
for a start, almost all singles in those days, you had to have a dance
sensibility, you know, and you couldn’t do that.
And so I sent it to The Carpenters and Richard [Carpenter] called me at
four o’clock in the morning and he said, ‘This line about sleeping
pills...’
I said, ‘the sleeping pills I took were just a waste of time.’
‘So... we can’t sing that — we don’t sing anything about drugs.’
[Thinks] Oh... God.
‘Can you rewrite the lyric? We’re here for another [so many] hours.’
So I rewrote the lyric. In fact, the lyric I wrote was *better*. And I
phoned through to the studio, to A&M Studios, and *they’d gone home!* And
I thought: I’d been up hours writing this and they couldn’t even hang
around. That irritated me.
And so, a few weeks later, Bones Howe was in London, who I knew, and I
played him the demo and he loved it. And went back, and the rest is
history, as they say.”
DC: “Well
Marilyn McCoo is probably thanking Karen Carpenter for turning
it down, every day. She did a great job.
TM: [Laughs]
DC: “Elton John &
Tim Rice — I didn’t find a song that you did with them.”
TM: “Yeah, because the song I did with Elton John is under the name Reg
Dwight, before he became Elton John...”
DC: “Ah... right!”
TM: “And it’s called, ‘Lord You Made the Night Too Long.’” And the song I
wrote with Tim Rice, we never, we did a demo of it and we never did
anything with it, so... But I did write with him.”
DC: “Polly Brown. I never heard of her or Picketywitch before, but Man,
she has a
Dionne Warwick thing goin’ on, doesn’t she?”
TM: “Yeah, well that was it. She was a Dionne Warwick sort of
sound-alike.”
[AUDIO CLIP: ‘Same Old Feeling’ by Pickettywitch]
TM: “That was a band that John [Macleod] had, and that was a B-side. And
really, John’s involvement with that is zero, although it’s got his name
on it, because I wrote the chorus as a B-side to a song. Just the chorus,
with another verse, on The Foundations’ first album, that appears (that
song) with a different melody — just the chorus melody, and all the rest
of it is different. And then, when I was working with The Hollies, I
re-wrote the song with
Tony Hicks — but he didn’t — at the end of it he
said ‘I don’t think this is really us.’ I said, ‘Well don’t you want your
name on it?’ He said, ‘No.’ Then John went and used it with Picketywitch
and it was [a] top-five hit.”
DC: “And I just wanted to mention that I thought that “Any Old Time You’re
Feelin’ Lonely & Sad’ by The Foundations had a
Gilbert O’Sullivan feel to
it.”
[AUDIO CLIP: ‘Any Old Time You’re Feelin’ Lonely & Sad’ by The Foundations]
TM: “Yeah, well they were entirely the wrong band to do it with. The guy
had a very rough voice. And the song, it was okay. Had we done it with a
different artist, it might’ve been a hit, but it never quite clicked to
me.”
DC: “You went from your songwriting era to writing books. Was that the
right order?”
TM: “Yeah.”
DC: “Writing fiction, right?”
TM: “Mmm-hmm.”
DC: “What caused you to change and focus your energy and attention on
writing books? What was happening in the music world at that time?”
TM: “Well, I was in my forties, you know. The record industry is a young
person’s game and the music was changing. I’d really run out of things I
wanted to do with pop music. i didn’t identify with much that was
happening at the time. My mother had — I had a novelist in my family.
I read a line in a newspaper one day which gave me an idea and wrote a
book. The first book I wrote was called, ‘Sayanara.’ The second book I
wrote was called, ‘Enemy of the State.’ And I got a quote from the
novelist,
Jack Higgins, who was huge at the time, saying that this was the
best thing of its kind since ‘Day of the Jackal.’ And I was the next big
thing, or something. And of course I sold it all over the world as a
result. And as I was coming out of a very expensive divorce, that was a
very nice development. And I wrote another book called, ‘Brutal Truth.’
And then I came up with the idea of going to
Brighton University where I
live in England and saying look, I’ve changed my career from being a
songwriter to a novelist and there’s a very specific way, a very technique
I’ve used to do it, you know, I think I could pass it on to other people.
And I taught four years at the university and I had a very, very high
percentage of people who got book deals. One guy, who, to this day is one
of the biggest novelists in England — he’s had four number one hits with
historical novels. That was my student. And I had a lot of fun doing
that.”
DC: “We should mention there’s another author named Tony Macaulay’ who’s
spelled the same way and is not you.”
TM: “Yes, he’s an Irish activist and sportsman, I think.”
DC: “How many
books have you written?”
TM: “Well, I wrote three that did well and the
difficulty is I could churn them out, it would take me about a year to
research them, and a year to write them, and theater started to come back
into my life.
I mean, theater was what I wanted to do right from the beginning, you
know, when I was young. And that came back into my life again in quite a
spectacular way. A hit show I’d written in the 80s was on in lots of
theaters in America and Germany and various places.
And then I got offers to do other shows. And this gave me the chance to
combine the book writing with songwriting. And it’s songwriting of an
entirely different nature because you’re using very many more techniques
to write showtunes then you are in pop music.”
DC: “You set up an association with the
Cocoa Village Playhouse in Cocoa
Beach, Florida.”
4
TM: “Yes, you know the area. It’s outside Orlando. It’s
Orlando’s beach front, effectively, and there’s a sort of Greenwich
Village-style area there, dating from the 20s, and it has a
state-of-the-art Broadway house, well it is for the last seven or eight
years. They spent millions on it, it’s got absolutely every facility a
Broadway house would have. Plus they’ve got brilliant funding. And I’ve
had seven wonderful years doing — I did five productions for them.”
DC:
“Oh, *five!*”
TM: “Yeah. And two completely-from-scratch musicals. And
it’s been an absolute joy. I’ve had the time of my life.”
DC: “I understand they all sold really well. Is there any chance that any
of us will get to see them that weren’t there?”
TM: “Well, the trouble with the ‘Build Me Up, Buttercup,’ musical, which
was the first, original one I wrote, is that the publishing situation’s a
*nightmare,* because [the songs in the show] they’re all [with] different
publishers. And to do the thing in any other context outside of the
community theater situation would require an enormous amount of money to
acquire all the different rights necessary.”
DC: “Gotcha.”
TM: “And it became so complicated that I didn’t pursue it a great deal
further. They’re gonna do the show again, quite possibly, and I’m gonna do
it in a way that I *can* actually get around some of these issues.
I write the book, music and the lyrics. I had about five, six hit songs in
it, the rest were original. And then more recently I’ve done a show called
‘Sherlock in Love,’ which was Sherlock vs. Jack the Ripper, where he falls
in love with sort of a vaudeville star along the way. I had a lot of fun
with that. It was an entirely new thing for me to write to sort of English
traditional musical like ‘My Fair Lady’ or ‘Oliver.’ That style, you know,
as opposed to writing a pop musical. So that’s been a huge
adventure.”
DC: “Well when you did the ones with music, what were the
sizes of the bands that you worked with?”
TM: “Fifteen pieces, as a rule, which for theater these days is huge.
Eighteen pieces in some cases. With a whole section of horns — real
strings, backed up with a string synthesizer. And when we had pop bands,
we’d have, you know, the whole works: two guitars, bass, drums,
percussion.”
DC: “Were you a consultant or did you actually rehearse the band?”
TM: “I did all the arrangements on ProTools, for those who know about
these things, it means you can completely clone the whole orchestra sound,
which has innumerable benefits, one of which is, by the time you actually
get the live band into the pit and hear them first time, you know every
note of the score already and you know that it works to the extent that it
does with synthesized instruments. Which saves a huge amount of time and a
lot of cost in changing things around afterward.
So I did all the arrangements on ProTools and then had it expanded out for
the different instruments individually. And I wrote all the underscore
which is great fun to do. And wrote the whole play and cast it and drew
out the initial drawings for the set designs, which were hugely
complicated. These great big sets, great fun. And so on and so forth. So I
was intimately involved with every part of it.”
DC: “In preparation for this interview, I went back and re-read — I still
have this
Songwriter Magazine I bought in 1978...”
TM: “Wow.”
DC: “You’re interviewed in there, and you talked about a Laurel & Hardy
musical, which I’ve never heard you talk about [since then]...”
TM: “Well, the two principal people involved with that both had heart
attacks, within about a year of each other. And without the stars attached
to it, it became almost impossible to cast. We went to... this is a
musical, as you say, based on the lives of Laurel & Hardy. There are other
difficulties with it, too. Because they’re os famous, a lot of stars
didn’t want to play people that were that famous because they felt the
comparisons that would be made would be, as Shakespeare put it, ‘odious.’
There was another musical dealing with that era which was the
Mack Sennett
musical, what was was that called? ‘Mack & Mabel,’ that’s it Mack & Mabel
dealt with the early days of movies and talkies and all that and it kind
of stole our thunder to a large extent. And so we felt that really had had
its time.
But it wasn’t wasted because I was able to use a lot of the songs in other
projects. I actually think almost every song. One of the songs I recorded
with Gladys Knight, another song I recorded with David Soul. And so it
really was not a wasted exercise.”
DC: “Very nice. So let me ask you a question here that’s multi-part, and
you can pick and choose whatever you want to talk about. One of them is:
How did your writing skills as a songwriter prepare you for musicals
and/or how has your songwriting process changed over the years, and/or in
what ways has your songwriting style, or your lyric writing voice changed
over time? Pick what you like.”
TM: “Well, I’ll just combine ‘em. The first thing to say about musicals is
that you’ve got to know the history of musicals and you’ve got to
understand what music is *meant to do* in a musical. And the songs in a
musical — a few can entertain, especially you’re a show-within-the-show.
In ‘South Pacific,’ when Nellie Forbush sings, ‘A Hundred & One Pounds of
Fun,’ it’s just a song *in a show*.
So a small percentage of the songs can just entertain. But in general,
they must either develop the character, develop plot, develop the world of
the piece in which the story’s set, or in some way advance the piece.
Otherwise, you run the risk of people saying you’re just shoving songs in,
slowing down the action of the story. And songs get in the way as opposed
to doing a job.
And so whenever any character has anything of note to say in a musical,
they should sing it. That’s why there are never any long speeches in
musicals, because the two things are mutually exclusive.
So the next thing to say is that when you’ve got maybe fourteen, sixteen,
eighteen songs in a show, you’ve got to bring the changes. Having
everything in 4/4 time, you know, 120 beats a minute, would be absolutely
dreadful. I mean there *are* plenty of jukebox musical that do that, but
then we know all the songs beforehand and we make allowances. And so,
largely, do the critics. But when you listen to the music of the great
composers of musicals —
Rodgers & Hammerstein,
Lerner & Loewe, and so forth
— they will use a whole range of different tempos, time signatures and so
on, to *bring the changes,* so that you get a sense of the whole, as
opposed to a bunch of songs just shoved together. And therefore...
Also, it’s very important to try to maintain energy in one musical. So
perhaps twenty years ago you had a ballad in Act One, but you don’t have
any ballads in Act One now. Very seldom.
Alan Menkin, who wrote one of the
Disney musicals, breaks the rule. But you’re trying to push the thing on
as hard as you can and so you’re trying to bear in mind all these elements
when you’re writing a musical.
And the most important thing about writing a musical is to choose the
right subject in the first place. Choose something that’s not so beloved
that adding music to it is gonna to upset the purists, but not so unknown
that people can’t identify with the story.
And so, it’s a very, very delicate balancing act. The best musicals, you
don’t go more than three or four pages without something sung, even if
it’s a reprise of something else.”
DC: “It sounds like when a pop star tried to enter the world of country
music in the old days, right? ‘You can’t change that — you can’t be
different!’”
TM: [Laughs]
DC: “...the country music style.”
TM: “So, you’re looking to create a whole musical tableau with the songs,
where each of the key members of the — key characters will have a moment,
a motif that’s theirs, if you like that you can bring back again and
again. And you might maybe want a duet when the lovers fall in love, you
want an eleven o’clock ballad, an eleventh-hour ballad that one of the
leads sing at the high point of the drama, fifteen minutes before the end
of Act Two.
There’s a great deal of tradition about writing musicals. You wanna
bookend both acts with really strong musical moments, but bring the
curtain up and down with some impact, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So
it’s the thought that you put in before you write a single word of the
show that’s crucial. Picking the moments where you put the songs
correctly. Where the songs actually do a job and embellish the project, as
opposed to slowing it down to a great, sludgy, un-seaworthy thing.
And so yes, a basis in pop music is only helpful, because a mistake I made
with some of the early musicals I wrote, donkeys years ago, was I the most
important is to show off one’s capacity to be a good musician, where as
really, the critics the public are asking the same thing of most musicals
as they are a pop song: they want to come out singing the music, not the
scenery. And therefore, you are obligated to have as memorable a score as
you can.
Some of the great writers of musicals, the most memorable songs are
incredibly simple. And so if you just want to use it as a show-off
opportunity to impress people with how much you’ve learned, then you’ve
got the wrong idea entirely. It’s certainly true that you can use a lot
more technique in shows that you do in pop music, but that’s just an
occasional bonus.
Did I answer all your questions?”
DC: “No, it was wonderful. We’re just trying to get like, things that
songwriters think about. Are there youthful points of view that, as an
older person, whose lived through some things — maybe divorce or
disappointments or whatever — that you wouldn’t be as quick to embrace
today in your writing, or do you think its still okay to write a
happy-go-lucky love song, or whatever?”
TM: “Men never cry in my songs — I hate that. No, I don’t think things
have changed at all in terms of what songs are about. Unrequited love,
love gone wrong, longing songs, brave songs. I suppose ‘Love Grows’ is a
happy-go-lucky song, now that I think about it. But they’re very untypical
of what I do. I mean, I tend to be... the songs that have an emotional
impact usually are fairly sad.
I wrote a song called (which my wife particularly loves, which Gladys
Knight recorded, which is from the Laurel & Hardy show, originally,
although no one knows it) called, ‘We Don’t Make Each Other Laugh
Anymore.’ Which is an unremittingly miserable song. I try not to write
those.
I used to say that if you’re going to write a sad song or a torch song,
then you should end on an element of hope. A sort of ‘someday, maybe we’ll
meet again and everything will be alright.’ Because otherwise, the song
takes on a sort of self-pitying kind of element. You know, pity party
songs usually don’t work in the end. They leave the wrong emotion in the
listener’s mind.”
DC: “Let’s just say from the 80s for the heck of it, I’m just gonna
arbitrarily pick the 80s to today — has any songwriter come along that’s
changed the way you write?”
TM: “No. I mean, I started off as a child listening to my mother play
Rodgers & Hammerstein on the piano and
Cole Porter and
Irving Berlin. I’m a
real film buff of the 30s and 40s era, you know. So I know all the scores
of most of these shows on piano, or most of the key songs. And then, as we
go through, obviously
[Gerry] Goffin and
[Carole] King and
Barry Mann and
Cynthia Weil, but if you’re talking what really got me going was
Burt
Bacharach and
Hal David and
Holland-Dozier-Holland. And I kind of took the
lilting, melodic quality of Bacharach in my mind and put it against the
grinding rhythms of Holland-Dozier-Holland and came up with a new kind of
style and that got me sort of noticed. And I’d like to think I did my own
thing and came up with a song that was more recognizably mine.
Then, having got to that place, I stopped being influenced by other
writers as much, to the point that when I’m writing, I never listen to
music. I don’t want to worry that I’m absorbing the wrong elements from
them.”
DC: “I love that sound byte you just gave about Burt Bacharach and
Holland-Dozier-Holland because if people go back and listen to your
catalogue, especially with The Foundations, you’re gonna hear that solo
trumpet, at times in the arrangement, and you’ll hear the bass line that’s
doing the Motown thing. Or even in ‘Buttercup,’ it’s sort of a Motown bass
line.”
TM: “Oh, very much so, yeah. In my head, often when I was singing, I was
Levi Stubbs of
The Four Tops, in another life. They didn’t record anything
of mine, which was always a great sadness to me. I’ve been told two songs
they recorded were mine, but I can’t find any record of them.
I don’t think, after a certain period, I felt that I wanted to model
myself on anyone else. I just thought whatever comes out, for better or
worse, is mine.”
DC: “That’s right. Well, you’ve had at least four soundtracks that have
used your songs so far: ‘There’s Something About Mary,’ ‘Heartbreakers,’
‘Shallow Hal,’ and ‘Starsky & Hutch.’”
TM: “There’s been a couple more, there’s ‘Conjuring 2.’ That’s a funny
story, actually. ‘Conjuring 2’ was just a pretty big picture last year.
And we went to see it ‘cause we knew we ha “Don’t Give Up On Us’ in it,
and they just paid a pretty hefty [] check to use it. And we’re all
laughing. This girl’s sitting on a bed in it, it’s set in England in 1975
or something. And David Soul, there’s a big poster of him on the wall. And
she takes off her headphones, and you hear just ‘Don’t give up on us,
baby, don’t —‘ and that’s all you hear. And they paid tens of thousands of
dollars to use it. We thought, either they shouldn’t have used it, or they
should’ve used *more* of it. It was a complete waste of money from their
point of view, but a very happy moment for us.”
DC: “Exactly. None of
them needed permission, right? Or did they?”
TM: “Oh, yeah.”
DC: “To cover a song, just to sing it, you don’t need permission but to
put in a movie you do?”
TM: “Synchronization rights. Sync rights. To use it with a commercial or
film. You have to pay the standard rate. And for a Hollywood-based movie
it’s a lot of money.”
DC: “Well I just want to say one more time — the
last time we talked, I mentioned that the Guardians of the Galaxy series
is using songs that are right up your alley, they’re right from your era,
and I hope you get placed in the third movie when the third one comes.”
TM: [Laughs]
DC: “They sell like crazy, it’s like, it’s Marvel, it’s gonna be doing
gangbusters business for ya.
My last topic is legacy. I just wanna cover a few things here that I read
about. You knocked yourself out of number one with another number one,
didn’t you?”
TM: “Yes. That was crazy. Well, the first hit I had was ‘Baby, Now That
I’ve Found You,’ and a wonderful blues singer who never had a pop hit came
to me and wanted me to record him. So I did a sort of Drifters-type ballad
called ‘Let the Heartaches Begin.’ It was a kind of ‘Save the Last Dance
For Me’ kind of thing in my head. Not rhythmically, but that was the mood
in terms of the lyric. And we recorded it and it shot straight up the
charts in two weeks. Knocked my own number one off the top position. I’m
the only person ever to do that, and I had number and number two, and then
the other way up. So I was also the first person to do that. Everyone said
‘what an achievement.’ And I said, ‘No, it’s not that, it’s the worst
planning in history!’ Steal their own number one. Quite the reverse is
true.”
DC: “So that was the second story I was gonna ask you about. It sounds
like it was related. Three songs on the charts at once, is that what you
had?”
TM: “I think three’s the most I had in the top ten at once, yeah. I had
two in the top ten quite a long time, on and off from ‘67 to about ‘77.
They came along like busses — I’d go along for a year with nothing and
then have two go into the top ten at the same time, and it happened quite
a few times. But I only had three in the charts once, I think.”
DC: “If my calculations are correct (I tried to do the math, here), was it
1986 that you played for the queen’s 60th birthday?”
TM: “Yes, I think it might’ve been, yeah, that’s right.”
DC: “Solo or with a band and was it...”
TM: “Oh, no, no, no. They approached me and asked me to write a queen’s
birthday song. And I came up with this really quite complicated piece. It
was like a child’s song. But I wanted to write the big
[Edward] Elgar, you
know, ‘Happy Birthday, Ma’am, God Bless You...’ — huge anthem thing. So we
compromised and I wrote a sort of childish verse about going to the palace
to sing to the queen and then had it modulate... It was a crazy thing to
do for six thousand kids to sing, to have it change time, feel — time
signature, tempo, feel, key, and then go back again. Plus it was hugely
range-y. But I thought, if we don’t tell them, they won’t know it’s hard.
And so, on the day, six thousand kids sang it perfectly from start to
finish. I mean, we never rehearsed together. They’d only rehearsed in
schools, you know. It was the biggest rehearsed musical event in British
history.”
DC: “Fantastic. On behalf of songwriters everywhere, I wanna thank you for
your role in making music contracts more fair.” TM: [Laughs]
DC: “Now will you *please* get to work on making streaming pay more
fairly? That’s your next task.”
TM: “Yeah, that would be good, wouldn’t it?”
DC: “What do you feel the Internet, Wikipedia or history gets wrong, or
misunderstands or completely misses about you, if anything?”
TM: “Not much. I mean, I never looked for awards. I never even thought
about them, if you ring up and say I’ve got to go to this thing, I say,
‘Why?’ I think the less I thought about it the more I won and whenever I
thought about it, I didn’t win.
So I’ve had a huge amount of things to be grateful for. I’m still living
well, off all the money, in a very happily, enjoying retirement. I don’t
have too many regrets anymore. Obviously I wish I hadn’t signed such a
spurious contract, and spent seven years in court trying to get out of it,
but every other writer did and they just didn’t fight to get out.
And you can’t turn the clock back and think ‘if only I’d done this if only
I’d done that. So all in all, I’m just happy that I was able to spend my
whole career something I’d have done for nothing or even paid to do. And I
have very few regrets.”
DC: “That’s a great place to finish up. Do you have anything coming up
that you want to tell us about?"
TM: “No.”
DC: “I’m gonna tell everybody to go visit TonyMacaulay.com so they can see
more about you.”
TM: “No I don’t. For the first time in my life, since last May, when
really I just ran out of ideas and ran out of energy for doing all this. I
mean the last musical I did, to put it on took over ninety people a night.
And I was involved with every area of it and I found it quite
extraordinarily tiring, even though nothing went wrong at any point, it
all went... it couldn’t have gone more smoothly, I did find it tiring. It
struck me it was kind of time to hang my boots up before I did myself some
damage.
And I paint in oils and I do carpentry, and I have a beautiful time with
my lovely wife. And that’s good enough at this point, at seventy three,
thank you. [Laughs]”
DC: “[Laughs] You’ve got an amazing amount of work behind you already and
we look forward to whatever comes next. And I want to thank you so much
for talking with us.”
TM: “Okay, it’s a pleasure.”
[END]
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