Every now and again I look back over my career and wonder how some surprising thing or other ever happened.As an example, let me refer you to my involvement, back in 1992, with For All Time, a top-selling single (No. 36 in the UK charts no less!) from Catherine Zeta Jones.
Well, almost, but not quite...My actual involvement was with the 'B' side of that record, performed by - name dropping again - Sir Anthony Hopkins...
It was some time around the end of the 1980s that I had got myself involved with one of my modern musical heroes: Jeff (War of the Worlds) Wayne as a replacement writer on what had already been a long-running project - a concept album based on the historical (as opposed to the filmic) character, Spartacus.
Like the phenomenally successful War of the Worlds album that had starred Richard Burton, Justin Hayward, Phil Lynott, Julie Covington and David Essex, Spartacus was to be a combination of rock music, songs and the spoken word.It was an exciting and exasperating project: exciting, because I feel instantly in love with the idea and was thrilled to be writing words that would be scored with Jeff Wayne music and read by Hopkins who was so clearly a latter-day Burton; exasperating, because the process gradually degenerated into a nightmare of endless haggling over interminable re-writes.
It was like working on a Hollywood movie! A page of narration that everyone adored when they first read it on Monday morning became the subject of total hatred by Monday evening. Some sequences were required to be re-written so many times that it became almost impossible to find a new way of saying what had to be said and the narrative began to bend, break and disintegrate into a dust of word ends and punctuation marks...
I wrote the script for whole of the first disc and the conclusion of the second, but when the contract came round for renewal (and fearing for my sanity), I bowed out and left the project. John Spurling valiantly took up the task and completed the second disc and the album was eventually released, to sadly mixed reviews, in 1992.
The finished album featured - in addition to Sir Anthony - Alan King as Spartacus; Catherine Zeta Jones as his woman, Palene; Fish as his fellow gladiator, Crixus the Gaul; and Ladysmith Black Mambazo as the chorus (aka Voices of Spartacus' Army).My name (and John Spurlings) appear in the accompanying booklet in very small print but I also picked up a shared credit with Jeff W on the 'B' side of that single which had Sir Ant reading my opening narrative entitled 'Animal and Man'.
Here, for your entertainment (or, depending on your view of such things, amusement), are the first two parts of this somewhat ill-fated project...
7 comments:
Oh dear! I'm surprised it made to 36! What really made my day was your typo at the start - "looking back over your CARER..."!!! Are you trying to tell us something? Don't worry Brian - I do quite understand. I'm capable of some pretty weird things first thing in the morning. I have found myself volunteering to adapt A Midsummer Night's Dream into modern day French for my am-dram group! neupfuge: an artistic attempt at glory that just doesn't quite made it
Brian,
whether a project succeeds or not, at least you can look back and say that you have had a wonderfully varied career.
I wonder, do you think CZJ plays that song to her father in law?
And when people ask about the project, do you and John Spurling stand up and chorus: "No, I wrote Spartacus!"
SUZANNE - One of my better typos, I think! Sorry to have corrected it! But my 'carer' insisted!
GOOD DOG - Well, of course, when she made the recording, she had still hitch up with Spartacus Jnr. Who knows, maybe it brought them together...
"I wrote Spartacus!" Brilliant! :-)
I was trying to think what attracted me to WOTW when it first came out. I think it was its sophistication in a genre of simplicity and the sheer novelty and originality of it. None of these things could be repeated when high production values and synthesisers became standard. A pity ! If only you could have been in on the original product or written the first W&G or finished the Mary Poppins 2 movie. I wouldn't know whether to feel cheated to have just lost out or just glad to have been involved at all !
STACHO : The sneeze of a stone man
I never guessed there was a prog rocker lurking in you, Brian!
Roger O B (just an old skiffler)
SMATIMIN: Gollum's older brother
Being Americans, we didn't see Darling Buds of May until earlier this year (yay, Netflix!). Even as a very green actress, Zeta-Jones stole almost every scene she was in, often from that supreme scene-stealer Sir David Jason.
It was, of course, her success in TDBOM that won her the role in Spartacus - perhaps we'd have done better is we'd also had Sir David instead of Sir Anthony! :-)
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