A SUPERSTAR IS BORN
Our next project after Joseph was called Come Back Richard, Your Country Needs You. Tim thought the story of England’s Richard the Lionheart was a suitable case for treatment. In truth, there is hardly any story. King Richard spent most of his reign away from home warmongering on crusades, hence our title. It was terrible. After this debacle, we needed to write something decent and do it pretty quick. Post-Joseph, we had been encouraged to choose another biblical subject, and many progressive churchmen had urged us to consider the story of Jesus Christ, which we resisted. Tim Rice, however, had mentioned several times Bob Dylan’s question, ‘Did Judas Iscariot have God on his side?’
He became fascinated about Judas in the historical context of Roman-occupied Israel. Was Judas the rational disciple trying to prevent the popular reaction to Jesus’s teaching from getting so out of hand that the Romans would crush it?
Was Jesus beginning to believe what the people were saying, that he truly was the Messiah? What if we dramatised the last days of Jesus’s life from Judas’s perspective? I could see massive possibilities in this, particularly theatrically.
Unsurprisingly, nobody else thought this was remotely a subject for a stage musical, but we did write one song whose lyric encapsulated these questions. It was called ‘Superstar’ and its chorus was destined to become the best-known three-chord tune I have composed.