A visit to musical guru Sir Tim Rice leaves
You can prepare for an interview subject being a bit grumpy or evasive, but it’s very hard to prepare for them being completely bloody lovely.
When Sir Tim Rice greets me at the door of his home in West London, I get the impression of the kindly neighbour you pop round to have tea with. Not the award winning lyricist who wrote Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita, and who sits on the Sunday Times Rich List somewhere behind Mick Jagger and Elton John (though still a fair way ahead of upstarts like Adele and Ed Sheeran). Sir Tim leads me down his front hall, past a well-ordered home office, and into an open-plan living/ dining room big enough to fit my whole house.
‘‘Why don’t you sit there and fire away,’’ he says. ‘‘Is that alright there, are you feeling comfy?’’ ‘‘Yes, very much, thank you.’’ ‘‘You don’t want a cup of tea or coffee?’’
‘I’m good, thanks. You have a very nice neighbourhood. Impressive hedges.’
‘‘… Yes, well I’m really only just getting to know it. I move to Henleyon-Thames soon. Do you know that at all?’’
‘‘Not really. How are the hedges there?’’
‘‘I should think very impressive.’’ ‘In the end it always comes back to the same formula: good story, good tunes, good singer.’ Sir Tim Rice
(Why am I asking him about hedges? I have no idea. There’s an art to putting a subject at ease before an interview, but Sir Tim is already at ease, so I’m thrown.) ‘‘Are you busy, Sir Tim?’’ ‘‘You mean right now?’’ ‘‘Generally.’’ ‘‘Oh! Yes, I have rather a lot happening at the moment, including sending a text to a friend, which … do you mind?’’ I wait while he proofreads his message. ‘‘I just need to check the spelling because you dictate it, and there’s always something completely misheard.’’ ‘‘Try doing it with a Kiwi accent.’’ ‘‘Oh-ha-ha! Yes. Can’t you get some sort of New Zealand filter?’’ ‘‘Afraid not.’’ New Zealand is about to welcome a lavish new international production of Tim Rice’s first project with Andrew Lloyd Webber: Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. You remember it from school. No, you definitely do. It opens at The Civic in Auckland at Easter, before moving to Christchurch and the Opera House in Wellington in May.
‘‘Joseph was first written for a school,’’ Rice says. ‘‘We never dreamed at the time it would go on to become a show that was done professionally in hundreds of theatres, and in different languages. But it slowly grew. It went