Mark Wirtz
Musician whose Excerpt from a Teenage Opera was a global hit
MARK WIRTZ, who has died aged 76, wrote and produced the single Excerpt from a Teenage Opera, intended to be the taster for a full-length production of what would have been the first rock opera; while his grand vision was never realised, the single (with its melancholy refrain “Grocer Jack, Grocer Jack…”) reached No 1 in 16 countries, though it was kept off the top spot in Britain by Engelbert Humperdinck’s The Last Waltz.
Mark Philipp Wirtz was born on September 3 1943 in Strasbourg; he studied graphic design at a college in Croydon – Ray Davies, soon to make it big with the Kinks, was a contemporary – then enrolled at Rada.
By then he had begun taking his first musical steps, and a publisher recommended him to Norman Newell at EMI to replace his departing in-house pianist, Russ Conway. “I had to wait for the Beatles to finish recording All My Loving to start my audition,” Wirtz recalled.
He passed muster and signed for EMI, releasing a single under the name of the Beatcrackers, and arranged and produced alongside Geoff Emerick, George Martin’s later engineer of choice, at Abbey Road.
Wirtz also started his own production company, and in 1966 wrote and produced the instrumental single A Touch of Velvet – A Sting of Brass; credited to Moodmosaic, it became a muchused pirate radio jingle. Among the records he produced at EMI was one of the definitive hits of the psychedelic era, My White Bicycle by Tomorrow.
He had begun to think about a rock opera even before joining EMI, and Excerpt … came to him in a dream: “I woke up and I thought, ‘I want to make a record out of this. It’s a great story.’” He wrote the music and asked Keith West of Tomorrow to write the lyric.
The song told the story of Grocer Jack, whose services are taken for granted by the adults of his town, though the children adore him, and are devastated when he dies – “Grocer Jack, Grocer Jack/ Is it true what mummy says/ You won’t come back?”
Wirtz took an unused backing track from an old recording, a song called Love Will Always Find a Way and enlisted Steve Howe, later of Yes, to overdub guitar. With West on vocals, Geoff
Emerick, in between shifts engineering the Sgt Pepper album, recorded it in true stereo, unusual at the time, and Wirtz brought in singers from the Corona Theatre School in Hammersmith to sing the chorus.
Excerpt from a Teenage Opera became an instant hit, reaching No 2 in the UK in August 1967, part of the soundtrack of the Summer of Love – and there was talk of Cliff Richard starring in the stage production. But Wirtz abandoned the project when a follow-up single, Sam, flopped; it did, though, catch the attention of Pete Townshend, who was working towards what would become Tommy, while Paul Mccartney said that without the Teenage Opera concept there would have been no Abbey Road second-side medley.
Wirtz left EMI to work independently, then in 1970 moved to Los Angeles. There he recorded for Capitol until being dropped for refusing to tour. He produced and arranged for artists including Helen Reddy, Dean Martin and Anthony Newley, but in 1979 left the business.
He did various jobs, including telemarketing, and restyled himself as a comedian. Moving to Savannah, Georgia, he became a columnist and food and drama critic, and later wrote novels.
In 1996 he collated all the recordings planned as part of Teenage Opera into a CD. In 2004 he returned to the studio to produce an album by his daughter’s boyfriend’s band, Les Philippes, and the following year he released a solo album, Love is Egg Shaped.
Mark Wirtz married the singer Ross Hannaman, with whom he recorded as the Sweetshop. They divorced, and he is survived by their daughter.
Mark Wirtz, born September 3 1943, died August 7 2020