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Composer Don Black
From Bond to Born Free, Matt Munro to Michael Jackson, Don Black on a showbusiness career which began in the 1960s
BACK at the start of May, Don Black had what he calls an “unwelcome visitor.” Feeling unwell, he was taken by his son Clive to the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital where Black senior learned he had contracted Covid 19. For the next nine days Black was stuck in an isolated room without a window receiving constant treatment. “Funnily enough it wasn’t as tough as you would think,” he says. “It was tough enough, but I wasn’t on a ventilator. The NHS was so phenomenal. I know you’ve heard it all before. We all have. But they were so compassionate. They took all the terror out of it.”
By the time Black finally recovered the nurses had discovered who he was. And when it was time to go home some 20 nurses saw him off, applauding and singing.
The song they chose was the song Black had written the words for and subsequently won an Oscar for back in the 1960s.
“Born free, as free as the wind blows/ As free as the grass grows …”
At home in Kensington some weeks later,
Don Black is remembering the moment. “That was amazing. I’ll never get over that.”
June 2020, and Don Black is much better, you will be pleased to know. “Thankfully, I’ve fully recovered,” he is quick to tell me. “I’m touching wood as I say it because you can never be sure, but I am back to my old self.”
It is the day after his 82nd birthday and Don Black, lyricist, Oscar winner, widower, wit, has set aside some time to talk to me about all of the above and how they feature in his memoir, The Sanest Guy in the Room. It’s a story that takes in Matt Munro and Michael Jackson, John Barry and James Bond, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Robbie Williams, his love of the great American songbook, wild success, and terrible grief. And now, he can add, surviving a pandemic.
“I can’t believe where everything’s gone. The time. One minute you’re the new kid on the block, the next minute you’re the elder statesman,” he says.
“When you write a book about yourself you have to dig back into the past, which is not something I normally do, and I am amazed at myself for the success I had in the early 1960s with Matt Munro. I don’t know. I just kept my head down and kept writing songs until they mount up to over 2,000.”
You will know many of them. Thunderball, The Man with the Golden Gun, Diamonds are Forever, Tell Me on a Sunday, To Sir, with Love, On Days Like These, Love Changes Everything … The list goes on.
Black is simply one of the most successful lyricists, someone who has written songs for cinema and musical theatre, and someone who has notched up long-time creative relationships with both Barry and Lloyd Webber.
And somehow in all of this he has maintained a healthy relationship to the world around him, those he works with and, it would seem, his ego.
It was the commentator Mark Steyn who once suggested that Black was “the sanest guy in the room” and Black’s memoir does go quite a way to underlining that fact.
The question is, in all this, is why? Why was Black the emotional spirit level around which others bubbled up and down?
He has a simple explanation. “Because I was married to the sanest girl in the room,” he says, talking of his late wife Shirley.
Black met Shirley Berg at a social club when he was 16 and she was 17. They were
married for more than 60 years until her death in 2018. Plus, he says, it might have something to do with the way he was brought up in a loving family in the east end of London.
“I don’t want to bang my own drum because there’s nothing to bang really. I’ve always wanted to be successful and be regarded as good at what I do, but I’ve never been a one for the fancy lifestyle.
“When people ask me what car I’ve got I say a blue one. I’ve never had the angst. When you’re in a room and you’re doing a musical with choreographers, composers and designers everyone is so anxious. Emotional collisions are all over the place.
“Obviously, I’m involved, and I give it all I have. But I’ve always come home to normality.”
IT’S true that one of the joys of Black’s memoir is his close-up view of the abnormality of the people he has worked with. He has a sharp eye and turn of phrase. Of one of his most recent collaborators, Van Morrison, he memorably says, “when you first meet him, he does have the look of a man who has just learned his flight has been delayed.”
But then he adds, “when you get him talking about music or philosophy, he can laugh like a member of a Jimmy Carr audience.”
The truth is Black is a forgiving host who gets on with everyone and as a result gets behind their public face. Take Lloyd
Webber. Don, I say, did you ever see the side of him that earned the composer the label “the dictator”?
“I’ve seen every side of him, and I have nothing but straight admiration for him. He’s very funny and he’s always depicted as this dictator and he isn’t really. He’s very collaborative. He’s became part of the family really. I’m godfather to his son. When I’ve read things like, ‘He’s dreadful,’ it’s very upsetting.”
In many ways, though, the real star of Black’s memoir is his late wife. “When I had to proof-read it, I thought the book was as much about Shirley as it was about me,” he admits.
Throughout, Shirley is the voice of reason. When Black is working with Lloyd Webber and AR Rahman on the musical Bombay Dreams, Black told his wife that Rahman is reckoned to be something of a genius. But when Rahman phoned Black at 3am, it was Shirley who pointed out: “If he’s such a genius why can’t he tell the f ****** time?”
Inevitably, we talk about grief. Both of us are widowers. How can we not? “Of course, it will never be the same,” Black admits. “It’s the hardest thing. If I want to break my heart all I’ve got to do is open a drawer or open a cupboard and see a dress or read her handwriting. It’s very easy to well up.”
After her death he threw himself into work, writing the book and working on his weekly Radio 2 show. But then he has always worked, starting as an office boy at the NME, before moving on to become a song plugger. He even had a turn as a stand-up comedian, performing five shows a day at the Panama Club in between the strippers. He didn’t go over well, he admits.
“I could have been Bob Hope, I still wouldn’t have got any laughs,” Black points out. “They’re not there to laugh.”
Along the way, though, he met Matt Munro and John Barry. “I was writing songs before I met Matt Munro, but nothing happened with them. And then I met Matt and I used to talk a lot to Matt and John Barry about songs. We were all hanging out together. And Matt recorded a couple of songs of mine, but they didn’t mean anything. Then he came up with this Austrian melody that he loved and that changed everything.”
Black, who was managing Munro at the time, put words to the melody (which Munro had heard at the 1964 Eurovision contest) and the result was Walk Away, which became a top 10 hit. Black had a new career.
You say in the book, Don, that you think Matt Munro was the best singer ever to come out of this country.
“No question. Maureen Lipman, who is a big Matt Munro fan, said to me the other day, ‘With the others it’s all show, with Sinatra, Tony Bennett, with all the other great singers. But with Matt there’s no pretence. It is what it is.’
“He just sang beautifully. He didn’t exaggerate it. There was no veneer. He didn’t show off with his voice.
“As soon as he starts singing you know it’s Matt. It’s instant recognition. And I always thought he had three lungs, because his breath control was unbelievable.”
Munro was also, Black suggests, very down-to-earth. “Matt Munro loved a game
DON BLACK’S GREATEST HITS
BORN FREE, MATT MUNRO, 1966