Golden oldies – THE MUSICAL!

The creators of Birds Of A Feather reveal how they got their new show – featuring the classic pop hits of the Fifties and Sixties – to the stage

We belong to the luckiest generation in history. We became teenagers in the Sixties – too young for National Service and too old for punk rock, but in the right time and place to enjoy the Beatles, Carnaby Street and England’s only World Cup victory.

At our north London youth club, everyone would bring in the 45s they’d bought with their pocket money and spin them on the club Dansette. In the summer of 1963, the song we played most was Sweets For My Sweet by The Searchers. It was a Number One hit, and was written by a song-writing duo with the exotic names of Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman.

Together and individually, Pomus and Shuman wrote some of the most memorable songs of the era, including His Latest Flame for Elvis, Here I Go Again for The Hollies and Save The Last Dance For Me for The Drifters. But if someone had told us that in 50 years’ time we would write the script for a Pomus-shuman musical, we’d have said, ‘Don’t be daft! In half a century no one will remember who they were.’

Back in the Sixties we didn’t want to be scriptwriters – we wanted to be in a pop group. Of course, first we had to get hold of some instruments. Laurence took on two paper rounds to pay for his bass guitar and amplifier. Maurice ‘ borrowed’ money out of his mother’s post office savings book to finance an electric piano. When she found out, she retaliated by confiscating his mod tonic mohair suit.

By the early Seventies we realised our musical fantasies were, well, fantasies. But we wanted more out of life than ordinary nine-to-five jobs. Then we stumbled on a drama group, Player-Playwrights, where we discovered we could write scripts that made people laugh. This was useful, as the Seventies was not a particularly amusing decade. We wrote our first TV series, Holding The Fort, in 1978’s Winter of Discontent, as rubbish piled up in the streets.

Throughout the rest of the 20th century we exceeded our wildest dreams, creating more than a dozen hit TV series including Birds Of A Feather, Shine On Harvey Moon, Love Hurts and Goodnight Sweetheart, which tells the tale of Gary Sparrow, who time travels back to the Blitz and passes himself off as the composer of My Way, Your Song and You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling.

When Goodnight Sweetheart ended its six-year TV run, we thought it could have a second life as a stage musical. We tried to persuade numerous producers to stump up the £5 million needed to turn it into a West End hit, but nobody took the bait. However, our efforts led us to Laurie Mansfield, who with his pal Bill Kenwright had produced hit musicals like Buddy and Blood Brothers.

Laurie and Bill – both huge rock ’n’ roll fans – asked us if we would like to write the script for a musical based on a million- selling compilation CD, Dreamboats And Petticoats. We jumped at the chance, and must have done something right, because four years later our show – a teenage love story set in 1961 against a soundtrack of 50s and 60s pop hits – is still touring the nation, with a second production resident in the West End.

What we didn’t know was that Bill and Laurie had been planning a Pomus- Shuman musical long before the first Dreamboats CD topped the charts. They’d become friends with Mort Shuman when he came to live in England in the Sixties, and after his death at 54 they agreed that one day they’d produce a musical to celebrate his songs. Bill and Laurie asked us to write the script for the show, to be called Save The Last Dance For Me, which they described as the second best title never used for a musical (the best being There’s No Business Like Showbusiness). Bill and Laurie wanted the new musical to have a seaside setting, so we decided to write the story of two teenage sisters from Luton, Jennifer and Marie, who go on their first parent-free holiday to ‘sunny’ Lowestoft. Marie, the younger sister, falls for an American airman from the nearby US Air Force base. The problem is, Curtis is ‘coloured’, and in 1963 this is a big problem.

Once we decided on our themes, our challenge – an enjoyable one – lay in finding the songs that help tell the story. It sounds simple, but it wasn’t easy as there were hundreds to choose from. Judging by audience reactions, however, they like the songs we like. Equally important was the question of where to set the action. Ours takes place at the air force social club, where there’s a soda fountain, hot dogs and limitless hunky Yanks. Our sheltered sisters feel they’ve been spirited to the US of A. There’s also the base’s own rock band, with Curtis as lead singer, belting out the Pomus-Shuman hits.

We’re delighted EMI believes in the show enough to release the music on a compilation CD called, you guessed it, Save The Last Dance For Me. We hope it will generate as much nostalgic pleasure for the public as the Dream- boats And Petticoats CDs have done. The show has already had one fantastic endorsement that’s better, even, than the terrific press reaction: when Bill and Laurie took Mort Shuman’s widow to see the show, she told them, ‘Mort would have been so proud.’

And so are we. Save The Last Dance For Me is on tour until 28 July, www.kenwright.com

The Drifters