OUTER LIMITS
She lost her heart to a starship trooper and inspired the likes of Nightwish and Within Temptation along the way. So we ask ourselves, how prog is the darling of the musical theatre world, Sarah Brightman?
She lost her disco heart to a Starship Trooper in 1978, but 20 years later would become one of the biggest classical crossover stars in the world. From Hot Gossip to The Phantom Of The Opera to concept
albums about space, we have to ask: how prog is Sarah Brightman? I’D BEEN LISTENING TO FLOYD, SANTANA, MIKE OLDFIELD, WHITE NOISE… WHEN
I THINK ABOUT IT, I WAS PRETTY PROGGY VERY EARLY ON.
Long before her disco hit I Fell In Love With A Starship Trooper, space was the place for Sarah Brightman. A child of the 60s – born in 1961, in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire – when Apollo 11 reached the Moon in 1969, the historic event became her inspiration. “It changed me,” she told TV show Loose Women in 2013. “I saw that human beings could do amazing things in their lives and think out of the box. It was the moment I started to really focus on what I could do.”
If the seven-year-old Brightman sounds precocious, it’s because she was. She’d been dancing and playing piano since age three. By 11, she’d won a place at a performing arts school in Tring, and trained in ballet in Birmingham. At 13, she was appearing on the West End. As her performance skills developed, so did a passion for prog. “I loved looking at my dad’s records,” she says. “He loved bands like Deep Purple and I was drawn to the covers, taking on board how important artwork was, alongside music.”
And the first album that Brightman bought? “It was ELP’s Brain Salad Surgery,” she laughs. “I’d been listening to Floyd, Santana, Mike Oldfield,
White Noise… when I think about it, I was pretty proggy very early on.”
Leaning to drama, Brightman needed to channel her focus. “Art school is a form you have to adhere to,” she explains. “You have the ideas, strength and aptitude but you have to learn how to put your artistic spirit forward.
“I needed ‘form’ because I wasn’t going to a be a rock singer, that wasn’t my way of life,” she says. “I was coming from something traditional but underneath there was always a rage and experimental things going on.”
As a dancer, singer and songwriter, at 16 Brightman landed a job with
Top Of The Pops’ house dance group Pan’s People before being recruited to Hot Gossip, who performed in clubs before being spotted by director David Mamet, who gave them a regular slot on ITV’s The Kenny Everett Video Show. Their sexed-up, rock’n’roll routines made immediate waves, with antipermissive activist Mary Whitehouse’s open disapproval making them more popular. “I was always dressed as the virgin in that group,” Brightman laughs. “I was 17, 18 and the first song we worked with was Kraftwerk’s TransEurope Express. Because of Kraftwerk I went out and bought a Yamaha CS-80 synth, which was quite amazing. When I became a female solo recording artist I wrote a lot of my B-sides on that.”
One night, Brightman and a friend passed the village green where they lived in Little Gaddeston and heard a party at the nearby manor house. They gatecrashed.
“I said, ‘We heard the music and wanted to come…’” Brightman said – to Andrew Graham-Stewart, the manor-owner and manager of Tangerine Dream. They began dating, and married within the year.
“He managed very interesting groups like Magazine, who were amazing.
I was fascinated by electronica because I loved the layers it created. It was like a choir for me. Electronic music would become my future.”
Brightman was selected to front a pop single, backed by Hot Gossip, called I Lost My Heart To A Starship Trooper. Written by Brit duo Typically Tropical, it cashed in on the sci-fi/
Star Wars boom of the time (‘Flash Gordon’s left me, he’s gone to the stars/ An evil Darth Vader has me banished to Mars’). Graham-Stewart helped out as a spotlight temporarily hit her “because I didn’t know what was going on”.
It went Top 10 in November 1978 and sold 500,000 copies, so Brightman recorded a few more disco singles, which she released on her own
label, Whisper. These had less success, so it was time to recalibrate. Musical theatre was a chance to exercise her three-octave soprano vocal range.
Working her way up the cast rankings in Cats and The Pirates Of Penzance to become the lead in 1982 musical Nightingale, Brightman caught the eye of Andrew Lloyd Webber.
They fell for one another romantically and artistically, separated from their respective partners and married in 1984. Two years later they’d hatched a hugely successful new rock musical, The Phantom Of The Opera. Brightman took the chief role of Christine.
“Andrew had grown up in the progressive era,” she says. “He loved and was fascinated by progressive rock as well as Rachmaninoff and Puccini – he’d already done [the classical and rock fusion album] Variations [in 1978].”
The pair’s love of prog fed into their new project alongside nods to Meyerbeer, Mozart and Gilbert & Sullivan. “Classical composers were the prog artists of their day,” she says. “But when I think of Phantom…, I think of Pink Floyd. They’re in the main song [sings ‘der-der-der-derder’], that’s from Echoes.”
With Phantom…, Brightman’s voice soared. “In rock,” she explains, “you can let your voice go into all sorts of areas as an outpouring of emotion and the trials of human life. Think about Freddie Mercury and Queen: one isn’t really polite about the voice and lets it just go there, which is what you do with opera as well. It takes the voice and thought into areas that you can’t imagine – that’s what makes it so grandiose. That’s also the essence of prog.”
As Brightman embraced opera and classical music, her image became more theatrical. In the hands of visionary costume and set designer Maria Bjornson, Phantom…’s gothic couture was revamped from a virginal white wedding dress and natural make-up to low-cut, corseted gowns and billowing, hooded satin cloaks set off by red lips, enormous mascara’d eyes and tumbling brunette locks. Around the world, female singers with a predilection for things gothic and operatic took notice: by the mid-90s this was part of the visual blueprint for a new wave of female-fronted symphonic prog and metal bands.
When Prog brings this up, Brightman seems unaware of her influence. “Do you mean Lady Gaga?” she asks. No, we mean Within Temptation, Nightwish, Therion, Epica… Nightwish even cover The Phantom Of The Opera with Tarja Turunen. “Oh, I didn’t think in terms of fashion or inspiration, I was just doing it from passion,” she laughs, before remembering her 2008 album in particular, Symphony. “The artwork for that with that bright red dress and that gothic look. The background’s at an angle and I’m running away from something – I was going through a dark time in my life,” she says.
The gothic operatic feel wasn’t the only thing that Brightman wanted to explore musically. Her 1988 debut solo album, The Trees They Grow So High, looks like a 4AD album, and the tracklisting is versions of folk songs arranged by Benjamin Britten. Folk and musical theatre pervade the follow-up As I Came Of Age. By ’93, Brightman had divorced Lloyd Webber and found a new direction – and a new love interest – with Enigma producer/ engineer and samples man Frank Peterson on the water-themed album
ANDREW [LLOYD WEBBER] HAD GROWN UP IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA. HE LOVED AND WAS FASCINATED BY PROGRESSIVE
ROCK AS WELL AS RACHMANINOFF
AND PUCCINI.
Dive, her image shifting to cyberpunk mermaid. Through Peterson, electronica was back in Brightman’s toolbox. She heard of him while performing in New York in 1990.
“I was working on Aspects Of Love on Broadway and every day the sound guy would put on Enigma,” she says. “I thought, ‘What is this, it’s absolutely amazing,’ so I asked and got the album.
“I was looking at being a solo artist and getting out of theatre for a while and I was told that Frank had had the idea for using Gregorian chant in the band [he went under the name F Gregorian], so I got in touch.”
Peterson lived in Hamburg and as they began working together and grew closer, Brightman found herself immersed in two musical worlds.
“During the week I’d be in Italy learning bel canto – the operatic form for classical music – and then I’d go clubbing in Hamburg at the weekends and be listening to people like Sven Väth,” she says. “That’s why my music got pretty fused and we ended up with the album Fly [1995] – a very pure progressive rock album with electronica, rock, classical and touches of opera [La Wally]. We kind of started the classical crossover genre.”
Peterson was a prog fan and ready to push boundaries but he was, she admits, “the practical one. He’d rein my ideas in to not lose the audience.”
The audience remained, and, through her classical connections, grew vastly. In 1996, her duet with Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli, Time To Say Goodbye, sold 12 million copies. Brightman performed at huge televised events such as the 2007 Concert for Diana and the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games with peers such as Domingo, Carreras and China’s King Of Pop,
Liu Huan. To date, she has sold more than 30 million units globally and is a UNESCO Artist For Peace. Brightman also champions young women in science and tech and sponsors new musical talent with scholarships to the Royal Northern College Of Music.
But the cosmos drew her back. 2013 album Dreamchaser reunited Brightman with producer Mike Hedges, once the 19-year-old engineer on Starship Trooper, for a space-themed record that prompted tutelage in Russia for an actual trip ad astra.
“I did all the training to go into space,” she says, “then for reasons I can’t go into I had to pull out. But being a trained cosmonaut is pretty proggy and out-there in itself, if you think of Floyd and Bowie…”
Prog is even at the heart of her new album, Hymn. Barclay James Harvest’s 1977 track takes centre stage, sumptuously developed for the Brightman masses. “It a beautiful song, both grounded and heavenly,” she says of a record bursting with influences and styles, and reflecting on the opulent artwork that she chose for its spiritual feel, loaded with symbolic references from Masonic to secular art.
Thirty years on from Phantom…, whether she is reimagining Sigur Rós and Cocteau Twins on Dreamchaser or mixing John Bonham samples with Procol Harum on La Luna, Brightman is compelled to keep experimenting, and her audience lap it up.
“It’s always been about concept,” she says. “The first time I heard Jeff Wayne’s The War Of The Worlds,
I knew I wanted to do that.
“Things just kept coming into my life,” she continues. “I was a pop artist exploring electronica. I was a classical artist who loved dance music. When everything came together it created the career that I have now, which is very wonderful.”