I
had never knowingly heard ‘ELP’, except for their 1977 hit single, however in 1983 my then music publisher was looking out for
‘projects’ he could pass my way in an effort to generate some royalties and
claw back the generous advance I had been paid. One day I was told that Keith Emerson,
no less, needed a lyricist to work on a song for a film he had been hired to
compose for. I was sent a rough cut of the movie, a drug smuggling caper shot
in Spain and starring John Heard and Levon Helm. It needed a theme song.
I met up with Keith at his club (Morton’s in Berkeley
Square), and listened to his requirement. He struck me as a bit of a cold fish,
and quite humourless. I thought he was a bit of a square, but I couldn’t allow
that to stand in the way of a commission. A week or so later we met at his
apartment in a mansion block close to Olympia. He was in training for the
London Marathon and came to the door in shorts and Nike trainers. He played me
the tune on a keyboard and handed me a cassette containing the film’s theme song
to go away with and put words to.
Whilst I was quite confident, over-confident maybe, of my
ability to write lyrics, this was a real challenge. Nothing too clever, nothing
ironic - think ‘Eye of the Tiger’. So I scribbled down some obscure nonsense
that scanned, and perhaps reflected the movie’s storyline. To present my effort
(entitled ‘Playing For Keeps’, which was the working title of Best Revenge) to Keith, I was invited down
to his impressive pile in East Sussex. I was a bit nervous and enlivened my
train journey to Battle with an illicit pick-me-up.
He met me at the station in his rag-top Morgan with wire
wheels, the works, and whisked me off to ‘Stonehill House’, formerly the home
of Peter Pan author, J M Barrie. Electric
gates, gravel drive, beams, beams, and more beams. After a coffee, Keith wanted
to leave me alone in his kitchen to do some further work on the eight lines
that would hopefully enhance his theme, while he went to his private gym to
exercise. An hour or so later he appeared and offered to ‘show me round’.
He took me into an enormous barn that contained some
recording equipment and a rehearsal space. There, on a high podium, sat his
white Hammond organ. He turned it on, cranked up the volume and, I swear,
commenced to play the bass riff to ‘Fanfare For The Common Man’. And as he
stood there pumping it out, very skilfully I have to admit, he shot me a glance
that kind of said, ‘Cool, eh?’
When we returned to the kitchen he looked over my lyrics.
‘Erm…’ he said, ‘not bad.’ He needed time to think about it, to see how they
might fit his tune, and offered to run me back to London where he had some
appointment. We chatted on the way, and I asked him some fan-boy questions
about The Nice. He dropped me off in Fulham and that was the last I saw of him.
I heard nothing more and thought that either the film had
been dumped or my lyrics hadn’t quite cut it. But then, about a year later, as
I was casually viewing Film 84 on TV,
I heard Barry Norman say, ‘And now a film about a drug smuggling operation, set
in Spain, and starring John Heard…’ There was a brief clip from Best Revenge and that was that. ‘Good
for Keith,’ I thought. ‘His theme music has seen the light of day.’
A week or so later I noticed that Best Revenge was playing the ABC Edgware Road. So I went along to
see it, dying to hear its theme tune and the words that presumably some other
lyricist had set to Emerson’s music. But when it blasted out over the cinema speakers,
there were MY WORDS! Several lines of them! How could this be? What would my
publisher say? I sat through the film credits, as one does, only to see: ‘Theme
song “Playing For Keeps” by Keith Emerson and Brad Delp’.
At this point, and I hope this doesn’t come across as a hard
luck story, I recognised the name ‘Brad Delp’ as the vocalist from ‘Boston’,
hit makers of ‘More Than A Feeling’ (what a great record!). Maybe Brad also had
a way with words, a way maybe of having it away with MY WORDS! I contacted my publisher: ‘I’ve
been cheated!’ I exclaimed. Investigations commenced and Mr Emerson was sent a
robust letter.
I am not a litigious person, but can be quite tenacious,
even though I knew any royalties would be minimal. It was a matter of
principle. Several years elapsed as reams of paperwork piled up; letters to and
from publishers, royalty collection societies, lawyers, managers, and Keith
himself. In 1988, he accepted that some of my lyrics had been used by Brad Delp
and promised to contact him.
It took him three years to track down Mr Delp, who
eventually did agree to us sharing the credits and royalties. During this
lengthy period I harboured a grudging dislike of Emerson as I felt he must have
known that Delp had incorporated some of my work into the song, but on
revisiting the correspondence over 30 years later I can see that he was
probably too busy to get involved in such minutiae and I now appreciate that he
made a sterling effort to contact Delp on my behalf and persuaded him to agree
to sharing the credit.
I don’t expect anyone to be that interested in this rambling
story about an obscure piece of music, although it did subsequently earn me a four
figure sum which at least made a small dent in the publishing advance I had received back in ’83.
You can hear some of my dreadful lyrics here
‘Out of a timeless
age, independent in their way… taking a chance on a dance, partners in crime
waltz away…’
Who writes this
Brad Delp died in 2007. Sadly, like Keith Emerson, he had committed
suicide.
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