Herbert Kretzmer

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Music, Society & Culture, Personal Journals, Music Commentary

4.3 • 14.3K Ratings

🗓️ 12 October 2003

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This week Sue Lawley's castaway is the journalist and songwriter Herbert Kretzmer. Born in South Africa in 1925, he came to Europe after World War II. For a while he lived in Paris, playing piano in a bar. He rubbed shoulders with Jean Paul Sartre and became friends with one of France's greatest singer-songwriters Charles Aznavour. The two formed a musical partnership and Kretzmer re-worked many of his songs into English - including the hits Yesterday, When I Was Young and She, which was more recently recorded by Elvis Costello for the film Notting Hill.

His day job was as a journalist and Kretzmer wrote celebrity profiles for the Daily Express. He says his most memorable interviewees were "writers and fighters", including George Foreman, Muhammad Ali, Truman Capote and Arthur Miller. But it wasn't until he was nearly sixty that he had his greatest success. The director Cameron Mackintosh was working on Les Miserables but did not have a 'book' - that is, a set of songs that he could produce. He remembered a chance meeting he'd had with Kretzmer, recalled the songs he'd written and his connection with France - and invited him to write the lyrics. The show has been running in London for the past 19 years and has played all over the world. Now aged 78, he continues to work. He is currently collaborating with the former ABBA musicians, Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus on another musical.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Gymnopedies by Yikin Seow Book: The Great War and Modern Memory by Prof Paul Fussell Luxury: Zippo Lighter

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2003, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a lyricist he made his fortune late in life at the age of nearly 60.
0:35.1	He was called in to write the lyrics for an ailing musical.
0:38.1	He did such a good job of it that it's still running in the West End 19 years later and he's a millionaire many times over.
0:44.7	He was born in South Africa which he left age 22 for the bright lights of London and
0:49.5	Paris.
0:50.5	He became the theatre critic of the Daily Express and wrote the lyrics of such hits as
0:54.6	Asnavoir's She and Peter Sellers and Sophie Lorenz goodness gracious me.
0:58.8	Songwriting and journalism provided a decent living until the producer Cameron McIntosh
1:04.6	asked him to write the lyrics for Lé Miserable. On such slim threads, our lives and careers
1:10.8	sometimes depend, he says. he is Herbert Kretsma how did it happen
1:15.9	Herbert that Cameron should ask you after all you were you were known much more as a
1:19.1	journalist than as a lyricist this was in 1984 and I was very keen to revive an old musical of
1:25.8	mine called Our Man Crichton. I wrote a camera and asking him whether he'd
1:29.8	ever seen it and whether he'd be interested in getting behind a revival of it. He wrote back and
1:35.2	said he didn't think he wanted to do it, but would I come and talk to him just so that we could
1:41.4	meet each other? When I arrived at he, we sat on his sofa and talked about everything and nothing.
1:46.0	At the end of a half an hour or so, I felt it was a good idea to leave the busy man,
1:51.0	so he saw me to the door on the way from the sofa to the
1:57.0	door he asked me why didn't you go on writing lyrics I said but I had continued
2:02.3	and he said well name me something you've
	...

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