Sir Tim Rice

Rosebud with Gyles Brandreth

Gyles Brandreth / Plain Jaine Media

Society & Culture, Unknown

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 18 April 2025

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sir Tim Rice, lyricist extraordinaire, is Gyles's guest today. Tim is one of the few people in the entertainment world to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony Award, and his songs for shows like Joseph, Evita, Jesus Christ Superstar, Chess and the Lion King are known and loved all around the world. And yet Sir Tim remains modest and charming, as you'll hear in this conversation - perhaps thanks to the good manners he inherited from his father. Tim tells Gyles about his childhood, his schooldays at Lancing College and how, despite his lack of ambition, he moved to London and got a job with EMI. Much of this conversation, not surprisingly, is about music: the records Tim listened to as a teenager, the band he played with at school, and the first songs he wrote and which helped him to get noticed. We find out how he met Andrew Lloyd Webber and started to make musical history. Thank you Sir Tim Rice for your warmth, wit and wonderful stories. Tim Rice is on a nationwide tour telling his brilliant stories and featuring some of his best-known songs until the end of May, tickets available here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's Good Friday. Good Friday because it's time for Rosebud and because it's Easter Sunday on Sunday.
0:06.9	The lambs are mewing, the doves cooing. Welcome to this week's Rosebud. I hope you were gently amused by my little introduction with
0:40.0	the lambs mewing and the doves cooing and the world renewing and the music queuing. I thought that was very good.
0:45.2	That was not my work. That was the work of my producer Harriet Jane. And, oh, I haven't got her an Easter
0:51.2	as just reminded me. Never mind. But I'm not sure that lambs do mew, do they? But it works. She got away with it.
0:59.4	Were the rhymes good enough? Does mewing rhyme with cooing? It certainly rhymes with renewing. That's clever. And the renewing idea is so wonderful because it's spring and also Easter is coming. All that's very, very good.
1:12.7	But did she really need a rhyming dictionary? Or did she need to be introduced to a really good
1:18.0	rhyme merchant? Well, I know one of the best of them, and it's Tim Rice. And as Charles would have
1:24.5	it, we thought he'd be ideal for this particular weekend because one of his most successful musicals, the one he wrote with Andrew Lloyd Webber, many years ago, was indeed Jesus Christ Superstar.
1:37.5	So, he is remarkable, one of the most successful lyricists in the history of songwriting.
1:44.0	Knighted in the 1990s, I think he's one of
1:47.3	a handful of people who has won an Emmy, an Oscar, a Grammy, a Tony, you name it, he's won it.
1:55.3	He hasn't just won one Oscar, he's won two Oscars, he's won three Oscars. He's extraordinary.
2:00.7	He's also very self-deprecating, very amusing, and I think you are going to enjoy your time with Tim Rice. Tim, we always begin with the same question.
2:27.4	And it's simply this.
2:28.4	What is your very first memory?
2:31.8	Gosh, I remember very vaguely being in hospital when I was three. I can't remember what
2:40.2	four, but I think I got some breathing thing or something. I've just had that very vague memory
2:45.7	of being in a hospital bed, not being at home. I don't remember being unhappy in that hospital scene, but I suppose
2:52.6	that would be my first memory. I also remember two large snails on a gate in Croxley Green Lane,
2:58.6	quite near a radlet. And that might have been 1947. That was also a very cold winter.
3:04.6	These are all very early memories and they're probably all before I was four.
	...

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