Tim Rice

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Music, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Music Commentary

4.3 • 14.3K Ratings

🗓️ 21 February 1976

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the world famous lyricist Sir Tim Rice. Sir Tim is best known for his collaborative work with Andrew Lloyd Webber creating some of the best loved musicals of recent years. The duo first teamed up in the late 1960s first producing Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, which is a staple of school end-of-term shows as well as enjoying numerous runs in the West End. The groundbreaking Jesus Christ Superstar followed, and then Evita, depicting the life of Eva Peron.

As a child growing up in Hertfordshire, he was enchanted by astronomy and cricket and excelled academically. On leaving school, he shunned university and tried his hand with the law. But he had dreams of becoming a pop star or, at the very least, a songwriter, and so he took a job as a management trainee with EMI records. When he met Andrew Lloyd Webber after replying to his request for a 'with it' writer he realised his future lay as a lyricist. Sir Tim was knighted in 1994 and he's the co-author of the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles and a co-founder of Pavilion Books.

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

Favourite track: Once in Royal David's City by Gauntlett Book: Molesworth by Geoffrey Willans Luxury: A telescope

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Christy Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.
0:05.9	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.9	The program was originally broadcast in 1976, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.
0:31.0	Our castaway this week is a broadcaster, and a writer of Lydix and Libretti,
0:35.4	who's doing exceedingly well, it's Tim Rice.
0:38.2	Tim, have you ever daydreamed about being a Robinson Cruiser?
0:41.6	Yes, quite a lot.
0:43.0	Could you endure the prospect?
0:44.8	I'm not too sure about it. I think I'd quite enjoy the novelty for a while, but probably we're off.
0:49.7	Can you think of anything you'd be particularly happy to do without?
0:53.2	Well, the telephone, not so much the telephone ringing, but the inefficiency of a telephone system.
0:58.0	Now, you'll write the words to Andrew Lloyd Webber's music.
1:00.8	Have you any musical skill yourself? Do you play the piano?
1:03.4	I do play badly, but I can play well enough, so if Andrew gives me a tune to put words to,
1:08.2	I can bash out the chords at home, but I don't get the family rushing into hear me play.
1:12.5	The families don't do that.
1:15.2	How did you start about choosing your eight records?
1:17.7	Well, I decided to choose eight records that I thought I could live with for a very,
1:22.3	very long period of time, and I also tried to choose them from different fields of music that I liked.
1:26.7	Where do we start?
1:28.1	Well, I think the first one ought to be Billy Holiday,
1:30.7	who's the greatest female jazz singer ever, and some good and nice work if you can get it.
	...

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