For a man who recently suffered from coronavirus and had a lengthy stay in hospital, Don Black sounds surprisingly hale and hearty. He can even find a positive about his brush with Covid-19. The NHS staff were fantastic, he says. Moreover, they found out who he was during his stay – he’d been booked in under his real name, Donald Blackstone – and, when he left the hospital, not only lined up to applaud him, but serenaded him with an impromptu version of Born Free, the Oscar-winning song that Black co-wrote in 1965. “Isn’t that wonderful?” he marvels.
Black’s book The Sanest Guy in the Room is full of anecdotes a bit like that. Somewhere between a memoir and an extended love letter to his late wife, Shirley – who died in 2018, after a marriage that lasted 60 years – it details his remarkable career as a songwriter. He is “the Pele of lyricists”, as Robbie Williams put it, who’s variously turned his hand to Bond themes, Broadway and pop songs – Black has done the lot.
He’s presumably the only songwriter in the world who can claim to have had both a string of West End successes with Andrew Lloyd Webber – Tell Me on a Sunday and Aspects of Love among them – and have his name in the credits of a record by the Smiths: they covered Work Is a Four Letter Word, which Black originally wrote for a 1968 comedy film, a move that apparently hastened the band’s demise. (“I didn’t form a group to perform Cilla Black songs,” protested Johnny Marr.) But let’s not dwell on a negative; that wouldn’t be Don Black’s style. More remarkable even than the commercial heights his work has scaled is that he seems to have emerged from a 56-year career in show business bearing not an ounce of bitterness or rancour.
Notoriously problematic figures turn out to have been charm itself in Black’s company. Failures – of which there have been several – are wittily brushed aside, among them Merlin, a Broadway musical about the Arthurian wizard, hampered by the fact that the lead, magician Doug Henning, “couldn’t sing a note” and Maybe That’s Your Problem, which proved, if nothing else, that early 70s London wasn’t ready for a musical about a man who suffered from premature ejaculation. “It was done very tastefully,” says Black. “I always think it was ironic that the show didn’t last long, either.”
It never reads like a whitewashed version of events: Black genuinely appears to have breezed happily through his career, as down-to-earth and charming as the book’s title suggests and indeed as he appears to be on the phone, calling from his London home on a Monday morning. He says he “learned a lot” from Matt Monro, the singer he started managing before his career as a lyricist took off. “Nothing impressed him at all. He was a bus driver, and he stayed a bus driver, mentally. Backstage at the Talk of the Town, I’d say to him, ‘Tony Bennett’s in tonight, he wants to come back afterwards and say hello.’ Matt would go, ‘That’d be lovely, son, but we’re supposed to have a ruby later’. And I’ve never been a drinker. I worked with people like Matt and John Barry, who really drank, but I wasn’t very good at it. Love going out, love opening nights, don’t want to get into all that big party nonsense.”
The thing is, his career shouldn’t have worked out at all. He was at London’s answer to Tin Pan Alley, Denmark Street, as a song-plugger and Monro’s manager, when he began dabbling in songwriting, inspired by a love of Cole Porter and the sight of a lyricist friend, Mike Hawker, taking delivery of a £1,500 royalty cheque. But by the time he started writing, Denmark Street was slipping into terminal decline: the arrival of the Beatles signalling a new vogue for artists who wrote their own material. Moreover, the songs Black wanted to write were supposedly out of fashion: “classy ballads,” as he puts it, “in the middle of rock’n’roll”.
And yet he succeeded: Monro had a Top 10 hit with Black’s version of an Austrian Eurovision entry, Walk Away, in 1964. “John Barry loved that song. It was about a man who falls in love with a younger girl,” he chuckles, “something John could relate to. And that’s when he said the life-changing sentence to me – ‘Do you want to have a go at Thunderball?’ He got me into the world of Bond. But I kept working as a song plugger. I came from Hackney, I’ve got that Jewish insecurity – ‘Well, it’s a hit, but I can’t afford not to work’.”
He finally gave up his day job when Born Free won an Oscar: “I had so many offers to work with great composers.” Even so, there were hiccups along the way. Like the producers of Born Free who feared Black’s lyrics concealed a political statement and initially cut it from the film – finally conceding “it grows on you”, at the Oscars ceremony. Bond co-producer Harry Saltzman was so horrified by the lyrics of Diamonds Are Forever that he stormed out of a meeting with Black. “He actually slammed the door: ‘Touch it, stroke it and undress it? It’s absolutely filthy!’ There are more people who don’t understand music than lyrics. No one will ever say, ‘I don’t like bar 47 of that song, but anyone can criticise a lyric.”
He seems to have made a speciality out of successfully collaborating with artists and writers who have a reputation for being difficult. There was the irascible Barry, who at one juncture managed to become embroiled in a punch-up at a Hollywood party with John Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas over the merits of Mahler, a fight that required the combined efforts of Black, Henry Mancini and Burt Bacharach to break up: “He was just very honest, that Yorkshire bluntness – he told many directors, when he saw a film that he was going to score, ‘Well, you’ve fucked it up with that scene there, haven’t you?’”
There was Andrew Lloyd Webber, who by many accounts is hard work and, more recently, Van Morrison, who seems to have spent the last 40 years cultivating a reputation as rock’s greatest curmudgeon. “Funnily enough, I spoke to Van the night before last and said to him, ‘Van, I hate to tell you this but I’m about to ruin your reputation. When I mention your name, people go, ‘How can you work with that grumpy bugger?’ In my book, I say that we don’t stop laughing when we have lunch together. I’m afraid I’ve pricked your balloon and made you a normal person with a hearty laugh’. He thought that was hilarious.”
So, what’s his secret? “Andrew Lloyd Webber is no different to Quincy Jones or Van Morrison when they sit at the piano. My thought is to concentrate on ‘how does it go?’ That’s all I need to know. It doesn’t matter about anyone’s lives when I’m sitting with them, because when they’re at the piano they’re all after the same thing, getting the right melody. They’re not really any different, any of these people.”
He even struck up a friendship with Michael Jackson, the latter presumably impressed that, given the unpromising brief to write a song for a movie about a lonely child’s love for a killer rat, Black came up with 1972’s Oscar-nominated, Golden Globe-winning Ben, which reached No 1 in the US. In the wake of Jackson’s success with the song, the singer became a regular visitor to Black’s Hollywood home, playing pool with his sons and painting with Shirley, before Jackson’s father inexplicably put a stop to his visits.
“I met him later on, and he was still lovely, but he was dressed strange, you know. It was a slow decline into … I wouldn’t call it madness, but wherever he ended up. I still have a painting he did with Shirley. My kids thought it would be worth a fortune, signed by Michael Jackson and Shirley Black. They’d read his glove went for a million dollars. I don’t know what they were expecting, at least a yacht out of it. So they took it to Sotheby’s, and the guy said ‘Well, if it was something to do with his performances, it would be worth a lot of money, but if you put this up for auction, I’d say you’d probably get something in the low hundreds’.” He laughs. “So, there goes the yacht.”
Black mourns the passing of the old Tin Pan Alley system of songwriting. “These days, no one wants a song unless they actually participate in the writing of it,” he says, a state of affairs that doesn’t seem to have impacted on his own workload. At 82, he’s been forced to give up his Sunday night Radio 2 series due to lack of time. There are plans to rework Tell Me on Sunday – the saga of a girl from London who moves to America – with a male protagonist, set against the backdrop of the Aids crisis. An entirely different generation of artists have sought him out, not least the aforementioned Robbie Williams. The idea of retiring seems to fill him with horror. “I don’t believe in taking it easy,” he says. “Something Charles Aznavour once said always stayed with me: ‘A man will never grow old if he knows what he’s doing tomorrow.’ I think that’s true.”
Don Black: The Sanest Guy in the Room is published by Constable.
