talks to Spencer Leigh
Herbert Kretzmer, initially from South Africa, was a journalist and the theatre critic for Daily Mail for many years. He is a superb lyricist and he has written many songs with Charles Aznavour as well as the English lyrics for Les Miserables. This interview was broadcast in On The Beat on BBC Radio Merseyside on 12 March 2005. SL: You’re known as a lyricist but did you ever want to write the music? HERBERT KRETZMER: When I began my life as a songwriter in South Africa at college, I fancied myself not only as a lyricist but as a composer. I wrote a few songs for a university show and I wrote a couple of songs for a revue which was put on in Johannesburg at the Library Theatre. The illusion, no, delusion, that I could write music pursued me all the way to England where I came to settle in the mid-50s. For the first time in my life, I started to look very seriously at what kind of work was being turned out by current songwriters in England and I came to the conclusion very quickly that there were 1,000 better composers living in my block alone. It was ludicrous to carry through that delusion from childhood into adulthood. I made up my mind that whatever talent I had as a lyric writer might be successfully exploited but I gave up any thought of composing and I never have again. It was banal stuff I was composing.
SL: And journalism and lyric writing are both using words.
HERBERT KRETZMER: Yes, journalism and lyric writing are compatible professions. They both depend upon the manipulation of the English language under very compressed conditions. You couldn’t negotiate with a bar of music to get in a devastating rhyme that will amaze every other lyric writer – if it doesn’t fit the music, if it doesn’t fit the beat, you have to throw it out. Equally in journalism, especially in my day which was the hot metal approach. Every word you wrote became metal within a few hours and then the metal was transfixed and transmitted on to paper through various means. You had to fit the metal’s measurement which was also unyielding so there is a similarity. You have to seek your freedom in both songwriting and journalism within a tight system which will not yield. The bar in the music is well named: you are behind bars.
SL: There is now such an interest in South African music. Have you been involved in that?
HERBERT KRETZMER: Not at all. I have been away for so long but I still speak both the official languages of my youth – English and Afrikaans. I keep a close eye on how things are out there, but I was never involved in the South African scene as such . When I was there I was trying to make my mark as a straight journalist. Songwriting was a hobby, a dream which was put aside for years at a time while I went on being a newspaperman. Then I became involved with Charles Aznavour who demanded a new album every couple of years and you knew that at the end of the labour, there would be a record.
SL: In 1960 you wrote Goodness Gracious Me for Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren. It might be thought politically incorrect, but nevertheless the phrase was used for a comedy series featuring Asian performers.
HERBERT KRETZMER: Yes, at that time, if anybody wanted to imitate an Indian accent they would usually use that phrase. What it wasn’t yet was a song title. The song has now become part of the national fabric as an example of Indianness. I can’t believe when I wrote She that it was the only title of that name. You would have thought that there would have been a glut of She’s. I suppose I can claim to have invented Kinky Boots. I have seen the phrase over and over again in fashion magazines and so on. That was used for a record by Patrick McNee and Honor Blackman.
SL: Had you written it for them?
HERBERT KRETZMER: No. Kinky Boots was done in half an hour. It was written at the time of That Was The Week That Was, the satirical show that took the country apart on Saturday nights. Ned Sherrin had commissioned some shots of King’s Road on a Saturday with girls wearing thigh boots and high skirts, which was the fashion of the time. It was a two minute film and the whole thing was shot from the waist downwards, a montage of pretty long legs in boots and miniskirts. Ned wanted a tune to go with it as he didn’t feel that it needed a spoken commentary. The little song would be disposable and never heard of again. Some years later we did another song for Patrick McNee and Honor Blackman called Let’s Keep It Friendly, which was a terrible little song in the Avengers personae. They needed a B-side and Dave Lee reminded me of Kinky Boots from several years earlier. Honor Blackman was the girl with leather boots in The Avengers so we brought it out of the trunk, and the rest is mystery.
SL: And yet it took many years to become a hit.
HERBERT KRETZMER: Simon Mayo heard it and thought the recording was terrible, but the whole thing tickled him. Patrick McNee was certainly a very stiff participant in the proceedings. It made for a very odd record and Mayo said, ‘Let’s make it number one.’ It was one of those bets that disc jockeys make with each other. It almost worked. It was popular with schoolchildren for some reason and some people are far more impressed that I wrote that than Les Miserables. You know, ‘Wow, that’s really something.’ They tend to be very young but one must take one’s fans where one can find them these days.
SL: Have you always enjoyed writing novelty songs?
HERBERT KRETZMER: Yes, I have enjoyed everything I’ve written but always when it’s done rather than when I am writing it. The process of writing is always agonising and I never feel that I am embracing a song; I always feel that I am facing a song almost in an adversarial way, I am dealing with something that I may not be able to beat, that is the attitude that I have. Sometimes you have a piece of music and someone wants lyrics and you don’t know what it is going to be about. Then you have to listen to the music until a song suggests itself. Certain sounds sit well on certain musical cadences. It is chaos and out of this chaos you have to fashion and discipline yourself to produce finally, maybe 12 or 16 lines of short and tight English words. You are battling chaos and finding order but it may beat you.
SL: But what of the comedy songs?
HERBERT KRETZMER: I have always enjoyed writing comedy songs and one of the songs I most enjoyed in Les Miserables was Master Of The House. It is my favourite song in the show as it is the one song that makes people laugh and that is a very welcome sound, especially during Les Mis which is not rich in laughs, even though it is rich in uplift. Some of my comic songs have come off quite well thanks to Peter Sellers and Rolf Harris. Rolf Harris did some comic songs about animals which at the time was going to be a bigger project than it turned out to be.
SL: In what way?
HERBERT KRETZMER: Dave Lee and I decided that we should do an alphabet of children’s songs using all our skills, not silly children’s words but the themes would be childlike. We decided to do an alphabet of children’s songs: A for Aardvark to Z for Zebra. Peter Sellers heard many of the songs and said that he would do it, so we worked specifically around him. We played him the songs in a flat with a grand piano near the Royal Albert Hall. He was fidgety and kept looking out of the window. I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ and he replied, ‘I have double-parked.’ I said, ‘You have come to hear something that we have worked on for a year and you haven’t got enough time to settle back and hear it. Your mind is on how soon you can get out of here and not how well these songs are written.’ This was typical of him. He was a great 24 hour enthusiast, but his enthusiasm would dry up. Luckily I didn’t need him in my life even though I liked him as a friend. The publisher then sent Rolf Harris round and he picked up a few of the songs but we never got that project going and it remains a dated idea. Kids today are so far ahead of the game. The vision of children sitting quietly and listening to songs about zebras and owls and dodos has more or less disappeared from our society.
SL: So many of Aznavour’s songs were about ageing, which is so different from a British songwriter.
HERBERT KRETZMER: Yes, Aznavour has two or three fixed themes in his life. They haunt him and they keep being regurgitated in various forms and ways. One of them has to do with the pity of the years. Even when he was a young man, he was looking ahead and he was obsessed with the idea that he would not live beyond the age of the girls he was singing about. He was always going to be gone before them and how would he be remembered. There is a wonderful song called Who and he is asking ‘Who are you going to fall in love with, Who are you going to go to bed with once I am dead and in my coffin, Whose name will you call out in the night?’ The final line in French was ‘Who will dry your tears and bury me again?’ It is a wonderful song, but it sounds as morbid as hell. The French don’t piss about: they go for the throat, they sing about things that no Anglo-Saxon songwriter would ever write about: death, life and the pity of sexual jealousy. They used to listen in the late night clubs to Buttershoe and Brel and Aznavour and Piaf. They didn’t start singing until one in the morning and they always sang about things that mattered. Aznavour is a couple of years older than me. He has performed his farewell concerts at the biggest indoor venue in Paris. He regularly fills it up for six weeks, by himself, no one else with him and an orchestra.
SL: You can’t imagine someone like him saying goodbye.
HERBERT KRETZMER: No, it may be his last concert in that venue. I wrote a song with him called You Will Never Hear Me Say Goodbye, which is vowing never to stage a farewell tour or to announce this is the end. He will keep on going til he drops but I doubt if he will do a six week season there. Even 80 year old men have to rest.
SL: What are his other themes?
HERBERT KRETZMER: They all have to do with mortality. They have to do with the life of soldiers, they have to do with soldiers dying, they have to do with the heartbreak of those who are left behind. He deals with the things that go wrong in ordinary romances, and everybody loves him because they all know what he is singing about: these are common experiences in their lives. The American writers have only got two themes – one is ‘Life is good, hooray’, and the other is ‘Life is awful, let’s sing the blues.’ They think that covers the spectrum, but Aznavour covers the infinite complexities of life. Brel does it too.
SL: We take our culture from America and yet France is only 30 miles away.
HERBERT KRETZMER: France is the most foreign country to the average Englishman, far more foreign than Germany or Sweden or Spain. In terms of uncomprehending otherness, to the average Englishman the average Frenchman is an alien, like someone from Mars. There is a natural hostility to that to what you cannot relate to or understand. The Englishman is much closer to the Dutchman or the Swede. If they met each other in a pub they would be pals by the second pint.
SL: Did you write the lyric for What Makes A Man A Man?
HERBERT KRETZMER: No, that is one of the Aznavour lyrics that I did not write. I like it a lot. What Makes A Man A Man is a very touching description. There is a lovely song called And I In My Chair in which a man describes how he takes a girl to dinner and they meet another man there. He can see his love changing hands in front of his face. The man who brought the girl can only observe. And I In My Chair is a wonderful song about knowing when things are over, knowing when to resign with grace, knowing when not to let the blood boil within you and so on. I don’t say that I could have done better than the man who did it but I wouldn’t have minded being given that song. Aznavour kept me a songwriter – he came to me constantly with the next album and so on. If it hadn’t been for Aznavour during those years, I would have given up. There was no market I could write for. There never was a market. Whenever I got into the hit parade, it was always as a fluke, a mistake, a novelty. She was a totally unexpected No.l hit. I was always someone who wrote special material. There were not a lot of covers of Aznavour songs, I guess other performers feel that he is such a distinctive voice and such a distinctive personality that once he has done it, he’s done it. There have been exceptions, notably Yesterday When I Was Young. She was not widely covered at all even though it was a No.l song for a while.
SL: But it was revived by Elvis Costello.
HERBERT KRETZMER: Yes, I have just seen a film The Tadpole with Sigourney Weaver and she opens the door and she goes into a cocktail party and when she does, the sound of She is heard. The song was written in 1974 and so it is very flattering.
SL: It must be very flattering that someone like Costello is doing your song.
HERBERT KRETZMER: No, they are troubadours and they do it if the gig’s right and the money’s there. I don’t take it as a signed personal approval of the song. I don’t think that he would do something that he actively disliked but these guys are minstrels, they sing for their supper.
SL: How did you approach the Aznavour songs? Did he give you a translation of the lyrics?
HERBERT KRETZMER: Yes, a song is a collection of phrases which have a certain resonance in a certain language with a certain culture. A word might mean a little more than it actually means. People who hear English songs are steeped in their own English culture. When you translate a song from one language to another, you have to absorb what the song is about. You have to try to get a very clear view of what the song says and get to know the mood of it, the voice of it. The best thing you can then do is to forget the French lines. You have to recreate and reinvent the song so that it comes out saying what the original song said but in its own way. To follow a master, you don’t have to be a little dog on a lease. You can follow him behind him quite voluntarily and make your own pathway. Even the title Yesterday When I Was Young does not occur in the French original. Hier Encore means Yesterday Again, but it is more like, It seems like only yesterday. For a start, you have a phrase that is untranslatable. ‘I was in my 20s and I ran after shadows, not realising that the shadows were running after me’: I ignored those images and went my own way with that song. You will not find the lines in the original that are direct translations and yet it remains Aznavour’s song. I was the recreator but I was really inside his head when I was writing it. Of course if a phrase in French will work in English, you grab it. You want all the help you can get but one must not follow the original too slavishly. That way lies disaster.
SL: There is a real love of words in the phrase, ‘The way the evening breeze may tease a candle flame’.
HERBERT KRETZMER: Yes, the internal rhyme. My favourite part of writing a song is when it has been accepted and people like it and you have time to play with it. I like the seamless internal rhyme, something that doesn’t draw too much attention to itself. Great songs are not written, they are rewritten.
SL: How did you approach Jacques Brel’s songs?
HERBERT KRETZMER: Both Tom Conti and Albert Finney were great Brel fans and they both possessed fairly decent singing voices and wanted to do some of his songs. I was asked to do a bunch of Brel songs and I chose The Girl From Ostend which I called Girl In An Armchair and that was about a girl whose husband had died at sea: the people gathered around her in the kitchen and it was a song about mourning and about loss. The song that Albert Finney did was You Can Smell Beer and it was about the beer drinkers of Europe, ‘From Munich to Manchester where the north wind blows, That’s where you can find the beer drinkers, Crowding into bars.’ You can see the fat swelling up on people’s necks from drinking too much beer and there was not enough air in these pubs. It was a wonderfully atmospheric song. They did the demos but I don’t think that anybody at the time thought it would be a good gamble.
SL: Some of the Brel songs would already have been translated so I presume you had to take what was available.
HERBERT KRETZMER: Exactly but if you do it well, you will get to be favoured and then it is others who have to take what is available. Aznavour came to me first for a number of years. At least I flatter myself that he was coming to me first but it may not be true. After She and Yesterday When I Was Young and a very successful album called Tapestry, Aznavour and I have been joined at the hip for 40 years. I couldn’t speak French then and I can’t speak it now. I spent a weekend with him, that was how I first met him. We sat in his study and we went through what he wanted to play for me. I would say, ‘Let’s do that one’ or ‘Let’s do that one.’ He would give me a very rough English translation and then I came back to London with a dozen songs including Yesterday When I Was Young. We didn’t know that it would outlast all the others.
SL: An example of a song that may have been intrinsically French is Little Holes, which was recorded by Topol.
HERBERT KRETZMER: It was a French song that Topol brought to me, The Ticket Collector Of Lilas, which may have been an underground station in Paris. It was about a ticket clipper at the turnstiles who put little holes in the tickets. The man lived in a hole himself as he lived in the underground and he talked about the great hole that waited for us at the end of our lives. It was very jaunty and jolly but it was also morbid. I loved it and it was a cute little song. The bits that fall off the ticket are like confetti so that leads to another image of what life can be.
SL: Have you ever been involved with the Eurovision Song Contest?
HERBERT KRETZMER: No, I have never understood the rules and it has become a visual thing and it isn’t much to do with the music anymore. It has to do with how people look while they are doing the songs and the songs come second. I was a judge at a Polish song contest once. It was run seriously and was a properly organised huge event, an Iron Curtain version of Eurovision. The entries from Hungary and Slovakia came on looking like American pop musicians and so there wasn’t much difference: black leather jackets with steel studs spelling out the acronym ‘Rats’ and so on. There were 22 categories. There were bottles of Polish vodka called Buffalo Grass stretched along the table where we were doing the judging. The judging went on for hours and when we came to the last categories, and the other English judge was closing his eyes and rotating his finger over the candidates, rather like choosing a Derby winner. The chairman called the judging to an end, and we hastily filled in the rest of the votes and we considered our work well done.
SL: You also did a film theme, No My Darling Daughter.
HERBERT KRETZMER: That was because of Goodness Gracious Me as Dave Lee and I became identified by film directors as a hot team for funny duet songs. They came to us but the miracle never happened again. No My Darling Daughter was for Sir Michael Redgrave and one of his daughters. I suppose I was never political enough as a songwriter: I never schmoozed, I didn’t go round meeting publishers and I didn’t know who the head of PRS was. I was a newspaperman and everything to do with songs except the writing itself, I knew nothing about. It was a different world. I have never been part of the songwriting establishment although I had a year on the Songwriters Guild, which became Bacs later. They were talking about quotas with the BBC and my mind wasn’t built around systems like that. I dropped out of that.
SL: Because you had written The Admirable Crichton in 1960s, did you realise what had gone into a musical and so were favourably disposed towards them when you went to review them?
HERBERT KRETZMER: It made it more difficult because if I went to see another musical and I didn’t like it, the chances were that I would know the composer. I remember going to see Pickwick and a whole bunch of friends were involved in that – Harry Secombe, Wolf Mankewitz, Leslie Bricusse and Cyril Orandel. Leslie and I were even thinking of working on something. I couldn’t share in the enthusiasm for that particular musical and it was my job to say so. You risk your friendships doing that – it was a long time before I got a civil word from Wolf Mankewitz and Leslie was far from pleased with me. If you can’t speak the truth about people you know, that means you will automatically favour them. If you can’t do an honest job as a critic, you have no right to hold that job. I knew the critics personally and I found them honest guys doing their job. There is no cabal or getting together in the interval, there is no ‘we’ at all. Even though we discussed it, we were not persuaded by each other. We wrote honest reviews.
SL: So your duty as a critic is to the readers?
HERBERT KRETZMER: No, the editor has said, ‘We will pay you for your opinion.’ Well, thank you very much. I am not a consumer guide, but I have a job of going to see a whole lot of people in fancy dress and wearing false beards creating a situation on stage and I am going on the first night. I had to surrender myself to what the evening told me. I never got jaded as everytime the curtain went up, my anticipation went up. I did the job for 18 years. It brought me closer to an appreciation of good lyrics. I always felt closer to lyric writers knowing how difficult that job was.
SL: How did you feel when the reviews of Les Miserables came in?
HERBERT KRETZMER: Exactly as I would have felt had I never been a journalist, had I never been a critic. I was somebody who had made a contribution to this musical and there were a number of critics who hadn’t liked it at all. One was gloating about the imminent collapse of Les Mis. Another one said that it was not worth bringing in from the Barbican to the West End as it is a waste of time and the problems are insurmountable. That was Jack Tinker and he was a honest man. There were excellent reviews in The Times and the Financial Times. We got enormous coverage in Time and Newsweek. It was a rough baptism, but it became apparent after two or three weeks that we were in on something quite extraordinary. Within a few weeks, no American coming into England would miss Les Mis and it was on the shopping list. If some of the reviews hurt, they didn’t hurt for long.
SL: What are you working on now?
HERBERT KRETZMER: I had a go at Martin Guerre with the two French guys who wrote Les Mis but that didn’t work out as it was the wrong combination of talents. Even with Les Mis, I wasn’t the first choice I followed a man, a very good poet, who had spent over a year on it. He was the theatre critic of The Sunday Times and he was told that it wasn’t working. I was brought in with only six months to go before rehearsal. They were supposed to open the previous year and so I had to do the job and do it quickly. I was like the seventh cavalry and it worked.
SL: And is there a new musical?
HERBERT KRETZMER: Yes, it is the story of a group of Swedish people in the 19th century who leave Sweden and settle in Minnesota. You follow them and their motives for leaving Sweden. The main focus is the woman and the story of whom she marries and the children she has and loves. It is based on four or five novels which are enormously popular in Sweden called The Immigrants, and it has been filmed twice. The Abba men have known this story all their lives and they decided to do a musical. They wrote it in Swedish and it played for over three in Stockholm, in Malmo and in Gutenberg. I met Bjorn Ulvaeus at a dinner at Carlton Tower. We praised each other’s work and he said, ‘What are you doing for the next couple of years, do you want to write a musical?’ I was startled and pleased and then I listened to the music of the show and the more I played it the more I loved it. It never felt, ‘Oh, no, not that track again.’ Bjorn is already an English lyricist. He wrote lyrics that were popular in the best sense of that word. What makes them remarkable is their percussive sound: it is because he is a foreigner and when he is thinking in a language that is not his own, he thinks in quick little phrases like Super Trouper. They are words that sit on the music like Mamma Mia. Lyrics can be as much a question of sound as sense and he has the sound. This has been a musical written by email, but we would meet once or twice a year. We have to sell it before it goes on and of course Broadway is going through a rough time. The tendency has been towards merry and bright musicals like Hairspray and Thoroughly Modern Millie.
SL: So it may be a hard sell.
HERBERT KRETZMER: I believe in the public mood, there is such a thing as the public subconscious. It picks up on things with unimaginable speed. We opened Les Mis at the Barbican on 8 October 1985 and next morning the reviews were pretty poor and yet somehow the word on it swept across London and brought people to the box office so that by lunchtime on the day of the reviews, they had sold more tickets than they ever had before. The size of the queue convinced Cameron to bring it to the Palace. How did that happen, how did that buzz sweep across the country? It can happen with movies too. If you can catch that wind, you are sailing.
SL: Herbert Kretzmer, thank you very much.
HERBERT KRETZMER: You’re welcome.
