Leslie Bricusse: ‘When I write, I hear the words and music at the same time’

It’s a startling confession: “I’m not very musical.” This from one of our most prolific film and musical theatre songwriters with a six-decade career in Hollywood, in the West End and on Broadway.

Leslie Bricusse was solely responsible for both music and lyrics for seven musicals – Scrooge; Goodbye, Mr Chips; Kings and Clowns; Say Hello to Harvey!; Sherlock Holmes – the Musical; Sammy; and Doctor Dolittle, which included the Oscar-winning Talk to the Animals – but it was his gift for pithy wordplay that made him the obvious choice for lyricist in his songwriting partnerships with Anthony Newley, Henry ‘Hank’ Mancini and John Barry among other composers. To this day he remains properly respectful of the musicality of performers, on whom he readily admits his work is “totally dependent”.

As he explains: “I’m musical in the sense that I can write a song, but I realised when I was learning the piano as a child that there were people who played it so much better. So I don’t play the piano now when I’m working on my songs: I use a keyboard at my desk instead. But I can pick out a tune; and Tony [Newley] found a wonderful man called Ian Fraser who became our arranger and eventually my musical director on all my Hollywood films and stage shows.”

I’m meeting Bricusse at his London apartment during a flying visit from his home in the south of France, where the likes of Elton John and Rod Stewart, to name drop just a few, are near neighbours and friends. “How those guys have endured – what wonderful durability some people have,” he muses, a remark that could equally apply to himself.

Leslie Bricusse has been part of our musical landscape for so long that the world premiere of Pure Imagination, named after his hit song from the 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, celebrates the 60th anniversary of his professional career with 60 of his best-known songs.

The show runs at London’s St James Theatre with a cast led by West End stars Dave Willetts and Siobhan McCarthy. Published on the same day are an updated edition of the Leslie Bricusse Songbook and his new memoir, also jokily called Pure Imagination, with sharply observed anecdotes about everyone he has ever known in showbusiness, from Joan Crawford and Gloria Swanson to Steve McQueen, Katharine Hepburn, Kirk Douglas, Elvis Presley, Gene Kelly, Michael Jackson, Judy Garland, Julie Andrews, Mia Farrow, Liza Minnelli and Joan Collins (and you’ll find yourself dining out forever on the one about Michael and Shakira Caine and the man on their doorstep).

He’s particularly pleased at the happy coincidence of the Pure Imagination show opening on the site of his original London debut with a musical he first co-wrote in 1953 as an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge with Footlights friend Robin Beaumont. “It was a musical called Lady at the Wheel and it opened at the old Westminster Theatre, which was rebuilt as the St James – so we’ve come full circle with absolute symmetry.”

Yet he has no plans to rest on his laurels. At 84, he’s still a contender, currently working on bringing his 2009 musical about the multi-talented Sammy Davis Jr to the West End next year as well as producing a concert and recording of George Gershwin songs that can be done, he says, either in a theatre or as a semi-classical concert.

“We did the Sammy Davis Jr show, then called Once in a Lifetime, in San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre six years ago with the actor and singer Obba Babatunde, who Sammy himself had introduced to me as ‘the next Sammy’. Well, no one was the next Sammy – but Obba was as close as you could get. But he was in his 50s then and he’s in his 60s now, so I had to find a younger Sammy – and I think I’ve got him finally. He’s about 35, so he can play younger and older, he has a beautiful voice and is a good dancer, so I now have to put it all together again and we’ll see what happens,” says the affable Bricusse in his unflappable-sounding way.

His ability to be the calm at the centre of the showbiz storm, adroitly ducking all the tantrums and tiaras, has played its part in his success, it seems. “I’m a good collaborator: I haven’t ever fallen out with any of them. Though there have been one or two tricky ones that I won’t name, but do not speak ill…” he adds.

As for the mysterious alchemy of songwriting, he explains: “When I write a song, I hear the music and words at the same time – one suggests the form of the other. And Tony was exactly the same. We would sing at each other across the room; it was a very bizarre, unofficial way of writing songs. When we collaborated with John [Barry] on Goldfinger and he first played the melody to us, Tony and I both sang ‘wider than a mile’ without looking at each other. Which was not a good start to our relationship with John. But in fact the chord structure was totally different from Moon River, so he didn’t nick Hank Mancini’s tune.”

The night-time is also the right time to write, he suggests. “When I wake up, if I can’t figure something out during the daytime and then wake up at 4am, it’s there immediately. I don’t know if it’s the subconscious mind working, but it just happens. You think more clearly and see what the mistakes are and how to do it right.”

Any regrets? Only, he says, that he didn’t write more with Newley. Soul buddies who nicknamed themselves Newberg and Brickman, they had their breakthrough successes with the musicals Stop the World – I Want to Get Off and The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd (which Stephen Sondheim, no stranger to witty wordplay himself, thought was a printer’s error of trans-position) and hit songs such as The Candy Man, Who Can I Turn To? and Feeling Good.

“Unfortunately Tony [who died in 1999] just timed everything in his later life wrong. He chose to go off and sing in Las Vegas, which was when our showbusiness marriage really suffered. The last thing he said to me when he was performing as Scrooge at the Dominion Theatre was, ‘I wish you and I had written more shows.’ And so do I – that was the best of our relationship. He went to Vegas because of the money, but he blew it all, and I don’t know why because he wasn’t a gambler. His managers should have seen what he could have done, because he would have had a much more multifaceted career. He was so many things: composer, lyricist, book-writer, director and performer.”

As for Bricusse himself, he remains refreshingly modest about his own abilities after all this time. “I am very lucky in that the right people have come into my life almost by divine intervention,” he concedes.

Lucky, yes, but it also sounds like a classic case of making your own luck through life.

The world premiere of Pure Imagination – The Songs of Leslie Bricusse is at the St James Theatre, London, until October 17