The Stage

Million pound notes - Keith Strachan

Published Monday 21 March 2005 at 10:05 by Nick Smurthwaite

Self-taught composer Keith Strachan abandoned a career as a maths teacher to make a far more lucrative living as a creator of musicals, hit singles and theme tunes. After enviable success in this field, his interest now lies in directing straight theatre, writes Nick Smurthwaite

After years of putting together pop and rock compilation musicals for Bill Kenwright and dashing off theme tunes for a variety of TV shows, Keith Strachan finally hit the jackpot in 1998 when the production company Celador called him in a panic.

It was about to launch its new quiz show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, and needed someone to rearrange the pop song Peter Waterman had written for it.

“They said they wanted something dramatic and full of tension, so I knew it had to be a new piece altogether,” recalls Strachan. “My son Matthew and I went away, knowing we had a week to come up with something. All we knew at that point was that it had to be bold and cinematic.”

Once they had the opening bars, inspired by Mars from Holst’s Planet Suite, Strachan and son were able to develop the rest.

“It kind of grew out of sounds and instruments rather than any particular tune.”

He says it was like winning the Lottery, or indeed coming up with the right answer to Chris Tarrant’s million-pound question on the programme.

“Yes, it has made us millionaires and we are very grateful for it. Everyone involved with the show has made a lot of money.”

However, his newfound wealth does not seem to have diminished his professional drive or his Geordie mateyness one jot.

“He still works through the night when he has to,” remarks his friend and collaborator Ray Cooney, “and like a lot of people who work in the theatre, his attitude is that he gets paid to do his hobby.”

Having started out as a maths teacher, it took Strachan a couple of decades to feel secure enough to give up the day job and throw in his lot with the theatre. For years he literally did look upon making music and creating shows as a hobby.

In his university days he ran a successful jazz-rock band, which did a three-month European tour and secured a record deal. When they split up, he took some of his songs to a music publisher, only to be told that they sounded as if they would make a good stage musical. Only knowing about pantomime from his childhood, Strachan was unimpressed.

“The only musical I’d seen that I liked was West Side Story but I thought I would give it a go, so I wrote a spoof western called Shoot Up At Elbow Creek, with Leslie Stewart and Roy Trueman, which had a lot of veiled references to drugs. Roy knew a director called Michael Richmond who was looking for an MD for a musical to be produced at the Orange Tree. I was so naive, I remember asking ‘What’s an MD?’

“Anyway, it sounded easy enough, playing piano in a room above a pub in Richmond and talking some actors through the score. I was still teaching but the show would be during the school holidays. I’d never met anyone like Michael (Richmond) before. He used to take me and Roy into these gay bars in Richmond. It was another world to me, a rugby-playing Geordie maths teacher. I loved doing the show and I learnt so much from Michael. It didn’t take me long to decide this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”

The Lady or the Tiger, with the bowler-hatted Strachan accompanying the whole show on piano, may have been a big hit at the Orange Tree but its transfer to the Fortune courtesy of Michael Codron was a box office disaster. Strachan recalls hearing one punter remark, “That wasn’t a bad little show, they should make a musical out of it”.

A call out of the blue from Ray Cooney was to set the seal on Strachan’s future. Cooney had seen Shoot Up At Elbow Creek at Greenwich, where it bombed, and invited Strachan to be MD on his West End show, Elvis the Musical, directed by the legendary Jack Good.

“Considering both my previous shows had failed, I couldn’t believe my luck, MD-ing a potential hit show in the West End and working with the great Jack Good. At last I was starting to earn a decent living from doing what I loved best, helping to create musicals.”

Good, who has since become a close friend, remembers being impressed by this “bluff, hard-working, straight-talking Geordie who would never give up on something until it was right. I just knew he was instantly trustworthy and dependable”.

The success of Elvis the Musical led to his first work in television, MD-ing two series paying homage to Good’s fifties pop show Oh Boy! which in turn spawned Strachan’s first entrepreneurial adventure.

“I invited some of the kids from Oh Boy! to be in a touring cabaret show, performing American music from the twenties to the eighties. There were eight of them, with a ten-piece band, and I called it Wall Street Crash. It was a kind of apprenticeship for what I do now, directing and arranging. I did all the musical arrangements for the shows and we became very successful very quickly.”

Wall Street Crash did several European tours and three Royal Variety Shows. Though Strachan left the project after four years, some of the original members of the group are still going strong.

His other “nice little earner” has been the Cliff Richard hit Mistletoe and Wine, part of the score for his musical The Little Match Girl.

“I wrote it in about half an hour and I remember thinking at the time that it was a hit single in the making. But it took another 12 years before we got Cliff interested in it.”

The song spent eight weeks at No 1 in the singles chart in 1988. Throughout the eighties and nineties Strachan continued to put together a series of compilation musicals for Bill Kenwright, sometimes at terrifyingly short notice.

“He would call me up and say ‘I’ve got a free week at Windsor - can you fill it? So I would put together a show, such as The Blues Brothers Meet the Soul Sisters - two white guys and three black girls doing soul classics. I would keep saying to Bill, ‘This isn’t going to work, you know’ but that show turned out to be one of the best first nights I’ve ever done. Sensational.”

He always takes great pains to ensure that the cover versions in these cut and paste musicals are as close to the originals as possible.

“Those old songs are so familiar that people know when they don’t sound right. You owe it to your audience to make them sound authentic.”

Never formally taught to play an instrument or read music - “I gave up piano lessons as a kid because I found it really boring,” he admits - Strachan has built an enviable reputation for playing by ear and writing complicated arrangements for huge 70-piece show bands. He practically invented the concept of multitasking - directing, arranging, devising, accompanying and probably a bit of TV composing after supper.

Strangely, he says he never sits down at the piano and plays for his amusement, nor does he compose anything other than commissioned music.

“I don’t do it for fun any more, it’s my job. If I’m honest, I am more interested in directing than arranging now. I have directed three plays as well as a lot of musicals. I would love to do more straight theatre.”

That said, his two current projects - a UK tour of Dancing in the Streets, the Motown compilation show, and Cooney’s new musical Time’s Up - both find him back in music mode, directing one and composing for the other.

“I couldn’t resist either of them. Motown is the music I grew up with and Ray’s show was really unusual and challenging to work on. It should be opening at Guildford in November.”

Now in his early sixties, Strachan appears to have lost none of his youthful enthusiasm for the theatre, nor his team spirit, so crucial in any kind of musical endeavour.

“There is no greater thrill for me than being in a rehearsal room for three weeks creating a new show with a bunch of talented people. That’s what I have always enjoyed about the theatre. It is what keeps me going.”

KEITH STRACHAN - A SUMMARY

1944: Born January 21 in Consett, County Durham.

1955-62: Educated at Blaydon Grammar School.

1962-66: Reads maths and science at Queen Elizabeth College, London University.

1970: Tours Germany and Italy with Swegas, eight-piece band he formed at university.

1975: Makes professional stage debut as musical director/accompanist in The Lady or the Tiger at the Orange Tree, Richmond.

1976: Co-writes first musical Shoot Up at Elbow Creek, at Orange Tree and Greenwich Theatre. Writes The Little Match Girl for the Orange Tree.

1977: Musical director on Elvis the Musical, directed by Jack Good.

1980-84: Creates Wall Street Crash. Becomes musical director on the TV series Oh Boy!

1986: HTV’s televised The Little Match Girl nominated for Emmy award.

1988: Receives Ivor Novello Award for Mistletoe and Wine.

1991: MD on Good Rockin’ Tonite, based on the life of Jack Good.

1993-96: Composes music for TV shows The Detectives, The Hypnotic World of Paul McKenna and How Do They Do That?

1997-99: Directs Saucy Jack and the Space Vixens at the Queens Theatr. Directs UK tour of Four Steps to Heaven.

2000: Directs UK tours of The Roy Orbison Story, Dancing in the Street. Keith and Matthew Strachan given award by ASCAP (American Society of

Composers, Authors and Publishers) for Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? theme.

2003: Directs Sinatra Tribute Concert and UK tour of Summer Holiday.

2005: Directs UK tour of The Who’s Tommy and revival tour of Dancing in the Street.