Sometimes, when I'm dreaming...

Commissioned for, but rejected from "Marilyn!" the musical, - the song was recorded by Art Garfunkel and later, by ABBA's Agnetha Fältskog. That's success; but I still see it as unfinished business...

I waited until midnight before writing the song. They needed it the next day but my music publishing contract ran out at midnight and I wanted to be telling the truth to my soon-to-be-former publisher if ever they asked whether I wrote it before the strict end of the contract. (The jury can read it in your eyes, you know). So I waited.

I was living and working in my scruffy office suite above a tobacconist in Wardour Street, Soho, during my divorce in March, 1983. A sharp contrast to the luxury of the previous two years circumnavigating the world aboard my own, posh 125ft yacht. I had been contacted just the day before by the producers of “Marilyn!”- the musical. I’d never heard of it. They were panicking. The show was only days from opening at London’s Adelphi theatre. - They asked me to go and see it at a public preview that night and tell them if I agreed with them that it didn’t have a hit song. I did, - and it didn’t.

I told them I had an idea that, when Marilyn was about to take the lethal dose of pills (in the days before it was widely thought not to have been a bona fide suicide) there was a pivotal story beat that had been wasted. A song could easily be inserted at that point; Marilyn on the bed, saying, effectively “Goodbye world”- (but obviously not in those words!) So I began writing at midnight. The perfect setting - three floors above the harsh, neon-lit Soho street. I had an upright piano, and otherwise, silence and a long night ahead. Somehow, I don’t know why, but the song just started coming out of me. The loneliness. The feeling of abandonment. By 5am I had a song. “Sometimes when I’m Dreaming”. (I found the original lyric sheet in a file the other day, forty years on; reproduced above). Meanwhile, back at forty years ago at 5am, I rang Wayne Bickerton - a fellow songwriter/producer friend who owned a top studio. He was agreeably grumpy to be woken so early but said I could go into his studio in W2 at 8am and use it to make a piano demo. In those days it was impossible to make even a good piano demo without a proper studio.

So I left my note for my PA (Gay Burkhardt) - you can see my scribbles on the sheet, asking her to type it up cleanly, - and raced off up the Street to Odyssey Studios, just off the Edgware Road. I was back by 10am with the demo - and Gay had the lyric typed up and ready. It was on a bike to the producers within minutes and I soon had a jubilant phone call from them. They loved it. It would be the hit of the show! This was an exhilerating feeling for me but I couldn’t imagine how they would sell the idea to the writers of the show, Jacques Wilson and Mort Garson. I was told it wasn’t the writers’ decision. But Stephanie Lawrence, playing Marilyn (!) would have to learn a new song in about three days - it would need to be staged, rehearsed and lit before opening night.

To cut a long story short (or is it too late for that?) - the director, Larry Fuller refused to add a new number into the show, saying, not unreasonably, that it was unfair on the cast and crew, so soon before opening night. The producers told me it was within Larry’s brief to make that call, and so they were sorry - the song never made it into the show. Sadly the show only ran for nineteen weeks. I have no idea whether my song would have helped. Probably not.

All the friends I believed in, I believed in for a while.

They had their flair, they had their style.

But nobody quite

Got it right

Nobody knew just how it feels to be…

Me.

But sometimes when I’m dreaming,

(And I dream a lot these days)

I meet someone who understands

Who leads me through the haze

It’s only when I’m dreaming that I fall in love for real

But I wake up screaming

Sometimes when I’m dreaming.

Art Garfunkel version

Only about a year later, CBS (Sony) records were putting together a Greatest Hits album for Art Garfunkel - eventually to be called (imaginatively) The Art Garfunkel Album. They wanted an extra, fresh track for it, and they called me to see if I could cook up another Bright Eyes! Well, we recorded a couple of tracks together at CTS studios with my (by now) pal, Artie, with whom I’d shared #1 success with Bright Eyes only a few years earlier. We did two of my songs, one of which was “Sometimes When I’m Dreaming”. He did a fabulous vocal on it. As always, his voice lifts a song to somewhere else. It was beautiful. When it came out as the lead single, it was met with the same apathy by radio folks that Bright Eyes had experienced five years earlier. “Too slow”, too “beautiful”. “Not pop enough”. This time, with no opportunity for me to hustle it into the charts by begging and cajoling media and retail, as I had with Bright Eyes. Ah, well. We tried, - and his album did very well.

Ten years later: Agnetha’s version

I knew nothing about this at the time! I had known Agnetha - albeit passingly and occassionally - ever since we all met at the 1974 song contest which (a) ABBA won with "Waterloo and (b) The Wombles were the interval act.

I don’t think Agnetha even really knew it was one of my songs. She just heard it on the Garfunkel album and did it. And boy, did she do it! I later saw a youtube interview clip where she mentioned it was by me, but I think that was after the recording. [Actually I now confess that I looped the bit where she said -only once - “Mike Batt” (so it said “Mike Batt, Mike Batt, Mike Batt” round and round… and posted it on Instagram. How childish of me! Ahem. Where was I? Oh yes - well, It was such a nice surprise to see this song, which had been born in such weird circumstances, - be recorded so beautifully by Agnetha. Not that Artie doesn’t - or indeed Katie Melua, the third world-class artist (That’s “third world-class artist”, not “third-world class artist”) who’s done it, And I had a something to do with that one. But Agnetha’s is special to me because I didn’t produce or arrange it, as I did the others, and it was not at my bidding. A total surprise. That’s the thing about songs, they jump up and give you a hug sometimes, often when you are least expecting it.

Is that it, for my song? Three top artists have recorded it and it’s never been a single chart hit, and most of you probably don’t know its name. Is it greedy of me to want more for it? To see it high in the singles chart one day? What about in the States! After all, sometimes, when I’m dreaming…

Video at:

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xe9f5z