Tony Macaulay
Multi award-winning songwriter Tony Macaulay will be conferred honorary Doctor of Music at the University of Sussex winter graduation on 23 January 2025.
It was while riding back from Brighton on his scooter in the 1960s that Tony Macaulay’s first song came to him.
At the time, he was a 19-year-old engineering student at Brighton’s College of Advanced Technology, while also playing in bands.
That particular song (he cannot now remember its title) didn’t bring him success, but many subsequent ones topped the charts and have been sung some of the most iconic singers and groups in the music industry
Elvis Presley, Tom Jones, Gladys Knight, Donna Summer, Sonny and Cher, Glen Campbell, David Soul, The Foundations, Annie Lennox and Donna Summer are just some of the artists to have performed his hits that include “Build Me Up Buttercup”, “Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes” and “Don’t Give Up On Us, Baby”.
In the songwriting world he is little short of a legend. He has had 38 top 20 hits, including seven that reached number one in the UK while three topped the US charts. He has been awarded nine Ivor Novello Awards for songwriting and has twice been named 'Songwriter of the Year' (in 1970 and 1977) by the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors - one of only two solo writers to achieve this.
Hall of Fame
His songs have featured in movies such as There's Something About Mary, Heartbreakers, Shallow Hal, and the movie version of the TV series Starsky and Hutch.
And he became composer to her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II when he was chosen to write a work to commemorate her sixtieth birthday.
He has also just found out that this summer he will be inducted into The Songwriters’ Hall of Fame in New York – with his name appearing alongside many of his heroes, such as Burt Bacharach, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, and Elton John.
Now, along with accepting an honorary degree at the University of Sussex’s winter graduation on January 23, 80-year-old Macaulay intends to share the secrets of his trade with Sussex students and staff through his talk, “Songwriting: Secrets of Success”, which will include tips on how to create songs that pull at the heart strings.
As a teaser, her reveals: “You always want the singer to sing in their highest key because it adds a huge amount emotion. They’re called ‘the money notes’ in the music industry.”
In his Brighton penthouse flat, where he lives for half the year (the other half he spends in Florida), he recounts the eventful journey that has taken him to the dizzy heights – starting with a gleeful anecdote about how his piano teacher told his musically accomplished mother that her son “doesn’t have an ounce of talent”.
Although Macaulay did work in engineering for a while (“the only job I could get was designing sewage treatment plants”), he was passionate about getting into the music industry. “The first guy I started writing songs with at 21 was a brilliant musician and arranger. And every time we finished writing I would figure out how to play it on the piano myself. I have also worked with some of the best musicians, and that’s how you learn.”
Songwriting was always his ambition, but he took a job as a record label ‘plugger’ - persuading radio stations to play the label’s releases - because he realised "you had to be on the inside of the business if you were going to stand a chance of getting you songs recorded".
He joined Pye Records and teamed up with songwriter John McLeod. Their first hit was “Baby, Now That I’ve Found You,” sung by The Foundations in1967, which went to number one, only to be displaced by their second record, “Let the Heartaches Begin”, performed by Long John Baldry.
“I am the only writer in history to knock his own number one off with another number one,” he says – another favourite anecdote. “Everyone said how incredible that was. I said, no, it’s bloody awful planning!”
Highs and lows
The success was enough for him to move to Los Angeles in his early thirties, where he was given a Hollywood launch. “I was asked which stars I would like at my launch party, so I chose Groucho Marx and Mae West because those were the stars I most admired when I was growing up. I ended up accompanying Groucho on the piano when he performed, and I once went to a séance at Mae’s house.”
The next ten years for Macaulay were full of incredible highs – and a few lows.
“If you write one song in four that becomes a hit you are doing well. I was having hits with one song in three at one point.”
But the pressure was immense. “The minute it’s a hit they want another one. If it’s too similar, people say it’s not as good. And if it’s too different, they say it doesn’t remind people of the first one.
“When you’re working in LA, you are totally aware of your status. I had just had a couple of big hits. I was being feted. Eighteen months went by without another hit and the people I'd been friendly with cancelled meeting me at restaurants. Then the hits returned, and the same people were ringing me up!”
Sometimes his songs have been more successful than he would have predicted, such as “Don’t Give Up on us, Baby”. It was first recorded by actor, David Soul – all within a week of Macaulay writing it - and stayed at number one for a month.
“I really like it but didn’t think it would be a hit,” admits Macaulay. “It has a 12-bar melody, which is quite unusual. And when I was offered David Soul to record it, I thought he could sing better than he could. We had to get other singers to sing the high notes.”
He has also written songs he doesn’t particularly like, including “You Won’t Find Another Fool Like Me, Baby”, which The New Seekers took to number one in 1970. Macaulay attributes its success to the lead singer, Lyn Paul.
“What the ‘X-factor’ really means is what an artist brings to the song that is not inherent in the song. You could listen to some singers singing the telephone directory and get the shivers. It’s the timbre of their voice.”
As the music industry changed, with artists tending to write their own songs, Macaulay gradually withdrew from that world.
While plenty of his friends and colleagues fell victim to the showbiz world of drugs and alcohol, Macaulay says his life outside of his career kept him grounded.
“I had tremendously strong other interests that were nothing to do with the music business: History and art, I paint, I like carpentry. So I became caught up with that to stop myself going completely crazy.”
In the mid-nineties, he turned his hand to writing thrillers and had three published (Sayonara, Enemy of the State and Brutal Truth) while also teaching creative writing at the University of Brighton.
He also wrote and had success with stage musicals – enjoying the immediacy of an audience’s reaction to his creative endeavours. His West End Musical, “Windy City”, premiered in the 1980s, winning both the Evening Standard Drama Award and the British Academy Award in the Best Musical category. In 2007, a new production of the show played to sell-out audiences at the Walnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia.
Science of songwriting
Now Macaulay and his second wife Sarah enjoy a quieter life. He enjoys talking about his careers and imparting secrets of songwriting but can see the record business has changed dramatically since the height of his career.
“It’s a very lonely business these days. In my day, you went into the studio with other human beings and created. You did all the deals, and you tried to get it on air.
“Now you get a few hundred quid’s worth of equipment in your bedroom and you can produce a completely finished record and send it as a file to a record company. You might meet the record company once and it either become a hit or it doesn’t. I think it’s a pity because I enjoyed the camaraderie of it all."
But the science of writing a hit song – or a best-selling book or an award-winning musical – is the same, he says.
“You take something that you admire – take it all to pieces and see how each piece works and how it works with the piece next to it. And once you work out how it works and why it affects you and get pleasure form it, you try to replicate that in the individual elements and put it back together and get something new.”
He may deny it, but it sounds like the mind of a highly creative engineer.