Jesus Christ Superstar is a 1970 rock opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. The album musical is a musical dramatisation of the last week of the life of Jesus Christ, beginning with his entry into Jerusalem and ending with the Crucifixion. It was originally banned by the BBC on grounds of being “sacrilegious”. (More from Wikipedia)
“Superstar”, with lead vocals by Murray Head, was released in late 1969 before the album Jesus Christ Superstar was even completed, much to the chagrin of MCA Records. (Head later recorded the main single from another Tim Rice production, Chess, called “One Night in Bangkok”, which came out in 1975). Another single from the album, “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” – sung by Yvonne Elliman as Mary Magdalene – was also a big hit.
Ian Gillan, the lead singer of Deep Purple sang the part of Jesus on the album. In addition to Gillan, the presence of rock session musicians like guitarists Neil Hubbard and Chris Spedding, bassist Alan Spenner and drummer Bruce Rowland gives the album more of a rock flavor than most of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s later work.
Based on the story in the Book of Genesis about Joseph and his “coat of many colors”, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat was first presented as a 15-minute “pop cantata” at the Colet Court prep school in 1968. A more refined concept album, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat was released in England in 1969 and was then reissued in the US in 1971 on Scepter Records after the success of Jesus Christ Superstar.
(October 2014)
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