Excerpt from a Teenage Opera by Keith West

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Keith West in 1967 (Getty)

Like Paul McCartney and “Yesterday”, Mark Wirtz had a dream. In 1967 Wirtz was a producer at EMI’s Abbey Road studios: “I saw this door-to-door grocer who was taken for granted by the village and taunted by the children,” he said, explaining his vision. But after the death of Jack the grocer, the town folk and the village children were heartbroken. It wasn’t an obvious topic for a hit single, but in 1967 pop gathered in bright ideas from every quarter. Wirtz wanted to tell his dream-story using rock music: “Not just a rock record – a rock opera. A movie on record. Wide screen, Technicolor. Special effects. With a cast of hundreds.”

Wirtz worked on the soundtrack with a fellow Abbey Road producer, Geoff Emerick, between legitimate EMI sessions, burying the extra expenses in his studio budget. The pair layered on brass and strings and a Clavioline motif for the introduction. Keith West, the singer with the psychedelic band Tomorrow, was invited to prepare a “libretto”. Wirtz decided a children’s choir would add a dolefully nostalgic touch and cast around at London’s Corona stage school, footing the bill himself. It was the hook that sold the record.

Then Wirtz remembered the American producer Kim Fowley. “One of Kim's many idiosyncrasies was his habit to preface virtually every noun with the adjective ‘teenage’,” he said. Wirtz had found the title for his opus. He went public in April 1967, playing “Excerpt from a Teenage Opera (Grocer Jack)” to EMI’s product manager, Roy Featherstone; and was met with baffled silence. “Featherstone finally gasped, ‘Have you gone mad? You think anybody out there is going to buy a rock record with children on it?’,” recalls Wirtz. They did, enough to make it one of the quirkiest hits of the decade. But the public soon tired of waiting for the full-blown work. After two more tasters failed to chart, EMI pulled the plug on what would have been the world’s first rock opera.