The idea behind Richard O’Brien’s most famous song, Time Warp, is you can keep experiencing the thrill of the first time over and over…
And for Richard, that’s exactly what happens when he sees his cult musical The Rocky Horror Show.
The riotous and raunchy rock ’n’ roll musical was only supposed to run for three weeks when it premiered to just 63 people in London in 1973.
But it is now both the most successful musical ever made and the one that has run continuously for the longest time.
The film adaptation, meanwhile, holds the record for the longest continually running release of all time, with one US cinema showing it every week for 43 years straight.
For Richard, now 81, it all seems rather insa-a-a-a-ne.
“It doesn’t make any sense really, does it?” he laughs. “It was always supposed to be just a silly bit of nonsense.
“It’s astonishing it’s still going strong. I never assumed it would appeal to a wider audience than friends, and some like-minded people, and I thought we’d exhaust that potential audience very quickly.
“Yet it’s still doing very well, which is terribly nice. And I never get tired of it. To stand at the back of the theatre and hear the roars of laughter, and the music going out and the people on stage having a good time, it never stops being fun, just like the very first night.”
The Rocky Horror Show has been seen by 30 million people around the world so far. It is currently touring the UK starring Strictly Come Dancing winner Ore Oduba.
“I love that every new generation is discovering it, and that the audiences are still so young,” says the former host of C4’s The Crystal Maze, who now lives in New Zealand.
“I remember once going to a show in Germany, and at the end of the row were two young girls, no older than 13 or 14, singing along to all the songs in English. I found that astonishing.”
Over the years hundreds of famous faces have performed in the musical, including the film’s stars Susan Sarandon, Meat Loaf and Tim Curry.
Richard remembers: “There have been lots of wonderful moments, Joan Jett playing Colombia was pretty fantastic, Meat Loaf playing Eddie in California was rather wonderful.”
He’s tried to see many of the productions but Richard says there was one night in Los Angeles he wished he’d been at.
“The show opened on Sunset Strip when Tim Curry was playing and Elvis went to see the show. My God, I would have loved to have been there that night.
"It must have been hell for the players though. I can’t imagine what it was like to have known he was there watching.”
But the last 50 years of unrivalled success might not have happened at all. After being dropped from the West End production of Jesus Christ Superstar, and having just become dad to son Linus, he decided to move back to New Zealand where he had spent his teenage years and get a “normal job”.
Just before he did, though, Richard was asked to entertain the Christmas staff party at EMI Film Studios, so wrote a joke song about B-movies which went down a treat.
The ditty inspired him to create a whole show pastiching the sci-fi and horror flicks he loved, telling the story of a couple whose car breaks down outside the castle of a transvestite mad scientist, Dr Frank-N-Furter. Richard himself took the role of his hunchbacked butcher, Riff Raff.
The show opened on June 19, 1973 at the Royal Court’s 63-seater Theatre Upstairs. An instant hit, it soon had to be moved to the bigger Kings Road Theatre in the West End.
The fantastically camp take on horror B movies, which was way ahead of its time when it opened, has also been credited with changing attitudes towards the LGBTQ+ community and blazing a trail for trans rights.
Richard, who identifies as transgender, says: “It was the first time the word transvestite had ever been spoken on a stage, and to be singing ‘Sweet Transvestite’ with such authority and shamelessness was quite exhilarating for us.
“We didn’t know what the reaction would be and we didn’t really care. But the word of mouth was phenomenal.”
Over the coming decades the show gained a huge cult fan base who come dressed up in stockings and high heels, join in with the ‘talk back’ lines introduced over the years, and of course dancing along with the cast during the Time Warp.
After five decades breaking down boundaries, there doesn’t seem to be anything more it can achieve… but Richard disagrees.
“There are plenty of countries where I’d love to see it go, authoritarian countries which still have this shutdown on gayness,” he says.
“I’d love to go to Poland for instance, or Russia. In fact I’d give the licence for free to anyone who wanted to do it there. They would have to be really brave wouldn’t they, as they would be putting their head over the parapet, but we would be there for them.”
- The Rocky Horror Show tours the UK until October. Visit rockyhorror.co.uk
