Lord of the punks

Julian Fellowes isn’t the first person you’d expect to have written a book about a character’s passion for rock’n’roll.

The stage production of the School Of Rock at New London Theatre.

You can forgive Julian Fellowes his near rock ’n’ roll illiteracy, given that he got the script for School of Rock: The Musical just right. “Who are AC/DC? What is the Clash?” he says over tea in a swish restaurant in Sloane Square, central London, not too far from where the pint-sized cast of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s acclaimed 2015 Broadway musical is wowing the West End; on the other side of the world, a similarly gifted clutch of Aussie kids are in their beds, dreaming of School of Rock’s opening night at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Melbourne.

“I saw the Beatles when I was 15 and had hair down to my shoulders,” offers Fellowes in his genial, precisely spoken way, dressed House of Lords-style (a life peer, he sits on the Conservative government benches) in a grey suit, crimson braces and blue tie, his bald pate shining in the autumn sunshine coming softly through the window on to our table. “Though I was hardly what you’d call a rebel.

“In fact when Andrew (Lloyd Webber), who I knew vaguely from showbiz circles, rang to ask if I’d be interested in doing the ‘book’ for School of Rock, I wondered if he’d muddled me up with someone else. But eventually I thought it was a great opportunity not to be dealing with ladies’ maids and footmen for once.”

Fellowes, 69, is best known for his multifarious observations of Britain’s upper classes, particularly as the creator of the 2001 film Gosford Park (which won him an Oscar for best screenplay) and the popular TV series Downton Abbey (2010-15), that period drama following the lives of the Crawley family and their servants in the former’s Edwardian country house.

Fellowes has penned several bestselling novels including 2004’s Snobs (about the marriage of an upper-middle-class girl to a peer) and is a recognisable face from his acting roles on screen and stage playing dukes, kings and other aristo stock. Rock‘n’roll he is not.

Nonetheless, any initial scepticism was quashed after he sat down in the screening room of his grand house in Dorset, southwest England, with his wife, Lady Emma Kitchener Fellowes (great-grand niece of the famous soldier Herbert, 1st Earl Kitchener), and their film-producer son Peregrine (the Honorable Peregrine Charles-Morant Kitchener Fellowes, now 27) and watched the ever-popular 2003 Jack Black comedy School of Rock, which Lloyd Webber had obtained the rights to adapt.

School Of Rock at the New London Theatre.

The story of Dewey Finn, a slobby former rock guitarist who inveigles his way into an exclusive school as a substitute teacher and turns a class of underloved high achievers into a mind-blowing rock band, resonated with Fellowes, who recognised its themes.

“Peregrine said, ‘Trust me, you will love it’ and I did, very much, though I knew we would have to broaden it out to make it worth the ticket price,” says Fellowes, who also wrote the scripts for the family musicals Wind in the Willows, from Kenneth Grahame’s classic novel, and Disney and Cameron Mackintosh’s stage version of Mary Poppins, which ran in Australia from July 2010 to June 2012.

“It had the same struggle and triumph you see in films like Asphalt Jungle and To Sir With Love, this sense of someone finding their self worth through helping others, these kids, to find self-worth.”

Black has said his scriptwriting for School of Rock was led by the notion ‘What would AC/DC do?’ but Fellowes needed no such motivation (or rock knowledge) in order to pepper his script with rock cliches, many of them aided by the astounding musicality of the kids (“Yes, the children play their own instruments,” runs a voiceover by Lloyd Webber at the top of the show). There’s the twirled drumsticks and insouciant pouts, knee slides across the stage and mano y mano electric guitar wig-outs. There’s the devil’s horns sign, a raised index and pinky finger gesture impossible to imagine being flashed by Fellowes, whose own pinky finger sports a signet ring embossed with a family crest that includes the motto: “After battle comes reward”, which is very Downton Abbey.

He sips his tea. “Of course we knew we would have to broaden it out if we wanted to appeal to everybody. There isn’t as much music in the film as you think; Andrew wrote 14 new songs, each of them extraordinary. He captures that sense of what it is to be young and unable to express yourself in words and so very often it’s a song that captures what you feel, makes sense of your emotions. I remember that very well,” he adds, pausing to acknowledge a smiling woman who is passing by our table.

The youngest of four brothers, Fellowes was born in Cairo, Egypt, to British parents, staunch Catholics, whose attitudes were surprisingly progressive. His father, Peregrine Edward Launcelot Fellowes, was a diplomat and Arabist who actively campaigned to have Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia — and the man at the heart of the Rastafari movement — restored to his throne during World War II.

Growing up in Chiddingly, East Sussex, with a family flat in South Kensington, southwest London (today he owns a flat near Sloane Square), the young Julian was sent to boarding school aged nine, coming home on holidays to ride ponies and hang with neighbours including the family of David Kingsley, head of British Lion Films, which piqued his interest in the film business.

Julian Fellowes has taken on School of Rock as his latest project.

Still, he read English at Cambridge University, where he was a member of the Footlights drama club, then studied acting before briefly relocating to Los Angeles and appearing in the small-scale likes of Tales of the Unexpected before moving back to England, where his Englishness had more cachet: “Casting directors in Los Angeles seemed to think that all the best actors were in Britain, so I came back,” he says.

His 1991 role as minister Neville Marsham in Danny Boyle’s For the Greater Good was his breakthrough; a turn as the incorrigible Lord Kilwillie of Kilwillie House in the BBC Scotland drama Monarch of the Glen (2000-05) made him a household face.

His segue into writing, which began in the 1990s with an Emmy award-winning adaptation of Little Lord Fauntleroy, felt natural, he says. But it’s hard not to wonder how much of his success he feels he owes to his privileged background or at least to the sense of entitlement that comes with having an elite education and, well, loads of money.

Indeed, it’s hard to listen to anti-establishment anthem Stick It to the Man, one of the tunes in School of Rock: The Musical, without noting the irony in the fact it involves Fellowes and Lloyd Webber, two of the poshest, most mainstream geezers you might come across.

“Yes, you’re right,” says Fellowes, who has always advocated a nuanced approach to everything, from history and politics to wealth and class. “Certainly here in Britain class is still with us in a way that, in the 1960s, everyone thought would be gone by now. While the greatest life ­determinant of children remains class, I’m a big believer in social mobility and encouraging achievement; an elite class can play a role by providing continuity in terms of support for arts, for charities, for skills. Otherwise you are simply wasting talent.”

Fellowes tries to make a habit of eschewing generalisations. His period dramas, like his novels, are all the more believable for their nuanced take on the milieus in which they are set: “If you write about any group you must be critical of their weaknesses but also applaud their strengths.” His yet-to-be-filmed NBC television series The Gilded Age, which is set in the upper ­echelons of New York during the industrial boom era of the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, is being billed as a sort of American Downton Abbey, although the modus operandi is different, says Fellowes, to that of Europe.

“It is about these newcomers who frightened the New York old guard because they had no limits. If they wanted to build a palace or buy a yacht, they just went ahead and did it. They redesigned being rich.

While some reviews of School of Rock have criticised its assumption that all children go to expensive boarding schools (and there is also a one-dimensional shrewish girlfriend character that could do with rewriting), Fellowes counters that the buttoned-up atmosphere of such an institution invests the children’s eventual busting out with even more throat-catching joie de vivre.

“But I do understand the frustration with entitlement,” he says. “When a kid has grown up sitting down to dinner with kings, ambassadors, landowners, they think ‘These are my people’ and they expect to join their number as they get older. One of the hardest things about coming from the working class and knowing you’re clever is having to force yourself to deal with those who aren’t your people.

“Thankfully there are some careers, and I think mine is one of them, where I don’t think these things operate.”

Class is often hard to detect, especially in rock or post-punk. Even Joe Strummer, the rabble-rousing, Fender-shredding frontman of the Clash, attended a private boarding school in ­Surrey.

The Clash, I repeat, just in case.

“The what?” says Fellowes, twinkling.

School of Rock: The Musical opens at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Melbourne on Friday.