Our brother, Ian Fraser, who has died aged 81, conducted the 1961 West End hit Stop the World – I Want to Get Off, and was Julie Andrews’s musical director for 40 years.
Ian went to the US with Stop the World in 1962, but he enjoyed working with British musicians and returned to the UK from time to time for recordings and broadcasts. He directed Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas for BBC television (1977), conducting Bing in both his last rendition of White Christmas and the hurriedly composed duet Peace on Earth, sung with David Bowie. Ian’s last visit to Britain was in 2010, to conduct his own score for Andrews’s telling of her life story, The Gift of Music, at the O2 arena in London.
Ian made his home in Los Angeles and it was there that he made his major contribution to music. Ian is one of the most Emmy-honoured composer/conductors in television history, with 32 nominations and 11 wins for outstanding music direction.
He conducted the 52nd presidential inaugural gala, for Bill Clinton (1993), with Aretha Franklin, Michael Jackson, Elton John and Barbra Streisand, and Christmas in Washington. This televised variety show, traditionally attended by the president and his family, has run for more than 30 years under Ian’s baton and has featured singers ranging from Andrea Bocelli to Annie Lennox.
Ian was born in Hove, East Sussex, to Sheila (nee Watson), and raised by his grandmother, taking her maiden name of Fraser. Sheila appeared in Wake Up and Dream on Broadway at the age of 16 and later married Frederick Sykes, our father, an army padre, who also supported Ian.
At Eastbourne college, Ian’s wide-ranging musical talent won him awards for singing, drumming, bugle and piano. He auditioned to be an organ scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, playing for Boris Ord, but on being warned by Sir Adrian Boult that music was a precarious living he decided on a military career. Training at the Royal Military School of Music at Kneller Hall in the early 1950s led to five years in the Royal Artillery Band as a solo concert pianist, harpist and percussionist.
On leaving the forces, he played in clubs and accompanied singers. In 1959, while working with Anthony Newley in a Decca recording studio, Ian met Leslie Bricusse, who wrote Stop the World. They worked together thereafter. Around this time we would tune in to the ITV music programme Oh Boy!, looking out for Ian at the piano in the show’s resident band, Lord Rockingham’s XI, which had a hit with Hoots Mon (1958).
Ian is survived by his wife, Judee, whom he met in the US and married in 1964, by us, and by three children, six grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
