GOD’S G FT (to melody!)
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s memoir of his early life reveals a suicide attempt, endless spats with Tim Rice and why he thinks he’s ...
BOOK OF THE WEEK
UNMASKED: A MEMOIR by Andrew Lloyd Webber (HarperCollins €19.99)
THERE have been a few notable flops, I suppose. A musical about Dr Barnardo in the jaunty style of Oliver!; a PG Wodehouse show, Jeeves! — that wasn’t helped by a plastered director (Emma Thompson’s father Eric, as it happens).
But on the whole Andrew Lloyd Webber is probably the most consistently successful composer in history and, unlike Mozart, there is little prospect he’ll end up flung in a pauper’s grave.
More than 20,000 schools to date have enacted Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. The London production of Jesus Christ Superstar ran for eight years, clocking up 3,358 performances.
Cats played for 7,485 consecutive nights on Broadway. The Phantom Of The Opera, ‘the most commercially successful musical of my career,’ is in theatres in 166 cities worldwide. It has been running at Her Majesty’s Theatre in the West End for 32 years.
No wonder that, even as a child, Lloyd Webber was ‘always buoyed up by my belief that I was God’s gift to melody’. When he met Barbra Streisand, herself no stranger to false modesty, and who was about to cut a single of his song Memory, Lloyd Webber joked, ‘Barbra, most artists kneel when they record my songs’.
At least I assume it was a pleasantry. It’s not entirely certain from the tone of his book what kind of person Lloyd Webber actually is — nice and considerate, or a tormented, angry soul, ambitious and driven .
You do get the impression it is best to keep out of his way in the recording booth and at rehearsals, where panic seems to reign.
He mentions his ‘meltdowns’, his ‘angst’, and seems proud of ‘my perfectionist tantrums’. I almost gave a cheer when I read that Frankie Howerd took revenge and bit him viciously on the neck.
Describing himself as ‘effeminate’ and ‘poncey’ — though he possessed demonic eyes and a mouth given to sneering — Lloyd Webber was a swotty, intense child, keen on history, ruined castles and Victorian art, as well as being a genuine devotee of music of all kinds, from Elvis to Beethoven.
He came from a cultured yet bohemian background — an aunt ran a transport cafe outside Reading called Jock’s Box, ‘where she kept hens’.
His mother ran a Kensington prep school, ‘a roaring success’, where pupils later included Hugh Grant and princes William and Harry, even though the headmaster was ‘interested in bare bottom spanking’.
Lloyd Webber’s father William, the son of a plumber, had won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, where he later became the Professor of Composition. A brother, Julian, scarcely mentioned here, went in for the cello. They lived in a scruffy mansion block called Harrington Court.
At Westminster School, it was the usual story of bullying and paedo teachers. Lloyd Webber even contemplated suicide at several points, taking the Tube to Ongar to swallow an overdose. Clearly the bid failed, and in 1966, with his D and E grades at A-level, in he was welcomed at Magdalen College, Oxford.
He left almost immediately, preferring to work on Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat with Tim Rice.
Rice, a lodger at Harrington Court, is described as a ‘blonde bombshell of an Adonis’ whose ‘real ambition was to be a heartthrob rock star’.
Their ‘pop cantata’ was first put on as an end-of-term show at St Paul’s junior school, Colet Court. It was an instant success. Decca made a recording and ‘our generous weekly money’ was €9,100 in today’s figures. The composer bought his parents a fridge.
Next came another biblical subject, Jesus Christ Superstar,
made initially as a double-album LP. There was a 60-piece orchestra, soloists, a choir, and soul girl singers.
It was controversial at the time, the idea of a pop Jesus — yet look at the Church now. It’s all trendy guitars and nose flutes. It was converted into a Broadway show by 1971. The London production opened in 1972 at the Palace Theatre, which Lloyd Webber bought and restored. Lady Lewis and I went along on one of our first dates.
The next massive hit was Evita, which opened in June 1978. Julie Covington’s single, Don’t Cry For Me Argentina, had already become a standard. The role of Eva Peron was played on stage by Elaine Paige, who was ‘petite, brassy and sexy’, and who off-stage was banging the dinner gong with Tim Rice. The production was to be Margaret Thatcher’s favourite show — she identified with the balcony scene, with Evita in her ballgown, rallying the populace.
Lloyd Webber now focused on staging Cats, based on TS Eliot’s poems. Judi Dench was meant to be Grizabella, but she severed her Achilles tendon and was replaced by Elaine Paige, who stopped the show with ‘Memory’. The cat body stockings and leg warmers became iconic.
AS Lloyd Webber says rather pointedly: ‘The lyrics were mostly by TS Eliot. I’d done it without Tim Rice.’ Evidently there was by now a bit of friction between the famous collaborators. We are told about wrangles down the years about billing.
Rice & Lloyd Webber or Lloyd Webber & Rice? ‘Tim was worried that as his name was shorter than mine he would get less space on the posters.’
This richly enjoyable memoir concludes with the behind-thescenes dramas involved with The Phantom Of The Opera. Michael Crawford insisted on secret meetings in an Angus Steakhouse.
When he said he wanted one song to be pre-recorded, as otherwise he’d have to sing with a hood over his face, and Cameron Macintosh said, ‘For the money you are earning, you can at least sing your big song live,’ the pair of them had a fist fight in Vauxhall Bridge Road. ‘I, being a pacifist, stayed in the car,’ reports Lloyd Webber.
The role of Christine was written for the ‘ravishingly pre-Raphaelite’ Sarah Brightman. He left his first wife — whom he’d known since they were teenagers — for her. He wed Brightman in 1984, when he was 36, and divorced her six years later after she had an affair with a Phantom orchestra member.
Whatever you think of his musicals — and people can be snobby — Lloyd Webber’s most important function, in my own view, has been his saving and championing of Victorian theatres. He laments the philistinism of councils and planners, who bulldoze our beautiful heritage in the name of shopping centres and road-widening.
For this alone he merits great praise indeed/