AND THE LORD SAID LET THERE BE ROCK
He was in chronic pain, drinking too much and depressed by a rare musical flop. But after ‘four lost years’, Andrew Lloyd Webber tells More he’s back in the West End with School Of Rock... ‘sticking it to the man’ with fellow head-banger Julian Fellowes
Andrew Lloyd Webber is full of surprises, the first of which is that he looks great. ‘I’m really back to health again after a bit of a bump and I’m really making up for lost time,’ he says, bounding down the stairs in jeans and trainers and a snazzy pink shirt. He is still an owlish little chap with soulful, baggy eyes, but the exhausted look of the recent past has gone.
The most successful composer alive, best known for his many hit musicals, from Evita to The Phantom Of The Opera, was plagued for a long time by chronic back pain and the after-effects of cancer surgery in 2009 that left him listless, depressed and – by his own admission – drinking too much. He has called this time of severe illness after the operation his ‘four lost years’. The workaholic Lloyd Webber carried on with new projects but they didn’t go well. One show was a let-down (Love Never Dies, 2009) and another was a total flop (Stephen Ward, 2013), but now he says he has recovered and is fully back in action. ‘I’ve never been so busy – it’s great!’
The 68-year-old’s musicals are performed around the world every day, he has a half a billion pound fortune and owns a string of top West End theatres. He’s fizzing with opinions on everything from the EU referendum to Nicole Scherzinger’s ‘crazy’ last-minute decision to back out of his new American version of Cats. He’ll even defend the price of London theatre tickets (‘Compared to Broadway they’re an absolute bargain!’). But it’s the latest project that’s putting a bounce in his step.
School Of Rock is a new musical based on the hilarious Jack Black movie from 2003 about a slacker who fakes being a teacher and ends up showing a classroom full of uptight kids how to rebel against their parents through rock.
The show got off to a terrific start in the States with a nomination for a Tony award, and it will arrive in Britain in the autumn.
All the songs are new, instead of the rock classics in the movie, and reveal melodic Lloyd Webber’s secret love of heavy metal. ‘Oh, God almighty, AC/DC!’ he says with a grin when I ask what he’s been listening to. The world’s leading composer of lush, soaring, romantic tunes unwinds by stepping away from the piano, whacking the stereo volume up to 11 and rocking out to Highway To Hell. Wow. So what else is on the turntable? ‘All the usual suspects, really. Deep Purple: Ian Gillan, the lead singer, was Jesus on the original album of Jesus Christ Superstar, so it wasn’t very difficult for me to switch back to that again. It was fun to go back to the days I used to love when I was a kid.’ He’s talking about the early Seventies, when he was a university drop-out hanging around with Tim Rice and writing musicals such as Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Superstar, driven by rock guitar, bass and drums. ‘We were recording Superstar at Olympic in London and the next-door studio had Led Zeppelin.’
Riffs ‘got chucked about’ when The Rolling Stones dropped by, he says, conjuring up the image of Keef Richards swapping licks with Jimmy Page and the young, intense Lloyd Webber watching, listening, learning – and nearly half a century later, recalling it all fondly. Led Zep were recording the likes of Whole Lotta Love, the mighty sound of which inspired him then and still does now.
‘You know, when Jesus throws the money lenders out of the temple and there are those big power chords? I thought, “Oh, come on! I’ll be 20 again!”’
His swept-back hair – grey at the temples with just a suspicion of dye on top – is almost long enough for a head-bang, but when I ask if he does that or plays air guitar he frowns and says, “Probably not!” There is still enough of the eccentric, distracted young boy about Lloyd Webber, though, to imagine him throwing a few shapes to AC/DC after I’ve gone. ‘The great thing about heavy metal is that it is – in its own ludicrous way – very theatrical. So it makes me smile. It’s quite funny.’
Is it true that he wrote School Of Rock because his wife Madeleine told him to? ‘Yes! She thought of it. Our children loved the movie when they were young – she saw it twice with them. When they insisted on a third time, she said I ought to have a look.’
Madeleine is the mother of three of his five children: Alastair, 24, William, 22, and Isabella, 20. She is a former equestrian who met him through friends and neighbours near Sydmonton Court, the 4,000-acre estate he owns in Berkshire. She was 27 and he was in his forties. They are now coming up to their silver anniversary. That’s not bad going for a man who had already been married twice before, but he says she has become essential to both his life and his work – not least because, he says, she has a far better business brain than he.
But as a peer in the House of Lords he is the political animal. He thinks the EU referendum should be stopped. ‘David Cameron should postpone it and go to the nation and point out that when the idea was mooted there wasn’t a refugee crisis splitting Europe in pieces.’
Since the vote is going to happen, what is he going to do? ‘I am a rather reluctant Remain voter. The things they get up to in Europe make your blood boil.’
He’s referring to the shortened working week, longer holidays and extensive sick pay that European theatre staff are guaranteed. ‘I’ve seen a production close, Phantom Of The Opera in Oberhausen, because they were effectively dealing with the workers having 80 days’ holiday a year.’
The situation is similar in the US, where Phantom is the longest-running show in Broadway history, School Of Rock is currently a hit and they will soon be joined by a new version of Cats.
But that has brought labour problems of a different dimension, with Nicole Scherzinger’s unexpected decision to abandon the role of Grizabella after months of negotiation about where her name would appear on the bill. He calls it ‘crazy’ and says he was ‘furious’ when he found out that she had decided to snub him in favour of Simon Cowell and rejoin The X Factor as a judge instead.
‘I had to fight to get her into the Broadway production. The American producers had not seen what she could do. She took them to the eleventh hour and everything was agreed with her manager, who has since resigned over this. He’s not representing her any more.’
Last time we met, before she
Furious when Nicole Scherzinger snubbed him to rejoin The X Factor with Simon Cowell
opened in Cats in the West End, Lloyd Webber told me he had fallen a little bit in love with Scherzinger. ‘I just wanted her to be able to show the Broadway community how good she is. I hope she will get another opportunity, but the chances are not great, because it’s a very small world there.’
Leona Lewis has taken over as Grizabella. ‘The report coming back from rehearsals is that she’s really good.’ The reality is that even his productions need stars to put bums on seats. But when I complain that ticket prices in the West End are way too expensive, he insists they’re not, compared to Europe or the States, where a top-price ticket for Phantom might be $700.
Lloyd Webber married for the first time in 1971, the year after
Superstar came out. He had two children with Sarah Hugill, who remains a friend, but she said at the time, ‘We don’t have holidays. He never relaxes. He has a hundred ideas all the time. He is exhausting to be with.’ (His oldest child Imogen, 38, is a bestselling author, while Nicholas, 36, is a composer whose musical The
Little Prince opened this year.) Sarah Brightman was a 20year-old dancer in Cats when she met him and became his muse. They were married in 1984, the year she played the lead in the ‘out-and-out romance’ of
Phantom. He insisted it was not written for her, but there were some sniggers when he also said: ‘It’s really about a man who is hideously ugly from birth but a genius, and who falls hopelessly in love with a girl and is only able to express himself through music.’ Their marriage ended after six years when he met Madeleine Gurton. This time it was Aspects Of
Love that appeared biographical, with its lead song Love Changes
Everything: ‘Love bursts in and suddenly all our wisdom disappears.’ But the lyrics were by Charles Hart and Don Black.
Still, Madeleine’s love for him changed a great deal in his life, bringing calm and stability. He calls her his rock and she plays a big part in his business. She was by his bed holding his hand when he came round from the operation to remove his prostate in 2009.
He was admirably open, admitting he was less likely to want to make love at bedtime than to say, ‘Sorry darling, I’ve got this fantastic tune in my head, I’ll see you when I’ve finished it.’
Bang goes the idea that Lloyd Webber must be a great romantic in his private life because he writes some of the most romantic tunes around. On the other hand, he likes to compose in bare feet, which suggests he is trying to free up his soul (or at least his toes). So does he pour out his heart when he is composing, or does it all come from the head?
‘You have to think as a dramatist. It’s as simple as that. If one’s dealing with high emotion, like I was with Phantom, you have to become part of those characters.’ Music is work to him, an act of creation separate from whatever he might be feeling. The words are always by someone else.
He’s got seven Tonys, three Grammys, an Oscar, a Brit and countless other awards yet is already looking for a new subject to write about. It might be a musical about the unlikely love story between English woman Ruth Williams and the first president of Botswana, Seretse Khama, in the early days of independence. He says: ‘I’ll just go on till I drop.’
School Of Rock – The Musical, New London Theatre, October 24
‘He never relaxes. He has a hundred ideas all the time. He is exhausting to be with’