Unmasked: A Memoir

Harpercollins 528pp £20 The Week Bookshop £18 Andrew Lloyd Webber has “always had a reputation as a notoriously difficult man to work with”, said Lynn Barber in The Sunday Times. This memoir “goes some way to making him more likeable”. In prose that’s “stylish and witty” – if also somewhat verbose – the composer looks back on the first 38 years of his life, from his difficult childhood in South Kensington to the premiere of The Phantom of the Opera in 1986 (“probably his peak moment”). Lloyd Webber’s father was a composer of church music; his mother was a piano teacher “determined to produce a musical prodigy”. The memoir covers his time at Oxford, which he left during his first year to pursue musical-writing; his fraught partnership with lyricist Tim Rice; and his long-standing alliance with impresario Cameron Mackintosh (“someone even more obsessed with musicals than him”). There’s scant self-reflection, and lots of “bragging”, but Lloyd Webber (above) is “fun company for 500 pages”.

In fairness to Lloyd Webber, his “lofty self-appraisal isn’t wide of the mark”, said Fiona Sturges in The Guardian. After all, he achieved spectacular success early in life. By his mid-20s, he’d already written Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Jesus Christ Superstar – and could afford to buy “a Tudor mansion on a large Hampshire estate”. Yet while the “making of money” is a persistent theme, he devotes little space to his life’s “darker” moments – such as a possible suicide attempt in his teens and the break-up of his first marriage. Indeed, the title of this book couldn’t be more misleading, said David Benedict in the London Evening Standard. While Lloyd Webber supplies torrents of information about his career, he “almost never shows his feelings”. The result is a book that “sits flatly on the page, evoking startlingly little pain or passion”.