Composer lets it all hang out in his memoir
Wild days, a mad existence, strops, affairs and smash hits: Andrew Lloyd Webber holds little back, writes Ann Treneman.
Andrew Lloyd Webber may not know the meaning of restraint. ‘‘I intended to write my memoirs in one volume and I have failed spectacularly,’’ he says cheerily at the start of this 518-page door-stopper. Unmasked takes us only to the age 38, just after the 1986 opening of Phantom of the Opera ,a show that he claims could be the most successful entertainment of all time.
Autobiographies, he declares, are always self-serving. This is no exception, but what marks this one out is his tireless devotion to asides, gossip, music and theatrical detail. His is an authentic voice, and you emerge feeling as if you have been allowed inside the tornado that is ALW.
There is much of this autobiography that is, quite simply, hilarious. There is no denying the passion but, oh boy, did he need an editor. It’s acres too long and could easily cut by 200 pages. The writing is often as tangled as a thicket.
He was born in 1948 and his childhood, lived out in a top-floor mansion flat in Kensington, west London, was eccentric. ‘‘Mum,’’ he writes, ‘‘was determined that I should be a prodigy in something or other.’’ His father, working-class and musically gifted, became a professor of composition at the Royal College of Music.
There cannot be many playrooms that have, at one end, a vast play-brick gothic cathedral and, at the other, a toy theatre with a revolving stage (an old gramophone turntable). Both were built by a very young Andrew. Musicals were the staple of his theatre. He went to Westminster School, where the terrible ideas continued to flourish. He describes being taught how to prepare a piano score for a musical he had devised. He says the show in question was called Westonia! and ‘‘one of the worst ideas ever conceived for the stage, short of a musical about the humanitarian work of Genghis Khan’’.
He went to Magdalen College, Oxford to study history but dropped out after being forced to choose between study and composing. The year before, Tim Rice had written him a letter out of the blue. ALW was 17. Rice was 20. Theirs is a rollercoaster bromance of grand melody and petty asides.
There was no area of his life in which his musical theatre obsession did not touch. Even his wedding in 1971 to his first wife, Sarah Hugill, included a new solo written for Jesus
(as in Superstar). The chapters on Cats are uproarious and worthy of a musical themselves. The search for the right lyrics for Memory resembles an epic trek across the Arctic tundra. It’s not clear if Lloyd Webber will write volume two, though I hope he does.