Andrew Lloyd Webber - Unmasked

HarperCollins Publishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollins Publishers 2018

© Andrew Lloyd Webber 2018

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Cover illustration © Bob King Creative Ltd.

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Andrew Lloyd Webber asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Excerpts from ‘That’s My Story’ – Lyrics by Tim Rice, published by EMI Music Publishing Mills Music Limited and reproduced with the kind permission of Sir Tim Rice. Excerpts from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat – Lyrics by Tim Rice © The Really Useful Group Limited. Excerpts from ‘Come Back Richard Your Country Needs You’ – Lyrics by Tim Rice, published by Novello and Company Ltd and reproduced with the kind permission of Sir Tim Rice. Excerpts from Jesus Christ Superstar – Lyrics by Tim Rice © The Really Useful Group Limited. Excerpts from Evita – Lyrics by Tim Rice © Evita Music Limited/Universal. Extracts taken from ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, The Poems of T.S. Eliot Volume I: Collected and Uncollected Poems and ‘The Naming of Cats’, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot © Set Copyrights Ltd and reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber. Excerpts from Aspects of Love – Lyrics by Don Black & Charles Hart © The Really Useful Group Limited. Excerpts from The Phantom of the Opera – Lyrics by Charles Hart, Additional Lyrics by Richard Stilgoe © The Really Useful Group Limited.

Title page art courtesy of Bob King Creative Ltd.

While every effort has been made to obtain permission from the photographers and copyright holders of the pictures used in this book, the author and publishers apologise to anyone who has not been contacted in advance or credited.

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Source ISBN: 9780008237615

Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780008237622

Version 2019-03-19

“The unworried Unmasked proves as readable as his hits are watchable.”

— Washington Post

“An autobiography that has … wit, surprise, contemporaneity, audacity, and an appealingly shrewd sense of the occasion.”

— The New Yorker

“I laughed, I cried, it was better than Cats !”

— Vanity Fair

“Mr. Lloyd Webber’s charmingly idiosyncratic, surprisingly endearing, and ruthlessly entertaining autobiography.”

— Wall Street Journal

“ Unmasked (the title is a play on Phantom ’s signature facial gear) will tickle music and theater geeks. It’s an insider’s inside account, highly readable, thanks to Lloyd Webber’s affable, intelligent voice”

— USA Today

“ Unmasked is a gripping insight into a rich and intensely creative life.”

—BBC America

“An enlightening look into Andrew Lloyd Webber’s early life and professional career.”

— Broadway World

“Is there is nothing Andrew Lloyd Webber can’t do … This memoir proves that he can write stylish and witty prose too.”

— Sunday Times (London)

For my fabulously un-PC Auntie Vi, most of whose sayings I could not possibly share in 2018.

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Prologue

Overture and Beginners

1 Perseus & Co.

2 Some Enchanted Ruin

3 Auntie Vi

4 A Whiter Shade of Something That Didn’t Taste Very Nice in the First Place

5 “Mr Lloyd Webber, Do You Like Cats?”

6 Enter Timothy Miles Bindon Rice

7 Teenage Operas, Pop Cantatas

8 Elvis with Mellotron and Tambourines

9 Any Dream Won’t Do

10 “Did Judas Iscariot Have God on His Side?”

11 Love Changes Everything, But …

12 JCS Meets RSO

13 Jesus Goes to Broadway

14 A Bad Case of the Edward Woodwards

15 Suddenly There’s a Valet

16 Syd

17 Driverless Juggernauts Hurtling Down a Hill

18 Eva and Juan

19 The Long Hot Summer and the Sound of a Paraguayan Harp

20 The Song that Cleared the Dance Floors

21 Imogen and Niccolò

22 Variations

23 Really Useful

24 Tell Me on a Sunday

25 “This Artfully Produced Monument to Human Indecency”

26 Shaddap and Take That Look Off Your Face

27 Mr Mackintosh

28 “All the Characters Must Be Cats”

29 Growltiger’s Last Stand

30 Body Stockings, Leg Warmers and Meat Cleavers

31 Song and Dance, and Sleep

32 “The Most Obnoxious Form of ‘Music’ Ever Invented”

33 Miss Sarah Brightman

34 “Brrrohahaha!!!”

35 Requiem

36 Epiphany

37 “Big Change from Book”

38 Year of the Phantom

39 In Another Part of the West End Forest …

40 Mr Crawford

41 “Let Your Soul Take You Where You Want to Be!”

Playout Music

Epilogue

Photo Section

Appendix

Footnotes

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

I have long resisted writing an autobiography. Autobiographies are by definition self-serving and mine is no exception. It is the result of my nearest and dearest, aided and abetted by the late great literary agent Ed Victor, moaning at me “to tell your story your way.” I meekly agreed, primarily to shut them up. Consequently this tome is not my fault.

I intended to write my memoirs in one volume and I have failed spectacularly. Even as things are you’ll find very little about my love of art which, along with architecture and musical theatre, is one of my great passions. I decided the saga of how I built my rather unfashionable Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian art collection belongs elsewhere. The dodgy art dealers who tried to screw me can sleep peacefully – at least for the moment.

This medium sized doorstop judders to a halt at the first night of The Phantom of the Opera . Quite how I have been able to be so verbose about the most boring person I have ever written about eludes me. At one point I had a stab at shoehorning my career highlights into a taut tight chapter, rather like Wagner brilliantly packs his top tunes into his operas’ overtures. This was a dismal failure. The only thing I have in common with Wagner is length.

So here is part one of my saga. If you are a glutton for this sort of thing, dive in, at least for a bit. If you aren’t, I leave you with this thought. You are lucky if you know what you want to do in life. You are incredibly lucky if you are able to have a career in it. You have the luck of Croesus on stilts (as my Auntie Vi would have said) if you’ve had the sort of career, ups and downs, warts and all that I have in that wondrous little corner of show business called musical theatre.