The interview which appears below, was originally published on The Observer in April 2002. ©The rights to this material are reserved to the owner. If you have any concerns or comments, please send an email to info@rahmaniac.com.
At the close of our interview, Andrew Lloyd Webber does a rather naughty thing. He plays me ‘Shakalaka Baby’, the single that will be released when the new musical Bombay Dreams opens on 19 June. While we are foot-tapping along, he talks animatedly about the way the song samples a Bollywood orchestra, with its different way of playing strings, about the sweep of the melody and the club-influenced rhythms.
Then he plays some more music from the show, and enthuses about its composer, 35 year-old A.R. Rahman, whose music inspired the whole project, and who, in his view, ‘is in the league of Paul McCartney when Paul McCartney was writing the best stuff’. This is good fun: the single is terrific and Lloyd Webber dissects it with boyish, and endearing, excitement.
He seems to have all the time in the world to stand around in his office trying to explain that the music in Bombay Dreams, which he has produced, will be entirely digital, and how much he wants Rahman’s work to reach a new audience for musicals, to ‘get into clubs, into the charts’. But then we go downstairs, to meet the photographer who has been patiently waiting through all of this, and suddenly the expansiveness evaporates. Lloyd Webber announces that he is running late, only has two minutes, and cannot possibly give us any more time. Maybe he got carried away upstairs, but it seems more likely that he doesn’t much relish having his photograph taken.
It is hard to think of anyone else who has quite so much face. Although beautifully dressed in a soft leather jacket and expensive shirt, he keeps hitching up his trousers, as if unconvinced that his waist can do the job. Altogether, he seems a man ill at ease in his flesh: even his facial muscles keep twitching, as if something is trying to erupt. It’s not just that he’s not much of a looker; more that less-than-favoured looks are aggravated by his manner, which is edgy and tense. He darts his tongue in and out over his lips; he does the trouser- hitching thing; he speaks in a slightly blustering, blimpish voice, sometimes so abruptly that it almost sounds like a stutter. Yet as he points out to me himself, he is responsible, with The Phantom of the Opera, for ‘the biggest entertainment in any medium ever, including film. Forget Harry Potter, forget Titanic.’
And anyone who could write the masterpiece that is Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, which has sustained millions of families on dozens of motorways the length and breadth of Britain, deserves to be honored. It is odd, then, that Lloyd Webber is not loved in the way that JK Rowling or Kate Winslet are loved, with warm pride and a sense of national ownership.
He may be quite sensitive about this: when I suggest to him that he doesn’t endear himself to people, he is defensive: ‘You’re the first journalist to have said that to me in five years. I find it completely the other way around. Since I married Madeleine 10 years ago, the tide has turned completely.’ Certainly, if you can get beyond the awkwardness and occasional tendency to sound like an overgrown public schoolboy – ‘Well done Lloyd Webber, I thought to myself!’ – what you find underneath is a passionate man who believes wholeheartedly in what he does, and talks about it with engaging energy. His frequent collaborator and friend, Don Black, also the lyricist on Bombay Dreams, says: ‘I love his enthusiasm.’
When he plays you a new tune it’s like a boy just starting out, like he’s woken up in the night and he just has to get to the piano.’ As we are listening to ‘Shakalaka Baby’ and Lloyd Webber is bemoaning the moribund state of musical theatre generally, he says: ‘I don’t think anyone realizes how much I care about this stuff.’ And this is true. We don’t, generally speaking, give Lloyd Webber nearly enough credit for being a man on a mission.
The idea of producing a Bollywood musical, for example, has been brewing in his head for about five years. ‘It started when I was pottering around the kitchen, Channel 4 used to do a Bollywood movie on a Saturday morning and this rather good song came on, but my mind was on what was happening to the scallops, so I completely forgot to write down what it was.’ A little later, he met Shekhar Kapur, the director of Elizabeth , ‘and he offered to put together a video of the best of Bollywood. I found that one in every five songs was great and one in every five songs was written by Rahman.’ ‘So I went to Southall, to a record shop, where I bought all his stuff that I could find, and then I went to see a movie of his called Dil Se.
My wife and I were the only white people in this vast cinema in Harrow, and I thought it was really interesting, all these people going to see a musical.’ Shekhar Kapur organized a trip to Bombay, where he and Lloyd Webber ‘knocked out a simple story in a hotel room’ and asked Rahman if he’d be interested in writing a score for the stage. He agreed, so they handed the bones of their story to Meera Syal to create a proper structure and add some edge.
As a producer, in Don Black’s view, Lloyd Webber has ‘great theatrical savvy. He casts a very smart eye over it – he knows what should be reprised and what signposted. He’s stimulating. And you can call him day or night, because he lives and breathes it.’ Rehearsals, with the entirely British Asian cast, begin tomorrow, the culmination of more than two years’ work on the team, score, and script. ‘To be honest,’ Lloyd Webber admits, ‘at the beginning I was quite worried that it would all fall apart because we wouldn’t be able to cast it.’ Real Bollywood actors don’t sing (the music’s dubbed), while in Britain, ‘quite a few young people told us not to let their parents know they were auditioning. With the very high aspirations the Asian community have, doing a musical is not what parents want.
But once everybody realised it was Rahman, the attitude changed.’ The timing of the opening is partly accidental, but could scarcely be happier, which makes a change after The Beautiful Game, Lloyd Webber’s last musical, which ran for only one year – nothing by Lloyd Webber’s standards. When Cats closes on 11 May, it will have been playing in London for 21 years, making it the longest-running musical ever, here or on Broadway. The Beautiful Game fell foul of foot and mouth ‘which the Americans thought was lethal’, and closed ‘five days before 11 September. And it’s about terrorism.
Whether that would have meant we couldn’t have opened at all, I don’t know… but this time it’s good, just because there’s so much about Bombay to feed off.’ Lloyd Webber is genuinely, twitchily, excited about the score for Bombay Dreams. ‘I can only say that hopefully as a melodic writer myself, I haven’t heard such original and good melodies in years.
For a long time I had a theory – which was obviously wrong – that once the lid was taken off Russia, the nation that produced Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov and Prokofiev would revitalise Western musical theatre.’ He arrived at this theory not least because Jesus Christ Superstar was such an underground hit there. ‘It was completely illegal, but the record to have. And then when the regime changed, all we got was a load of even worse entries for the Eurovision Song Contest. But when I heard Rahman, I thought maybe my theory was right, and I was just wrong about where it’d come from.’ His own music is sometimes criticised for being derivative, and he hasn’t, it is true, broken new musical ground in the way that Sondheim has. But no one could refute his contention that he has always tried to stretch the form.
He has written scores for such unpromising subjects as Jesus Christ, Cats, Bickering Trains and Eva Perón. And no one else, in his view, is trying that hard. Rent, he believes, is old fashioned musical theatre masquerading as rock. ‘And it doesn’t interest me to go and see a compilation musical, however good it is – you know, Abba or whatever. And I hate to say this, but since Tim Rice and I came along in 1968, there have been no new composers whatsoever whose work has stuck.
Maybe you could say the French boys [Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boublil, creators of Les Misérables and Miss Saigon ], but Schonberg’s older than me. And Elton’s come in now, but he’s older, too.’ So when he says that he thinks Rahman’s score could bring young people back to musicals, of course it’s partly producer-talk, but he’s also saying something pretty radical. As for his own music, he admits to having a couple of albums’ worth of the stuff squirreled away.
He was approached to make a recording with different artists earlier this year, ‘and it was flattering, but something inside me was saying, “I am still a dramatist.”‘ And now he’s found a subject, and ‘a rather famous writer’ with whom he wants to work. They were about to hide away for a weekend to test the chemistry. Ah, the chemistry. Let us hope he was less bristly and defensive with the famous writer than with me, because I found the chemistry quite difficult to get at. He got his PR to call the office after the interview to complain that I asked him about suggestions that he drinks heavily.
But Faye Dunaway is on record as having said after a meeting at his house: ‘The man loves a drink. He went through two bottles of wine, just while I was there. I couldn’t talk to him.’ He also famously has a splendid wine cellar, so this is a question that he should, by now, be able to deal with comfortably. (Besides, he’s one of the most successful men in the world – known, to readers of Private Eye, as Andrew Lloyds Bank: really no need for him to be nervous about anything). For the record, he says he only ever drinks wine, never spirits, and he doesn’t do it during the day.
He is perfectly sober throughout. Maybe he’s cross that I suggested that something about him wasn’t endearing, which he is adamant that nobody thinks anymore. (Don Black, though, thinks it’s disgraceful that he isn’t held in higher esteem in this country. ‘His success is so awesome – maybe people just can’t cope with it.’)
‘When I was married to Sarah B,’ Lloyd Webber explains (his first wife was also called Sarah), ‘people really didn’t get to meet me that much. Sarah spends six hours a day singing and probably another two or three hours working out. I needed another half who was able to do the dinner parties and things. I remember one evening we were asked to go to something with the US ambassador and she just didn’t want to go. So in the 80s, people didn’t really get to see me.’ Despite this, he talks about Sarah Brightman with affection and goes out of his way to tell me that ‘she is the second biggest female star in America after, well… Britney, I suppose.
She’s found this market where she’s a kind of, I don’t know, sexy opera singer. I promise you, she’s huge.’ He still sees her regularly, although she lives in Germany, and had just been persuading her to come to the last night of Cats. He’s also generous about Tim Rice, close to his elder children by his first wife and evidently delighted at having three young ones with Madeleine. So far, so well-balanced and equable. Nothing to be tense about there. But what about that remark he was alleged to have made before the 1997 election about leaving the country if Labour got in?
‘I never said it. There was an interview with the Yorkshire Post which was then pillaged. What I actually said was if Labour went back to the bad old days and started taxing everybody at 83 per cent, then neither I nor anybody would be around. But I said in the interview, if Tony Blair sticks by his promises, which we’re pretty sure he will, he won’t do that.’ He now sits as a Conservative peer, but regrets it.
‘I wish I didn’t. I would love to be a cross-bencher.’ So why doesn’t he resign the whip? ‘The fuss if I did, you know… I mean, I don’t know if it would be a storm in a teacup, but it’s just easier not to do anything. Actually, I think the whole House of Lords should be neutral.’ Lloyd Webber is worth hundreds of millions: it’s difficult to know how many, because his real worth resides in the copyright to his musicals. It is, in any case, so many millions that he doesn’t even have to say the word: talking about a picture he’s watched over the years, he says easily that ‘it’s now worth five.’ He has a home in Chester Square (very modern, with a glass staircase), a country house in Berkshire and a castle in Tipperary, ‘which is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen’.
Not bad for the grandson of a plumber. The posh name isn’t really posh: Lloyd was his father’s middle name, which he used professionally, ‘and it stuck.’ It was a hugely musical upbringing: his father was an organist and composer, who lacked the social confidence to do what he might have done ‘which was film scores, because he was as good as any of the major Hollywood writers. But I think for him to have done that – the young scholar at the Royal College of Music – he would have considered it letting the family down. He talked to me about that sometimes.’ For his Westminster-educated son, things were different; Andrew cheerfully dropped out of Oxford after a term, having failed to find anyone there who was writing lyrics as well as Tim Rice.
His mother taught piano and was given to taking outstanding young musicians under her wing; it is not entirely clear what she thought of his tunes. The pianist John Lill lived with the family for a time, and Lloyd Webber has hinted that his mother focused her attentions on him to the detriment of her children. But he doesn’t particularly want to talk about it now, ‘because you can read all about it in my autobiography, which I’m writing at the moment. The revelations will be in there.’ (He was supposed to complete it this year, but it looks like the new musical might get in the way).
Steven Pimlott, the director of Bombay Dreams, says that Lloyd Webber ‘is like a battery. He has this huge energy and, when he’s firing on all cylinders, he has this way of getting things absolutely right.’ The pair worked together on Joseph and Lloyd Webber’s 50th birthday celebration at the Albert Hall; and they share a passion for Puccini and Rogers and Hammerstein, which, Pimlott says, has given them ‘a shorthand way of talking’. Passionate, in fact, is the first word that comes into Pimlott’s head when he talks about Lloyd Webber.
And it’s not just music; you can see that it’s also art, and architecture, and wine. It is impossible not to admire Lloyd Webber’s verve, energy, and what Don Black calls his ‘nose for theatrical goose bumps’. Merely in financial terms, he’s a national asset: cabs and restaurants and hotels thrive when he produces a hit show. He’s a theatrical genius. If only he could relax a bit, he might finally be loved as he should be.
