 ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER
The Lloyd Webbers are a musical family. William was the head of the
London College of Music and his wife Jean was a piano teacher. It
therefore surprised no one that their son Andrew was playing violin
and piano at the age of five. After he met Tim Rice, a junior employee
at EMI Records, he abandoned his history studies at Oxford University.
Together, they would form a mould-breaking partnership.
The choir school Colet Court asked the pair to write a brief cantata
for the school's end of term concert. Joseph
And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat (1968) was the result. Lasting
just 20 minutes, it nonetheless generated enough interest to warrant both
an enlarged version and a recording. Agents Land and Myers offered to pay them £3,000 per year to write
songs and deliver a script. They returned with the idea for Jesus
Christ Superstar. But its subject matter was deemed sacrilegious
and producers also baulked at the thought of staging an oratorio/pop opera.
Lloyd Webber and Rice responded by releasing 'Superstar' as a single.
It was a hit in America, and they were asked to produce enough material
for a double album. Locked away in a Herefordshire hotel, they composed
their rock opera in one working week.
Jesus Christ Superstar
bore what were to become Lloyd Webber trademarks. This blend of pop and
classical music was through-composed (i.e., more or less continuous and
with minimal dialogue); the plot examined power and corruption. Suddenly,
audiences became aware of a totally new kind of music.
Failed Ambitions
In 1974, Rice and Lloyd Webber worked simultaneously on Jeeves
and Evita. Rice, feeling that
he could not do justice to P.G. Wodehouse's novels, backed out of Jeeves,
giving way to playwright Alan Ayckbourn. The production went ahead, but
it ran for only five weeks. Ever the perfectionist, Lloyd Webber took
the failure hard. He was becoming a workaholic, while Rice could produce
lyrics on a napkin over lunch. Backstage at Evita,
he was a popular figure whereas Lloyd Webber was thought of as distant. Evita, based on the life of
Eva Peron, was their next collaboration and it proved a happier affair.
The project was Rice's idea. His lyrics were literate yet contemporary
while Lloyd Webber's score contained elements of jazz, choral music, rock
and Latin American rhythms.
Amidst all this activity, Lloyd Webber found time for lower-key projects.
For a bet, he wrote Variations for his brother Julian, the 'cellist.
It proved so successful that it almost toppled ABBA from the top of the
UK charts in 1978 and went on to provide theme music for the British arts
programme The South Bank Show.
Bittersweet Memories
Cats (1981) marked the end of
a collaborative era. Lloyd Webber set music to T.S. Eliot's poems in 'Old
Possum's Book Of Practical Cats', but he approached Rice to provide words
for the last-minute composition 'Memory'. Rice worked through the night,
but his work was never used and his partnership with Lloyd Webber was
at an end. The composer moved into a different gear for the extravagant musical
on roller-skates Starlight Express (1984), with book and lyrics
by Richard Stilgoe. For Phantom
of the Opera, the 25-year-old Charles Hart, winner of the
Vivian Ellis Award (a prize for new musicals writers), was brought in
to work on the lyrics (Richard Stilgoe is credited with 'additional lyrics').
Hart completed them in three months and went on to work with Lloyd Webber
on Aspects Of Love
(1989), co-writing the lyrics with Don Black. Black himself wrote the
book and lyrics of Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard (1993), together
with Christopher Hampton.
Success after success has made Lloyd Webber into a British institution.
With a knighthood, the purchase of Canaletto's The Old Horse Guard
for over £10 million and the purchase of the Palace and New London
theatres, he has become established as the sort of power-broker who might
well appear in one of his own productions.
His most recent exercise is as producer for the musical with the Bollywood
flavour - Bombay Dreams (2002) - with music by A.R. Rahman, Book
by Meera Sayel and Lyrics by Don Black
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