14 A Bad Case of the Edward Woodwards
17 Driverless Juggernauts Hurtling Down a Hill
19 The Long Hot Summer and the Sound of a Paraguayan Harp
20 The Song that Cleared the Dance Floors
25 “This Artfully Produced Monument to Human Indecency”
26 Shaddap and Take That Look Off Your Face
28 “All the Characters Must Be Cats”
30 Body Stockings, Leg Warmers and Meat Cleavers
32 “The Most Obnoxious Form of ‘Music’ Ever Invented”
39 In Another Part of the West End Forest …
41 “Let Your Soul Take You Where You Want to Be!”
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.
Andrew Lloyd Webber
Before me there was Mimi.
Mimi was a monkey. She was given to my mother Jean by a Gibraltan tenor with a limp that Mum had taken a shine to in the summer of 1946. Mimi and Mother must have seemed a really odd couple as they meandered through the grey bomb damaged streets of ration-gripped London’s South Kensington.