Unmasked. Эндрю Ллойд Уэббер
quite alien of course to anything in contemporary classical music, but of a scale and dramatic breadth equal to many of the famous twentieth-century film composers. I believe he knew it but couldn’t bring himself to consider going down that road.
First, in the 1930s it would have seemed like a heinous case of letting the side down for a working-class boy who had won every sort of academic gong to demean himself in the world of “commercial” music.
Secondly, he loved a fixed routine. He could never have coped with overnight rewrites demanded by a temperamental director who wanted a musical rethink like yesterday. But listen to Dad’s orchestral tone poem Aurora. I played it once for the movie director Ken Russell, who pronounced it an erotic, supercharged mini-masterpiece. The director of Women in Love should know.
I have one very vivid memory of Dad. Before we went to the movie of South Pacific he played me the Mario Lanza recording of “Some Enchanted Evening.” Three times he played it, tears streaming down his face. The third time around he muttered something about how Richard Rodgers’ publisher told him that this song would kick off the postwar baby boom.* When the record finally stopped he looked me straight in the face.
“Andrew,” he said, “if you ever write a tune half as good as this I shall be very, very proud of you.”
On that evening my love affair with Richard Rodgers’s music began. I went to bed heady with melody. Sadly, however, Dad never raised the issue of whether in my later career I’d come even halfway to equalling “Some Enchanted Evening.”
MUM, MEANWHILE, WAS DETERMINED that I should be a prodigy in something or other. So when I went to the junior department of Westminster School, known as the Under School, my mother’s eagle-eye supervision of my homework meant that I rose through the school far too fast. By the time I was eleven I was in a grade where some of the class were nearly two years older than me.
Considering I was smaller than the other boys, useless at sport, still played classical music and was the school swot, it’s not surprising that I was bullied. I needed a big idea. It came about in an unlikely way. Westminster Under School was in those days in a square that was walkable from Victoria station, two stops down the underground from “South Ken” station. Heaven knows what today’s parents would think of a journey to school involving packed trains, a walk past a shop selling “Iron Jelloids” and the Biograph, London’s first gay movie house, but that’s the journey I took twice daily. On the morning in question a saddo tried to fondle me undercover of the tight standing crush on the underground train. I was too shocked to make a fuss. But I was furious, so furious that it gave me an idea that maybe was big enough to call an epiphany. Whatever, it changed my schoolboy life.
That afternoon was the end of term concert. I was slated to play some boring piano piece by Haydn. It was time to ring the changes. I ascended the stage to a deafening yawn and announced a change of programme. There was a small flicker of interest.
“Today,” I intoned, “I am going to play some tunes I have written that describe every master in the school.”
The flicker of interest was now a flame – on the small side, but a flame nonetheless. So I dedicated to each master one of the tunes I had written for the Harrington Pavilion. After the first there was baffled applause. After the second it was heading towards strongish. During the fourth song the school was clapping along and when, before the sixth, I turned to the headmaster and said, “This one is for you,” even the other masters applauded.
At the end there was uproar. Boys were shouting “Lloydy, Lloydy!”
I was no longer the little school swot. I was Andrew. And I had become Andrew through music.
IT WOULD GREATLY SIMPLIFY writing this tome were I to claim that this was the moment I knew my destiny was to write music. But the truth is, it wasn’t. Music was an increasingly important part of my life, my safety valve in fact, but it wasn’t my overriding passion. Equal first was still architecture with art a close third.
My love of ruined castles and abbeys must have started very young because I have a scrapbook put together when I can’t have been more than six. It is stuffed with guidebooks and postcards and very childish writing about the abbeys and castles around Southampton and Portsmouth. This figures, because my father’s sister Marley lived around these parts in one of those twentieth-century houses which, like most of the sprawl on the English south coast, should be demolished forthwith.
I am pretty sure that my passion for architecture kicked off at Westminster Abbey. A few years ago I was invited to a meeting about some very exciting plans for the Abbey’s future. The Dean of Westminster produced a letter that the Abbey archivist had found which he proceeded to read. It was from me aged seven offering my pocket money to the Abbey fabric fund. “Precocious brat” was written all over the faces around the table. I have had many discussions about getting involved with the Abbey subsequently, but they always stall over my insistence that the utterly inappropriate chandeliers that were hung in the church in the 1960s are sold to a hotel in Vegas.
I shall forever have a debt to my parents for indulging my childhood obsession. Every family holiday was somewhere in Britain where there were buildings I wanted to see. One summer the family found itself in a rented house near the massive steelworks of Port Talbot in Wales because I wanted to be near a place called Margam Abbey – which, by the way, has a great orangery. The best holiday was in Yorkshire. You have to be made of Yorkshire granite not to be moved by the stunning evocative ruins of Fountains Abbey. My favourite was Rievaulx. What did the abbey look like before Henry VIII’s minions did an ISIS job on this medieval masterpiece? The imagination runs riot. The vistas to the abbey from the glorious mid-eighteenth-century park on the hill above Rievaulx are England at its Arcadian best.
What emphatically was not Arcadian was an incident still embedded irrevocably in my skull. My parents took me and Perseus the cat to Richmond Castle. The place was pretty empty, so Mum let Perseus off his dog lead. Out of the blue a bunch of cadets from the local army camp tramped into the castle courtyard as noisily as their boots would allow, caught sight of our terrified cat and chased him up the spiral staircase of one of the towers. Dad, of course, ran for cover. Even today I have a real paranoia of the army. Certainly it fuelled my childhood fear of conscription, which was still in action in Britain at that time, and ten years later heightened my sympathy with the pressganged US conscripts of the Vietnam War. That incident and the constant fearmongering headlines in the press about war over the Suez Canal throughout that hot 1955 summer led me to the dark thought that forces I could never control would some day destroy me and my little world of theatre and medieval buildings. It was during that otherwise idyllic holiday that I first prayed at bedtime.
VERY SOON THEATRES JOINED the list of abbeys, cathedrals, country houses and the like that so dominated my childhood. The 1950s saw the arrival of television. Soon the variety theatres that were so much a part of pre-war British life became sad, redundant, twitching corpses. Theatre after theatre succumbed to the wrecker’s ball. I found their plight irresistible. Some theatres literally had become ruins. I remember prising my way into the derelict Bedford Theatre in London’s Camden Town, a theatre made famous by the early twentieth-century artist Walter Sickert who painted it brimming full of vibrant life. Rain was pouring through a gaping hole in the roof. Two years later it was a memory.
Some of the lucky ones had a stay of execution by being turned into TV studios. The Chelsea Palace was one such. I was taken to a transmission of a then massive TV comedy series, The Army Game. The stalls had been raised to the level of the stage to create a huge flat floor on which the dinosaur TV cameras ducked and dived around teeny little sets. In the late 1950s that sort of show was broadcast live. For a brief period, the Harrington Pavilion was turned into a TV studio with a similar flat floor, but mercifully common sense prevailed and live theatrical performances resumed PDQ with a massive hit musical called The Weird Sisters based on Macbeth. Now the Chelsea Palace is yet another Kings Road shopping centre. What would a theatre producer give for such a wonderful building in that location now?
HOWEVER THE TV PROGRAMME that really game-changingly gripped me was a Saturday night rock’n’roll show called Oh Boy! It thrillingly made a virtue of being