Andrew Lloyd Webber: I come from a musical family. My father was the director of Music of the London College of Music, and he was the senior, I suppose you might call, lecturer in composition, music composition, of the Royal College of Music. And my mother was a piano teacher who really specialized in teaching very young children. So, music was around me all the time. My brother, of course, was a leading concert cellist, and possibly was one time Britain’s most pianist. And so, the family was all music. But I was the one who didn’t really go for what’s called classical music, although I mean it was all around me all the time. I was the one who brought rock and pop, and of course, theater into my family. I had an aunt who was an actress, and possibly the theatrical side came from her. I was taken to musicals and opera when I was very, very small, and really, by the time I was seven or eight, even really as young as that, theater had grabbed me, and musical theater had grabbed me.

Andrew Lloyd Webber: I can’t remember when, exactly, I composed my first, but my father organized it as some of my tunes, if you like—my sort of very, very juvenile tunes—were published when I was about eight, I guess. And it came out in a magazine called Music Teacher. I found a few of them the other day, and I was rather hoping that I’d find something which was absolutely wonderful that I can reuse. But, no. There was one little tiny bit of it that I seem to recognize in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat. So, I suppose I wrote that pretty soon after if you think about it. I mean, I was 18 when I wrote, 19 when I wrote Joseph. I did enjoy writing for the theater pretty immediately. And then I built my own toy theater, and we did dreadful musicals, and they were on various subjects that I and my brother—we sort of got various long-suffering friends and parents around to listen to.

Andrew Lloyd Webber: But theater absolutely grabbed me from a very, very early age. And I have also a great love of art and architecture. I mean, my other real interest was history, and particularly those days, medieval history grabbed me a lot. And so the other side of me, I was going around seeing ruined buildings and castles and abbeys and churches and there were cathedrals and things, so there was a time, there was a time when I even thought that that’s what I really wanted to go and do.

Andrew Lloyd Webber: My father had an electronic organ because he was a great organist, as well as everything else. He was the Musical Director for the Central Hall Westminster when I was very young, and he played the organ there. He was a famous organist in his day, and a very young man when he started to play the organ. He came from a very working-class background, and in those days, really playing the organ in churches was the way you kind of got started in his day. That was before the Second World War, so music was all around everywhere.

Andrew Lloyd Webber: She was a very successful—not so much successful, is probably the wrong word, but she taught an awful lot of children. I still keep finding people who come up to me and say, you know, I was taught by your mother. And it’s extraordinary. But she also became very, very much involved with the career of a very young pianist in those days called John Lill, who went on to win the Tchaikovsky competition. And he sort of moved in as a kind of older brother to Julian and me into the family. So there was him playing the piano as my father played the organ, there was me with my musical theater and my rock and pop, and my brother on the cello. And goodness knows what the neighbors thought.

Andrew Lloyd Webber: In my case, my parents rather gave up on me. They knew I was sort of really doing my own way and finding my own path. And I think, and possibly wisely, my father was not really very keen for me to be too formally musically educated. There was a time… I got what’s called a… it’s difficult to explain, but it’s called a demi-ship to Magdalen College, Oxford, in History. And I met Tim Rice by that point, so I decided really not to take it up, which the family had thought obviously was a pretty odd and weird thing to do. I suppose you could call it a scholarship or an exhibition to Oxford. They thought that was not a bit weird. But my dad didn’t. And he knew that I would really do what I wanted to do. And I met Tim Rice by that point. He was five years older than me, and when you’re 17, which I was then, and Tim was 21, that’s a big age gap. And I was very worried that I might lose Tim Rice, and he might go off and do other things because he had other… he was working at EMI records at that point, and he could have well gone off and really had a career away from me.

Andrew Lloyd Webber: I did do a term at Oxford, and I got myself very into Oxford theater very, very fast. And I thought I’d find, you know, other people who could really write lyrics and, you know what, I realized very, very quickly that lyric writing, good lyric writing is very, very, very specific, and good lyricists do not grow on trees. And I realized that Tim and his turn of phrase and everything he was doing was very special. So I think the proof in the pudding really was the first thing we wrote, which was Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat. Wasn’t actually the first thing we wrote, because we did a musical that never got on, which was this sort of commission. But you listen to Joseph, and we just had a revival of it in the London Palladium, which has been an enormous success in London. And I was struck. I had nothing to do with this revival. I just went to it as if I was an ordinary member of the public really. And I was so struck by how his words and everything is still fresh over 50 years later after we wrote it. And I think that answers your question. I knew very, very early on that his words were special. And his London was very much what they called swinging London in those days, and what I caught the tail end of it. But again I was an odd animal, because everybody else was doing rock and pop. And all that rock and pop was a huge part of my background. I still wanted to do musicals. And musicals were not what people were doing then, particularly in Britain.

Andrew Lloyd Webber: Anything to do with musical theater, which is really what I do, I mean, you can write melodies in isolation. Yes, of course, one can think of them any time; they can come in the middle… I can think of one in the middle of this interview. But really, with musicals, everything starts and finishes with a story. I am a firm believer that a great musical score can’t carry a bad story. Whereas a really great story can carry an okay musical score. A really great example of a great story carrying, well, not carrying, but serviced by a fantastic score, would be Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story. Or if you want to go Shakespeare, Hamlet, the Lion King, because the Lion King is really the story of Hamlet. And those are all great stories. And in my case, I found that I’d done certain musicals where perhaps the story isn’t really strong enough, and no matter what I had written, I think that the musical would never really have been as successful as it would have been if it had been a great story.

Andrew Lloyd Webber: The story of Joseph is wonderful because it’s a very simple, primal tale about jealousy and then redemption and forgiveness. And that’s a primal tale. I mean, the story … I mean, thinking of the Tim Rice ones, it’s a story of, well, the last seven days of Jesus Christ is pretty good. And Evita, you know, which was very much Tim Rice’s idea, a very interesting idea, I think looking back at it to have written in 1975, ’76, which is when we wrote it, because it was in a way probably much more about what was going on at the time in our own country, Britain.

Andrew Lloyd Webber: In one sense, you writing about home is quite difficult because it is something that is actually going on. But what I’m saying is that I think it influenced what we were doing. Of course, the one show that you would come around and say, ‘Well, he’s talking nonsense about great story,’ would be Cats because Cats hasn’t really got a story. That was me trying to do something that I hadn’t done before. I mean, my mother used to read me the T.S. Eliot cat poems in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats when I was a little boy. And Tim Rice always liked to really write to melodies, in case we found the dramatic situation. And I wrote for the dramatic situation or where I thought that I could take the music in tandem with the story. But with Cats, what I wanted to do was to see if I could set existing verse, because I’d never done that before. So I started setting the poems, thinking of them as a concert piece. And because of Valerie Eliot, who was T.S. Eliot’s widow, gave me some other poems, which were not actually published as Old Possum. I thought I’d got something bigger. I wasn’t sure what it was. And that evolved. It’s a long, long story, but that evolved into Cats, the musical, which was very, very much about dance, which was happening in Britain at the time and a whole load of areas of theater that I hadn’t really got into. But primarily it started because I wanted to see if I could set existing poetry to music.

Andrew Lloyd Webber: I didn’t think initially of Cats as a musical. I thought that if I could set these poems, maybe they’d have a life as a kind of concert piece, a little bit like there were words in Peter and the Wolf, you know, but I was thinking if I could actually set these things, maybe there’d be a life, you know, a 40-minute concert in which… or they could be sung as part of a program where there was other music, and never, ever thought of it as a musical. Until Valerie Eliot gave the story of Grizabella, the Glamour Cat, which wasn’t in the book. And that’s when I thought maybe there’s something bigger in all of this. Initially again, I thought of it maybe as a companion piece to in the theater, like a 45-minute, maybe an hour companion piece to something which I had written before, which was a series of Paganini variations that I wrote for my brother, which became a very, in Britain, was a very successful album. And there were a lot of people saying, ‘Can we choreograph this?’ And I’d wonder whether you could put Cats together with the variations as a two-part evening. And I actually explored that for quite a long time. So, kind of Cats evolved almost by accident.

Andrew Lloyd Webber: I certainly wrote to him and said he had a gift for melody. And I very much wanted to meet him. But, in fact, I didn’t meet him until I had written Jesus Christ Superstar, and it had become quite a big hit here on record at that time. Well, actually, it was getting very big in 1970. And he was apparently very keen to meet me too. So we did meet. He talked a lot actually about Jesus Christ Superstar, which I didn’t want to talk about at all. He was interested in whether or not I thought that writing what you might call through-written or through-composed musical, where there wasn’t any dialogue, which is really opera, whether you like it in another word, was going to be the new way through and whether the musicals with book scripts were something that was going to disappear. Because I suppose Jesus Christ Superstar was one of the first, it was more or less the first musical of its kind where there wasn’t any spoken dialogue. And I was very much, it pains to say to him that I always think everything is horses for courses. I mean, yes, I suppose probably my most famous shows are more or less completely through-written and through-composed because I like writing that way, because it means that as a composer I’m in control of the dramatic arc of the evening, and the music is driving it along with the story. But, look, I just did School of Rock, and School of Rock is something that absolutely has to have a script because the tempo of the whole thing is to be driven with dialogue as well as music. So there is no rule. But that’s what we talked about. But I didn’t get from him what I really wanted to get out of him, which was how his personality as a musician completely changed when he was writing with Hammerstein compared to his early years when he was writing with Lawrence Hart. I mean, you can see a little bit of the Rodgers you find in Hammerstein occasionally in the work that he did with Hart, but it’s like two different people. And that’s what I wanted to ask him, and he kept on asking me about Jesus Christ Superstar.