The last time Andrew Lloyd Webber sold off his wine collection, in 2016, he announced that he hadn’t had a drink in two years. He had been collecting since he was 15, after being introduced to burgundy by his glamorous Aunt Vi, and drank wine every day — now he had given up “completely”. His extraordinary cellar stacked with Romanée-Conti 2005 (£15,000 a pop) and Château Pétrus 1982 (£50,000 a case) had been emptied, part of it auctioned by Sotheby’s and the rest sold privately. “It’s all gone,” he told the London Evening Standard. “I have a very strong will.”
That was bravado, Lloyd Webber says now. The truth is he stopped drinking for 18 months, while producing School of Rock on Broadway in 2015-16, but then went back to it. “I was doing what they call ‘white-knuckling’, without any backup, and I started to worry that I wasn’t being creative.” He had written Cats, Evita and all his greatest hits in the era of the long lunch, and associated composing with a glass or three of wine. “And I thought, ‘But I’ve said to everybody that I’m not drinking.’ So I started to drink secretly.”
Lloyd Webber comes out with this in a rush, five minutes into our conversation, because after many years of lying about alcohol he wants to come clean. We are sitting in his office above the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, and although he looks well — slim, energised, his shock of hair an exclamation mark over arched eyebrows — he spreads his hands on the table as if to brace himself. “I am a recovering alcoholic. Sixteen months ago I decided that I needed help and it’s the best thing that ever happened to me.” This time he really is auctioning off the last of his wine, and this time he’s really quitting — rehab, AA, sponsors, the works. No more white-knuckling.
“You think it’s secret, but it’s not,” Lloyd Webber, who is 78, says of his drinking. “Everybody knows. I started getting into a downhill spiral and about 18 months ago the family were in a desperate state. My wife was feeling she couldn’t go on.” He checked himself into a clinic, which didn’t work, but it prompted his first trip to an AA meeting in Switzerland, then others in the UK.
In his wine cellar, 1997Alamy
The surprise was how much he liked, even “adored” AA. “People had always said, ‘Oh no, you wouldn’t like that.’ And you get this thought that it’s a load of meth drinkers coming in off the streets. Not at all. What I love about it is, you go into a room and everybody’s equal. I’ve made friends that I wouldn’t have thought possible.”
He now attends a meeting every day, moving between his homes in London, Hampshire and New York, and speaks with the compulsive candour of the newly converted. Does he get recognised? “Of course, but it’s not an issue. I did the meeting in New York on the day I was opening Cats: The Jellicle Ball last week, and nobody said a thing.” His favourite American AA meeting was in St Louis. “It was great fun. When you get a whole load of rednecks, it’s rather different to a meeting in Chelsea.”
He says the turning point was hearing someone else describe the “stupidity” of addiction. “It was about the ludicrous lengths you go to, the hiding and the pretending.” He had been functional as a bon viveur, he thinks — it was only when he declared himself sober that the trouble began. “When you’re a wine drinker, you don’t think of yourself as… well, alcoholics drink spirits.” Not doing that had been his free pass. “That was the shocking thing for me, when I realised that I was drinking vodka to hide it.”
For a long time he focused on making it to midday and his first drink. “You don’t really think. It’s just, ‘How am I going to get through the day?’ I got that thing of seriously worrying that I wasn’t writing, and panicked. ‘Maybe I’ll have a drink. OK, I’ve written something.’ Because it does slightly liberate you — but then it’s more and more and more.”
With his wife, Madeleine, in 2002Getty images
Did he write any of his famous musicals while drinking a lot? “Probably not a lot, but I can think of a couple of songs that have been hits where I’d definitely had a glass of wine and thought, that was all right.” Such as? “No Matter What, which was a big hit for Boyzone. I can’t really remember going right back.”
That’s the thing: there’s a lot he can’t remember. “I’m lucky that nothing did go very wrong. I haven’t had some frightful accident. But then you begin to think of the near misses.” He cringes to think of the people who might have avoided working with him, “because word gets around”. “I thought that I was getting away with it,” he says. “The thing is, I am deeply sorry and I can only apologise to people if I made a mess.”
The paradox is that without booze Lloyd Webber is the most productive he’s ever been. Cats: The Jellicle Ball, a tribute to the 1980s drag scene, opened to the best reviews of his career (“a joyous glitter bomb”) and he is writing two new musicals: one based on the 2006 film The Illusionist and another about the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa.
The latter came to him while he was in rehab. “I think it will be unlike anything I’ve done for a long while — more like Joseph [and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat], 70 or 80 minutes, quite funny.” Then there is the success of his off-Broadway Phantom spinoff Masquerade, an immersive show involving six casts. “If anything goes wrong it falls apart. I couldn’t have done that if I hadn’t been sober — I wouldn’t have been concentrating enough.” And an all-star version of Jesus Christ Superstar opens at the London Palladium this summer with Simon Russell Beale and Boy George joining a rotating cast as Herod, while the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre is staging a new Cats.
Lloyd Webber: “I’m lucky that nothing did go very wrong”Chris McAndrew for The Sunday Times Culture
Partly this Webbernaissance has been down to sobriety and — not unrelatedly — a willingness to let other people play with his work, whether it’s the high camp of the Jellicle Ball or the director Jamie Lloyd’s high-concept takes on Sunset Boulevard and Evita. In an interview with Variety magazine last year Lloyd Webber appeared to have fallen out with Lloyd, complaining that Evita was too loud. While he stands by that, they seem to have made up. “Evita was deafening on opening night, but it was brought back down. If it goes to Broadway, Jamie and I have worked out what we’re going to do. I thought I liked everything loud, but Jamie likes it louder. The thing I’d love to do with him would be an American rock tour of Jesus Christ Superstar.”
In New York they would have to make other adjustments to Evita. There would be no outdoor balcony scene for Don’t Cry for Me Argentina because of the risk of a shooting. “They wouldn’t even begin to get the insurance for it,” Lloyd Webber says. Nor would they make any money unless Rachel Zegler was in it for a year, “and I can’t see how she can be”. Perhaps he has been thinking his way round this because he mentions that Zegler wasn’t his first choice for Eva Perón. “I’d better not say who it was, but she dropped out. Then Rachel sent us a recording of herself doing the whole score, and we said: holy smoke!”
The best thing about being sober is the way it has brought his family together, Lloyd Webber says. A few months ago he returned to his flat in New York and the doorman asked if he was hosting a baby’s birthday party. “I went in and there were all these balloons with ‘1’ on them — my youngest daughter had sent them to celebrate me being one year sober.”
Three years ago his eldest son, Nicholas, died of gastric cancer, aged 43. “He was alcoholic,” Lloyd Webber says simply. “He was in a dreadful mess and came out of it. But I couldn’t help noticing how he’d changed. He got stomach cancer and one doesn’t know what caused it, but I can’t believe that all the medication he was on helped.” To remind him he wears two leather bracelets — one with a gold disc inscribed “Nick”, the other with a silver link from his four surviving children. “I look at them and they stop me drinking.”
With students funded by the Music in Secondary Schools TrustAlan Davidson/The Picture Library Ltd
Lloyd Webber is sure that his father, an organist and teacher at the Royal College of Music, was an alcoholic too. He didn’t see it as a child because he was a boarder at Westminster School, then away at Oxford University (very briefly) before getting a flat. “Things got more difficult at home for my brother [the cellist Julian]. I think my aunt probably was alcoholic too, though I don’t remember her ever being drunk. I do remember my father.” What was that like? “He used to get quite depressed. He always wanted to be a composer, and he was, but he felt his music was out of its time.”
The money raised from next week’s Christie’s auction, estimated at about £300,000, will go to the Music in Secondary Schools Trust, which is part-funded by the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation. Giving more children access to music is his passion project and the issue that has made him cynical about politicians of all kinds. “We know that for every pound we put into my scheme, £9.87 comes back,” he says, citing the benefits calculated by the Social Value Engine. “It’s all proven. But will anybody do anything about it? No. Lip service. Keir Starmer saying, ‘Oh, I went to the Guildhall.’ Well, please. It saves in policing, knife crime, drugs.”
When he sold his cellar through Sotheby’s in 2011, Lloyd Webber recorded a video interview with the auction house’s head of wine. His love of the stuff was clear as the two of them pootled about in his Hampshire cellar, stroking bottles (“you lovely, lovely boy”) and gasping at rare vintages. Next week’s sale marks a decisive break with that version of himself: is he saying goodbye to anything positive?
“Oh, there’s lots of happy memories. I used to love my burgundies. But it would set me on the slippery slope. I can’t and I mustn’t.” That’s his bad luck, he says, although you have to have been an alcoholic to appreciate the joy of being sober. Last night he was in Oxford for the opening of the new Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities, where Nicole Scherzinger sang songs from Sunset Boulevard. Tonight he will hear Zegler sing Don’t Cry for Me Argentina at the Olivier awards.
“I have had probably the two finest female performers in musical theatre in my shows, and I’ll have heard them back to back. When you’re not drinking you think, ‘My God, how lucky am I?”
Final Treasures from the Wine Cellar of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Apr 22-May 6; christies.com
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