Unmasked

Being told that I had a brother is memory number two. It was a bright spring day and I was playing in Thurloe Square gardens, to which my family had a key. I remember not quite understanding what having a brother meant, but here my memory goes blank. I can’t remember anything about Julian as a baby at all, perhaps because Julian’s popping onto the planet also saw the arrival of Perseus the cat. Perseus was a wonderful square faced, seal-pointed Siamese boy, not one of those angular faced jobs so beloved of today’s breeders. I fell in love with Perseus instantly. Dad was also completely devoted to him. But I realize now that the family really shouldn’t have had an animal like that cooped up in a flat. His incessant cries to get out still give me nightmares.

Such was Perseus’s deafening low Siamese miaowing that when I was around seven I asked if I could take him on a lead to Thurloe Square when I wasn’t at school. Both Mum and Granny said yes. How trusting parents were in those days. You wouldn’t let a kid loose with a cat on a lead around South Kensington today – unless you were after a million hits on YouTube. So I became a regular spectacle walking Perseus like a dog across the old zebra crossing that led to the train station and the only bit of greenery Julian and I knew, at least in school termtime. One day Perseus escaped. Five hours later he was found among the pedestrians on the zebra crossing returning from the only piece of greenery that he, too, knew. Percy’s kerb drill was impeccable.

Years later I had the job of looking after Percy when he was dying. The old cat raised himself tortuously from his basket and started miaowing in a manner all too reminiscent of his incarcerated cries. The poor old boy scrabbled at the front door as if there were a rabbit to catch outside. So I put his lead on. He didn’t want to walk so he sat on my shoulder, a mode of transport which he always liked.

A year or two earlier the traffic at South Kensington had been reorganized into a fearsome one-way system. At the time it was claimed to feature the most complicated set of traffic lights in Europe. Perseus never mastered the new system but it was clear that the old cat wanted to pad back to the gardens that he used to freely wander to before its advent.

We got to the site of the old zebra crossing. Percy tried to get off my shoulder and I put him down. He sat for a few seconds, looked out at the new traffic lights and hissed. Then on his own he turned, lead trailing behind him, back to our flat. Next day he died. I owe Cats not only to Mummy’s bedtime reading of T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, but also to Perseus.

My third memory of 1951 is so shocking that it might also account for my not remembering anything of baby Julian. It concerns my appearance on the cover of a magazine called Nursery World. Mum hired a photographer, thrust a violin and a bow upon my person and thus created a nauseous picture on the front of the grisly publication that haunts me still. It speaks volumes about Mother. For Mum was so ambitious for her offspring that she would have given Gypsy Rose Lee’s famous showbiz mum a fair old run in the Great Child Prodigy Handicap Stakes. Sadly I was no such thing. Pushy mothers of the world beware. Offsprings rebel. Just as Gypsy Rose Lee took a career path her mother hadn’t intended for her, so did I. Not as a stripper, though, at least not in public.

Mum was an ace children’s piano teacher. Although she died in 1994 she is still a bit of legend among the great and the not so good who inhabit the leafier parts of southwest London. In 1950 Mother co-founded a pre-prep school called the Wetherby with a couple called Mr and Mrs Russell, the former being interested in bare bottom spanking. I was one of the first tots through the door. The place was a roaring success. Over the years luminaries from Princes William and Harry to Hugh Grant have joined the ranks of short-trousered ones who crossed Wetherby’s threshold.

My mother had a big hand in the school’s birth pangs. In those days parents from most walks of life wanted their kids to learn the piano. My mother’s brilliance and patience in that department assured the Wetherby’s swift ascendancy. Anyone who has ever sat beside a child while it plonks away at ghastly ditties with titles like “El Wiggly” or “Honk That Horn” will bear out that to do so you either need to be a saint or tone deaf, or most probably both. Mum’s patience might well redefine canonization. I reckon she must have given at least 100,000 piano lessons to beginners in her lifetime. Further, she really cared about her charges. There was a time when this confirmed, yet confused, socialist claimed to have taught a fair wedge of the Tory party.

I confess that her piano lessons gave me a head start in the basics of music. The trouble was that there were so many of them. And there was that wretched violin. Mum’s general idea was that I would emerge on the international concert stage as some Yehudi Menuhin-style violin toting child prodigy. Her hopes didn’t last long.

The next instrument out of the closet was the french horn. I was rather better at blowing than scratching. Indeed I rather enjoyed playing this overdeveloped hunting instrument until I was twelve. It was then that a crisis occurred. Mum’s quest to have me garner serious music grades brought me full frontal with Hindemith’s horn sonata. I have read somewhere that Hindemith developed a load of theories about the importance of amateurs to music. My theory is that some of his compositions were designed to make average instrumentalists like me abandon music for once and for all. He achieved a resounding success in my case. After attempting to play his epic I chucked my french horn in its case where it remains to this day.

Clearly Mum was transferring her ambitions from my father to me but to grasp why you have to know something about him. Billy Lloyd Webber was a mild man who feared authority in any form. He once hid in a cupboard because he had mistakenly called out the fire brigade. It transpired that Granny had left a chicken in the oven and smoked the flat out. He was convinced he was going to get a stretch in the slammer for abusing the emergency services.

Billy’s family was solid working class. His father was a plumber by trade but also a keen amateur musician. Like so many of my grandfather’s contemporaries, Billy’s father had sung in various church choirs. So Dad was steeped in the late High Church nineteenth-century choral tradition beloved by the Anglo-Catholic “smells and bells” establishments where Grandpa exercised the larynx. As a child Dad got music scholarships all over the shop. At an unprecedentedly youthful age he won a gong to the Royal College of Music. He also became the youngest person ever to become organist and choirmaster at St Cyprian’s Clarence Gate, a splendid “Arts and Crafts” church by Sir Ninian Comper. But for all his talent Dad wouldn’t say boo to a goose. All he wanted was a nice quiet routine.

By the time I was ten, Dad was increasingly content in his academic roles such as Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music. In 1959 he became boss of the London College of Music which seemingly sealed the end of his composing aspirations. He felt his writing was out of step with its time and increasingly wrote “light music” under pen names or music for amateur church choirs. Mum found his lack of ambition infuriating. Still, she was very particular about taking me to listen to his cantatas and anthems, especially first performances. Even Julian, who was barely old enough, was dragged along to hear them but soon new compositions seemed to dry up – or so we all thought. After my father’s death, Julian discovered a cache of compositions that had never been performed. Some of them were as good as anything he ever wrote.

2 Some Enchanted Ruin (#ua656de99-a461-5b66-a30a-10e6ca97eedb)

The three great passions that were to shape my life – art, musical theatre and architecture – surfaced early. My love of architecture kicked off with a weird romantic obsession with ruined castles and abbeys which began as early as I can remember. By my teens this led to a full-blown love of architecture of all sorts. Quite where this came from is a mystery; the visual arts don’t feature in the Lloyd Webber family DNA.

In the case of theatre and pop music, it is easy to explain why. My family had an annual Christmas outing to the London Palladium pantomime.

Everything captivated me. In those days the Palladium was synonymous with popular variety theatre. All the big names played there. The pantomime was a combination of big names, big sets and contemporary pop songs that must have been a heady mix to this five-year- old. One such pantomime, Aladdin, contained a line that I still cherish:

Aladdin rubs lamp. Up pops genie.

“What is your wish, sir?”

“To hear Alma Cogan singing ‘Sugar in the Morning.’ ”

Curtain parts to reveal Alma Cogan singing “Sugar in the Morning.”

Very soon I had built my first toy theatre. This was first a well loved adapted version of a Pollock’s toy theatre but eventually became a vast construction made out of play bricks baptized the Harrington Pavilion. Over the years its technical ambitions grew to such an extent that its stage acquired a revolve made from an old gramophone turntable. That revolve was a direct result of my aping the famous closing scene of TV’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium. All the stars used to line up on the legendary Palladium revolve waving good night to millions in Britain for whom that show was the television show of the late 1950s and early ’60s. To Britain it was as big as The Ed Sullivan Show in the USA. I pinch myself every morning knowing that today I own the theatre that turned me on to theatre.

London Palladium inspired pantomime and variety seasons at the Harrington Pavilion were short lived. Christmas holidays 1958 brought me full frontal with musicals for the first time. It was a baptism and a half. I saw My Fair Lady and West Side Story plus the movies of Gigi and South Pacific all in the space of four game-changing weeks. 1958 also coincided with the arrival of Harrington Court’s first long-playing gramophone. With it came an LP of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite. Unfortunately for Dad the other side was Prokofiev’s The Love for Three Oranges Suite whose gloriously dissonant chaotic start much appealed to Julian and me. The famous march had us dancing on our bed with joy. Thus started my lifelong love of Prokofiev, in my opinion one of the greatest melodists of the twentieth century.

My Fair Lady was the talk of London throughout 1958. The legendary musical based on Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion had opened on Broadway two years earlier to ecstatic reviews, apart from one Alan Jay Lerner told me about in Variety that said there were no memorable songs. The producers did a brilliant hyping job in Britain by banning the music from being heard or performed until just before the London production opened with the result that the Broadway cast album was the ultimate in chic contraband. Naturally Auntie Vi had one so by the time I saw the show I knew the score backwards and had long pondered whether Rex Harrison’s semi-spoken song delivery had a place at the Harrington Pavilion. London’s lather foamed even further as the three Broadway leads, Rex Harrison, Julie Andrews and Stanley Holloway, repeated their starring roles at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane and I was lucky enough to have a ticket to see all three – actually two because Stanley Holloway was off. It’s funny how a disappointment like that stays with you forever. In my case that and the rustling front cloth depicting the exterior of Wimpole Street as Freddy Eynsford-Hill warbled “On the Street Where You Live” are what I remember most about that December Saturday matinee – apart from my showing off by singing along with the songs to show I knew them.

My love of the score took me to the movie of Gigi, the now impossibly un-PC story about a girl being groomed as a courtesan. Can you imagine what would happen if you pitched a Hollywood studio today a song sung by an old man entitled “Thank Heaven for Little Girls”? Thank heaven I was young enough only to agree and even today the overture from Gigi is something I relish hearing.

Curiously it was Granny Molly who banged on about West Side Story and it was she who took me to it. The American cast’s dancing was like nothing I’d seen before. That two stage musicals could be so different yet equally spellbinding had me in a tailspin. Granny bought me the Broadway cast album for Christmas and pretty soon it was my favourite of the two. I related to Bernstein’s score much as I did to Prokofiev’s Love for Three Oranges.

However what completely pulverized me was the film of South Pacific. I went with Mum and Dad and I remember the afternoon I saw it as vividly as the legendary colour filters that would have clobbered a lesser score. I had to wait until my birthday the following March for the soundtrack album. I still treasure my battered worn copy – incidentally it is the only album to have been No. 1 in the UK charts for a whole calendar year. By Christmas 1961 I knew the scores of Carousel, The King and I and Oklahoma! and had seen the South Pacific movie four times. But there was one other movie. It only had a few songs but it grabbed me nonetheless. Elvis in Jailhouse Rock. The “Jailhouse Rock” sequence had me standing on my seat. I still have the worn-out 45 rpm single that drove my parents to distraction.

Musicals were soon the staple diet of the Harrington Pavilion. I wrote tons of dreadful ones. An audience of bored parents and friends, relatives and anyone I could find would gather for the latest offering with Julian and me on vocals, and me alternating as pianist and scene-shifter. At its zenith the theatre’s stage, were it to have been built lifesize, would have dwarfed that of the new Paris opera house at the Bastille. Subjects included everything from The Importance of Being Earnest to The Queen of Sheba. A whole fantasy town developed around the theatre. Everyone in this town was somehow dependent upon the theatre’s well-being. The Harrington Pavilion had a box office through which the townspeople booked tickets. Hits or turkeys were assessed by the reaction of the audience of bored parents and friends.

I developed with Julian a complete world in which I could hide and where I was truly happy, a make-believe world with one common denominator, musical theatre. There were stars who came and went, made comebacks or passed into oblivion with billing to match. There were pretend directors, designers and programmes, even souvenir brochures, for I was very impressed by the stiff-covered job that went with My Fair Lady. There were special train services that ferried audiences from the fantasy town to the theatre on show nights and, when I was given my first tape recorder, original cast albums were quick to follow.

Praise be to the good Lord that the tape recorder in question was incompatible with any other. For some reason it had its own peculiar tape speed. Thus my prepubescent warblings, along with the gismo that recorded them, are mercifully lost to posterity. However I own up that two of the tunes survive in other guises. From Ernest! billed modestly as “A Musical of Gigantic Importance,” one became “Chained and Bound” in Joseph. The main melody of “Chanson d’Enfance,” appropriately titled under the circumstances, in Aspects of Love also came from this show. Quite how the latter could possibly have made sense dramatically in a musical based on Wilde’s timeless comedy eludes me.

However my burgeoning love of medieval cathedrals, ruins and churches affected me equally as deeply. I built a vast play-brick Gothic cathedral (dedicated to St Elvis) at the other end of the nursery to cope with the Harrington Pavilion theatregoers’ spiritual needs. St Elvis’s Cathedral fell victim to the wrecker’s ball and chain, i.e. Julian in a fit of rage knocked it down. But for many years the Harrington Pavilion, being glued together, survived unscathed. In the Sixties when I left home, my toy theatre was carefully dismantled and stored. But sadly it went missing when I moved house in 1974. All I have now are a very few photographs.

WITH THE TOY THEATRE shows came an increasing interest in me from Auntie Vi. Mum, frankly, whilst not disapproving of my puerile jingles, didn’t exactly approve either. She had transferred her ambition for a classical musician of a son onto three-year- old Julian, for whom she had bought a baby-sized cello. Dad, however, was starting to show an interest in what I was up to. When I was ten he took some of my tunes, arranged them very simply for the piano, and had them published under my name in a magazine called The Music Teacher with the title “The Toy Theatre.” Every now and again when I was experimenting away at the piano he’d come in and ask me how I had discovered some chord or another. I suppose that wasn’t surprising: my father, for all his grand title of Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music, truly loved melody. In fact he was the most open bloke about melody there could be.

Thus in addition to hearing all the current musicals, specially when I went to visit Auntie Vi, my father would play me music of all sorts, albeit with a heavy leaning towards Rachmaninov. Dad’s taste in “serious” music did not embrace the modernists. He did, however, admire Benjamin Britten’s orchestrations, though he would wave his cocktail-shaker in anger that Britten left for America in the Second World War as a conscientious objector. Dad repeatedly moaned that Britten thus gained a massive unfair advantage over composers like himself who stayed in bomb blitzed London and did their bit for the war effort.

In 1958 Dad decided to hit the organ keyboards again. He had given up his post at All Saints Margaret Street after the war to teach composition at the Royal College of Music. Now, a decade later, he was appointed musical director of the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster. The Central Hall services were polar opposite to the High Church trappings of All Saints. I gather his move caused quite a stir in circles where incense is a key conduit to God. But Mum was delighted. She distrusted Catholics. Catholics believe animals have no souls. The truth was that the Central Hall had one of the finest organs in Britain, and Dad was itching to play publicly again. My cellist brother Julian tells me that performing was where Dad showed a steely side. Early in his career Julian asked Dad how he could overcome his pre-performance nerves. Dad rounded on him, saying if he had prepared himself properly he wouldn’t be nervous.

Apart from the occasional blood and thunder sermon or rousing free-church hymn, the ray of sunshine in the colourless services that Julian and I were now dragged to every Sunday was the moment Dad goosed up proceedings with one of his organ improvisations. Of course Methodists are teetotallers so I hope nobody examined the mineral water bottle Dad had beside him in his organ console and which, after a swig, miraculously transported him to ever greater inspirational freedom.

2014 saw the centenary of my father’s birth and there has been a welcome flurry of interest in him as a composer. This has been much encouraged by Julian’s discovery of many pieces he wrote but kept under wraps because he openly felt his music was out of step with the contemporary serious music world. It was. But, rather as late Victorian painters continued in sub Pre-Raphaelite style long after the advent of Impressionism, Cubism and the like, today we see these artists still had something to offer even if it was out of its time. I feel the same way about Dad’s music. He could have been a fantastic film composer. His work is crammed with wonderful big melodies, 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 from his eyes. 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 announced, “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.