Andrew Lloyd Webber "I REMEMBER"

Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber, 70, is the legendary composer of some of the most successful musicals in history and has reigned over the West End for nearly five decades

- Amanda Riley

…WE LIVED IN A RENTED FLAT. When my parents met, Dad had close to zero income. He, Mum, my dear Granny Molly and Mimi, my mother’s pet monkey, shacked up under one roof in a rented flat in London’s South Kensington.

…MUM’S MONKEY DISLIKED ME. When Mum got pregnant, her pet monkey Mimi became horrendously distressed and violently attacked my mother’s stomach with bloodcurdling cries.

…MY FATHER WAS A MILD MAN. My paternal grandfather was a keen amateur musician. 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. But for all his talent Dad wouldn’t say boo to a goose. He was content in his academic roles such as Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music. Mum found his lack of ambition infuriating.

…TAKING OUR CAT FOR WALKS 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 my cat, Perseus—a wonderful square-faced, seal-pointed Siamese boy. The family really shouldn’t have had an animal like that in a flat. Such was Perseus’s deafening meowing that when I was around seven I asked if I could take him on a lead to Thurloe Square, the only bit of local greenery I knew. I became a regular spectacle walking Perseus like a dog.

…MY FIRST TIME ON A MAGAZINE COVER. Mum was an ace children’s piano teacher and her lessons gave me a head start in the basics of music. When I was about four, Mum hired a photographer and thrust a violin and a bow upon my person. Mum’s 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.