Andrew Lloyd Webber Reveals He Drank in Secret for Years After Telling People He Was Sober: ‘I Am a Recovering Alcoholic’
Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber is “a recovering alcoholic,” he admitted to The Times of London in an interview published Saturday. “I started drinking secretly.”
Lloyd Webber admitted to the outlet he took a break from drinking from 2015-16 while producing “School of Rock” on Broadway.
“I was doing what they call ‘white-knuckling,’ without any backup, and I started to worry that I wasn’t being creative,” he added.
“And I thought, ‘But I’ve said to everybody that I’m not drinking.’ So I started to drink secretly.”
The admission came within the first minutes of the interview. Now the composer is auctioning off the last of his wine and quitting for good. “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,” he said.
He also said his drinking was not a secret, despite what he thought. “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,” Lloyd Webber explained. He and Madeleine Gurdon have been married since 1991.
Lloyd Webber also said he’s had positive experience with Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings, which he attends daily whether he’s at his home in London, Hampshire or New York. “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,” he explained. “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’s also no longer worried about being recognized, which happens. ” I did the meeting in New York on the day I was opening ‘Cats: The Jellicle Ball’ last week, and nobody said a thing,” Lloyd Webber revealed.
His alcoholism was easy to support, at least mentally, because he preferred wine. “When you’re a wine drinker, you don’t think of yourself as … well, alcoholics drink spirits,” he justified. Since he didn’t drink spirits, he felt he didn’t really have a problem. “That was the shocking thing for me, when I realized that I was drinking vodka to hide it.”
When asked if any of his big songs were written while under the influence of alcohol, Lloyd Webber readily pointed to a few. “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.” That includes “‘No Matter What,’ which was a big hit for [’90s Irish boy band] Boyzone. I can’t really remember going right back.”
Elsewhere, Lloyd Webber said both his late son Nicholas (who died of gastric cancer in 2023) and his late father were alcoholics, too. “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,” he recalled. “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.”
Read the full interview with Lloyd Webber at The Times of London.
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