Andrew Lloyd Webber is opening up about his road to sobriety, telling The Times in a new profile that he is a recovering alcoholic.
“I am a recovering alcoholic,” the composer told the outlet in an interview published Saturday. “Sixteen months ago I decided that I needed help and it’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”
Lloyd Webber previously announced he stopped drinking while producing the Broadway production of School of Rock in 2015 and 2016, though he told The Times that he “started to drink secretly.”
“I was doing what they call ‘white-knuckling’, without any backup, and I started to worry that I wasn’t being creative,” he said. “And I thought, ‘But I’ve said to everybody that I’m not drinking.’ So I started to drink secretly.”
The EGOT winner explained that he “started getting into a downhill spiral and about 18 months ago the family were in a desperate state.” Lloyd Webber added, “My wife was feeling she couldn’t go on.”
He then checked into a clinic, which The Times noted “didn’t work,” which led him to attend an AA meeting in Switzerland, and more in the U.K. Upon attending meetings, Lloyd Webber said he “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,” he said. “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.”
Lloyd Webber attends meeting everyday, and he recalled a turning point when a fellow attendee was describing the “stupidity” of addiction. He explained, “It was about the ludicrous lengths you go to, the hiding and the pretending.”
“When you’re a wine drinker, you don’t think of yourself as… well, alcoholics drink spirits,” he said. “That was the shocking thing for me, when I realised that I was drinking vodka to hide it.”
Lloyd Webber was asked if he wrote any of his acclaimed musicals while drinking, to which he responded, “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.” However, the outlet noted that there are things he does not remember from over the years.
“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 said, adding that he believes some people may have avoided working with him “because word gets around.”
“I thought that I was getting away with it,” said Lloyd Webber. “The thing is, I am deeply sorry and I can only apologize to people if I made a mess.”
