Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1999, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a composer. His music has entertained a generation making

him one of the most successful and almost certainly the richest British

musician who's ever lived. He went to Westminster school and then up to Oxford but

chose to leave after only a term to pursue his musical career. Like some of the

great composers in history, he decided to write almost exclusively for the theatre where his work could be enjoyed by everyone and so it's proved

Joseph and his amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat Jesus Christ Superstar

Evita Cats Phantom of the Opera,

they're just some of the shows which have transformed

the world of musical theatre.

Their creator, showman, art collector, food writer,

is a man who wants to be judged above all by his work. I just love musicals and I love the theatre he says and I want to make sure they go on.

He is Andrew Lloyd Weber or indeed Lord Lloyd Weber.

Why the musical theatre, Andrew, I mean it might have been pop, it might have been classical,

sacred chamber, but you chose the musical.

Why?

Well, I was always fascinated by musical theatre from the very

very word go. My aunt was an actress not a particularly successful one but I

thought her world was unbelievably glamorous and she used to take me to see some of the American musicals which

were of course later in in Britain and they were of course in New York and so I got to see

an awful lot of things very early on it's grabbed me and opera grabbed me I I'm just one of those things. It just grabbed me and opera grabbed me. I am just one of those things.

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