02-07-2025
Andrew Lloyd Webber's top 10 songs, ranked
Andrew Lloyd Webber has always been part of my life. My first encounter, aged eight, came in 1993 with the West End revival of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. My similarly smitten friend and I learnt all the songs, and on a subsequent school-trip bus ride, terrorised the rest of our class by singing the entire score from start to finish.
Joseph was the ideal entry point, with its bouncy tunes and a cast featuring children, but I've since grown into Lloyd Webber's more sophisticated, elaborate and gorgeously romantic scores. I have spent thousands of hours with the composer, and I've come to appreciate that while he is indisputably the master of the earworm (Memory, fittingly, is unforgettable), that skill perhaps overshadows the complexity of his writing and the downright weirdness of some of his creative choices.
My top 10 picks reflect that sheer variety, and the fascinating possibilities that Lloyd Webber's work offers for rediscovery and reinvention.
10. U.N.C.O.U.P.L.E.D., Starlight Express
Just when you thought Lloyd Webber and Richard Stilgoe's fantastical roller-skating train musical couldn't get any more surreal, along comes a spot-on pastiche of a country-music tearjerker – sung by a dining car. The forlorn wailing is done by Dinah, who has been ditched by her race partner Greaseball, and it's the locomotive equivalent of Tammy Wynette's similarly styled lament D.I.V.O.R.C.E. – Dinah is 'a carriage with no marriage', 'a van without a man'. It's easily the zaniest, funniest song in a show that is characterised mostly by childlike wonder. It also offers a cheering note of female empowerment, combined with a brilliantly rude climactic joke. At the performance I attended recently of Starlight's spectacular Troubadour Wembley Park revival, that distinctly adult punchline had the (grown-up) audience howling.
9. King Herod's Song, Jesus Christ Superstar
Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's ambitious breakthrough show was a passion project in every sense, and it has remained a steady favourite – although it took Timothy Sheader's 2016 production at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre to really convince me of its pulse-racing rock-concert underpinnings. I have lots of favourites from JCS, including Mary Magdalene's I Don't Know How to Love Him and the fervent soul-searching by Jesus and Judas (of which more later). But I have to include another wild swing by Lloyd Webber: the sneeringly sarcastic, campily vaudevillian number sung by Herod. It's a surprising but hugely effective choice for this big-villain moment, and pairs a deceptively jaunty tune with provocative lyrics, such as 'Prove to me that you're no fool / Walk across my swimming pool'.
8. Tell Me on a Sunday, Tell Me on a Sunday
Lloyd Webber can do colossal bombast, but he can also do simple, and simply devastating. This solo one-act song cycle (written with Don Black) is much more of a cabaret-style chamber piece than his usual West End juggernauts, and it's low concept, too: the story follows a British girl who travels to the US and gets her heart broken, repeatedly, by a series of awful men. Take That Look Off Your Face was the show's breakout single, but it's the tenderly crafted title number that really encapsulates the work's plaintive, wistful tone – an expression of grief for the loss of innocence. It's arguably Lloyd Webber's most relatable creation, too: haven't we all experienced the horror of an impending break-up, and wished we could make the pain just a little less searing?
7. Mr Mistoffelees, Cats
Fair warning: once you hear this devilishly catchy refrain – 'Oh! Well I never, was there ever a cat so clever as magical Mr Mistoffelees' – you will find yourself absent-mindedly humming it approximately every hour for the next 10 years. It's appropriate, really: this musical tribute celebrates the great conjuring cat, who can perform astonishing feats, and it's a number that really casts a spell. Part of its appeal lies in its wit and sense of mischief. Lloyd Webber matches T S Eliot's affectionate musing on the deceitful and ornery nature of moggies (Mr M's family call for him in the garden in vain while he's curled up asleep in the hall) with a playful, jazzy style. But I really love it because it's the most joyful singalong of all the Cats numbers.
6. High Flying, Adored, Evita
The driven title character of Lloyd Webber and Rice's Evita has a riveting counterweight in narrator Che. He is the sceptical onlooker to the hysterical media circus surrounding Argentina's glamorous First Lady, Eva Perón, and he gives the astute political musical its necessary bite. This Act II number, in particular, is a perfectly incisive takedown of overhyped celebrity that often comes into my mind. Eva has risen from poverty to power – but at what cost? Did she achieve fame too young? And will the fickle public sour? The contemptuous commentary is somehow more needling when set to lovely lilting music that befits the Peróns' inaugural ball: Che is the ghost at the feast. It's a construction so fiendish, it could rival Stephen Sondheim.
5. Memory, Cats
Lloyd Webber was concerned that his mega-hit-in-waiting was too reminiscent of Puccini, so he played it for his classical composer father and asked him what it sounded like. His dad gave the now-legendary reply: 'It sounds like a million dollars!' Add in angsty, existential lyrics cleverly filleted from Eliot's poems by the director Trevor Nunn, and Cats' breakout anthem was born – a moment of raw, thunderous emotion in this whimsical show. The genius of the number is its dramatic build. With each verse and, crucially, each progressive key change, it grows from quiet sorrow to a howl of anguish that blows your hair back. While the song's rather fatiguing ubiquity keeps it off my top spot, I will always remember, and treasure, my spine-tingling first experience of it in the theatre.
4. Superstar, Jesus Christ Superstar
How do you turn biblical legends into living, breathing, flawed characters? Key to the remarkable success of JCS is the melding of the epic and awe-inspiring in Lloyd Webber's score with propulsive genres like rock and pop: music that makes Jesus and Judas instantly understandable, and which parallels their warring ideas about faith, change and ideology with a contemporary social and cultural revolution. My favourite example is the almighty title number, led by the spirit of Judas (who has died by suicide at this point). It mashes up several styles: the angelic choir articulating the holy trinity of lyrics, 'Je-sus Christ / Su-per star', the funky riffs and Judas's desperate, frenzied questioning ahead of the crucifixion. The haunting catchiness lodges his doubts in our heads, too: 'Who are you? What have you sacrificed?'
3. Sunset Boulevard, Sunset Boulevard
The lush grandeur of Sunset's big ballads, mainly sung by the faded silent-screen star Norma Desmond, always impressed me. However, it wasn't until I saw Jamie Lloyd's revelatory West End revival in 2023 that I was fully gripped by the musical's transposition of Billy Wilder's savage Hollywood satire. The diva might be the 'greatest star', but the screenwriter Joe Gillis actually gets the signature number. That was emphasised by Lloyd's audacious staging of the sardonic title track, which saw the actor Tom Francis (followed by cameras) saunter backstage and out into the street, ripping away the comforting artifice in the process. It made Lloyd Webber's ominous music all the more formidable, and lent extra heft to the bleak cynicism of Joe's transactional words: 'She was sinking fast, I threw a rope / Now I have suits, and she has hope.' Soul-destroying.
2. All I Ask of You, The Phantom of the Opera
From the darkest Lloyd Webber number to the loveliest. Phantom is by far his most ravishing score: yes, it has crashing organ riffs and synths, putting a bombastic 1980s spin on gothic melodrama, but it's packed with wrenching emotion – the yearning, envy, desire, loneliness and bliss. It also builds in moments of pure sweetness amidst the Grand Guignol plotting. One of those is the exquisite duet between budding soprano Christine (the Phantom's pupil) and the other point of their love triangle, her childhood friend-turned-eligible suitor Raoul. In contrast to the Phantom's dangerously obsessive ardour, Raoul offers her partnership, safety and devotion – and she matches his sincerity perfectly in this soaring ballad. The two become one in the music, and so we long for them to match that unity in their romance.
1. Don't Cry For Me Argentina, Evita
Like Tom Francis, Rachel Zegler, star of the current West End Evita, is ruffling feathers by exiting the theatre mid-show: she takes to the London Palladium balcony to sing the big number to passers-by. Pure stunt, or another purposeful creative decision by director Lloyd to highlight the work's subversive power? After all, Don't Cry For Me Argentina is simultaneously Lloyd Webber's greatest ballad and his most fascinatingly complex. It might seem earnest and sentimental, but it's actually a cunning piece of populist political oratory, bolstered by the stirring score. 'All you have to do is look at me to know / That every word is true' is the triumphant closer: Eva writing her own story, her own truth, and selling the hell out of it. For me, that sophisticated combination of form and meaning is Lloyd Webber at his absolute best.
