Andrew Lloyd Webber is a recovering alcoholic.
The 78-year-old legendary composer announced in 2016 that he hadn't had a drink for two years, but he has now admitted that, while he stopped drinking while producing School of Rock on Broadway at that time, he secretly went back to alcohol afterwards and sought help just over a year ago.
He admitted to The Sunday Times newspaper: “I was doing what they call ‘white-knuckling’, without any back-up, and I started to worry that I wasn’t being creative.
“And I thought, ‘But I’ve said to everybody that I’m not drinking.’ So I started to drink secretly...
“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.”
The Cats composer admitted he went into a "downward spiral" in 2024 before getting sober and his family were deeply concerned.
He recalled: “You think it’s secret, but it’s not. 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.”
While Andrew - who is married to Madeleine Gurdon, the mother of his three youngest children, and also has Imogen and the late Nicholas with first wife Sarah Hugill - checked into a clinic, it didn't work for him, but it prompted him to visit an Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting in Switzerland, and then others in the UK and he "adores" the sense of community he has found within the support groups.
He said: “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.
"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.”
Andrew - who now attends a meeting every day - explained his turning point came when he heard someone else talking about the "stupidity" of addiction.
He said: “It was about the ludicrous lengths you go to, the hiding and the pretending.”
And he thinks he only developed a problem after declaring he was sober and started drinking in secret.
He said: “When you’re a wine drinker, you don’t think of yourself as… well, alcoholics drink spirits.
"That was the shocking thing for me, when I realised that I was drinking vodka to hide it.
"You don’t really think. It’s just, ‘How am I going to get through the day?’ I got that thing of seriously worrying that I wasn’t writing, and panicked. ‘Maybe I’ll have a drink. OK, I’ve written something.’ Because it does slightly liberate you — but then it’s more and more and more.”
Andrew feels "lucky" that nothing went badly wrong when he was drinking and he's embarrassed to think people may have avoided working with him because "word gets around".
He said: "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...
"I thought that I was getting away with it.
“The thing is, I am deeply sorry and I can only apologise to people if I made a mess.”
