This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
Another week, another 1960s music memoir, and we all know the form. Overnight stardom? Check. Bohemian excess in Swinging London? Check. Photo of our hero as a young groover, looking goofy under his mop-top hair? (God, was it really so long ago?) Check, check, check.
The twist is that this is a story of classical music, not rock. Julian Lloyd Webber only ever wanted to play the cello, and for most of this enjoyable, gossipy autobiography, that’s exactly what he does. From his teens until the day shortly after his 63rd birthday when a herniated disc ended his playing career, Lloyd Webber succeeded in a field where no amount of sex appeal, PR or electronic fakery can take the place of musicianship and insanely hard work.
By the 1980s, Lloyd Webber was the rock star of the British cello. His interest in rare repertoire and the new music he commissioned from composers as varied as Arnold, Rodrigo and Philip Glass made him the foremost champion of his instrument alongside Rostropovich.
And yes, perhaps name recognition helped — though in a sector as snobbish as classical music, it’s more likely that the family name was a hindrance. When Lloyd Webber mortgaged himself to the last penny to buy his magnificent “Barjansky” Stradivarius, the Tatler sneered that his career was “a tax dodge of his brother Andrew”. (The writer, Lloyd Webber is quick to point out, was an Old Etonian).
In truth, the Lloyd Webber clan were fiercely self-reliant. There were no hand-outs from Andrew or anyone else. As their mother lay dying, Lloyd Webber cleared his concert diary — anathema to the family ethos. “If you cancel, I will never forgive you,” were the last words she ever spoke to him.
Lloyd Webber’s memories of musical London in the 1960s and 1970s are particularly gamey, and he gives great anecdote. He grew up in a chaotic South Kensington flat, home at various times to his father William (a frustrated composer), a monkey called Mimi and the pianist John Lill, who at that point believed himself to be the reincarnation of Beethoven.
Tim Rice did Julian’s English homework for him (the teacher gave it a B+). Later, Melvyn Bragg heard an early performance of the Variations Andrew wrote for his kid brother and promptly optioned it as the theme tune for The South Bank Show. At times, Lloyd Webber makes success seem so easy that you wonder if he’s doing himself a disservice.
Other chapters tell a less enviable story — of exhausting tours, bad hotels and a personal life in which the most enduring relationships are with instruments and record labels. His sudden, forced estrangement from the cello threatens to derail his existence until he finds new purpose as a music education advocate, and as a transformative principal of Birmingham Conservatoire.
There he experiences at first hand the way that British musical life is weighted against anything outside London. He inherited a demoralised and deeply mediocre institution (I once witnessed his predecessor conduct a job interview feet-up and shoeless — big toe peeping through a hole in his sock). He left it with the title “Royal” and the best facilities of any British music college.
Classical music memoirs can be scrupulously bland, but Bows and Arrows is satisfyingly ready to dish the dirt. Michael Nyman, the conductor Richard Armstrong, and the producers of the film Hilary and Jackie all get a deserved pasting. Others — such as the composer Malcolm Arnold (who made a drunken pass at Lloyd Webber’s second wife, and later turned out an unplayably bad cello concerto) are forgiven on grounds of lovability and genius.
But there’s a melancholy ground bass to Lloyd Webber’s story — the gradual disappearance of classical music from British culture. In the Eighties, he chatted on prime time TV with Terry Wogan and Russell Harty. By 2012, the planners of the Olympic closing ceremony allocated him just 20 seconds to play Elgar (whilst seated, naturally, on a model of the Royal Albert Hall).
Ever the trouper, Lloyd Webber agreed, only to find his performance cut still further on the night. “Classical music’s 20-second contribution to the three-hour ‘Symphony of British Music’ had shrunk to five,” he observes. It’s depressing to think that Julian Lloyd Webber might be the last classical virtuoso to become a household name in these islands. Still, he’s going down fighting, and he spins a bloody good yarn.
