Tim Rice: ‘Jesus Christ Superstar wouldn’t be written now in case it offends eight other religions’

Sir Tim Rice is trying to request a cup of coffee in a members club in White City next to the BBC. Yet because he also ordered an earlier coffee downstairs, he needs to close down the app and reopen it in order to place a new order. Sir Tim is baffled. “What app? I don’t have an app,” he says.

The waitress promises to sort it out, but Rice is clearly adding the episode to his long list of modern inconveniences, which includes Instagram and the difficulty of knowing in a place like this which bathroom to use. “I’m exhausted by modern life. It’s a minefield. And I don’t see how this tech improves things. What’s wrong with just talking to someone?”

Rice may be 80, but in fact, wearing a dapper checked suit with matching shirt and socks, he looks quite at home in this sleek media enclave, with its artful sepia lighting, abundance of house plants and BBC creatives hunched over laptops. And he is showing no signs of slowing down. We’ve met because of his show, Sir Tim Rice – My Life in Musicals: I Know Him So Well, in which the erstwhile writing partner of Andrew Lloyd Webber and the Oscar, Tony, Emmy and Grammy award winning lyricist behind Aladdin and The Lion King spills the beans on nearly 50 years in show biz, alongside live performances of his most famous songs.

He did a few dates in smaller venues earlier this year and it proved so successful, his producer has booked another 22 venues across 28 dates from next April. “People said to me – you must be mad, embarking on that sort of thing at your age,” he says. “But actually, this sort of thing keeps you fit.”

During the show he also talks about some of his less well known pieces. It’s always been a slight irritation to Rice that, while everyone knows him as the lyricist for Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, they are less aware of his pop career. “I did think that if I no longer had to hear Don’t Cry For Me Argentina I’d be happy,” he says.

“But I was keen to include songs that don’t get played to death on the radio, such as A Winter’s Tale [the festive weepie, sung by David Essex, which reached no 2 in 1983]. And It’s Easy For You, which Andrew and I wrote for Elvis [it appeared as the final track on Elvis’s final studio album Moody Blue, in 1977].”

Rice’s deep abiding love for pop music helped revolutionise British musical theatre in the early 1970s. He had always dreamed of being a rock star, although he was working as a legal clerk when he first met a debonair 17-year-old Andrew Lloyd Webber in 1965. Lloyd Webber was more into “Georgian wine glasses and classical records” than pop, but something between them clicked: fabulous photos of the two of them from around this time show them sporting louche side burns and patterned shirts.

Their first project together, The Likes Of Us, about Thomas Barnardo, never reached the stage, but then they hit on the idea of a musical about the final week in the life of Jesus, with an irreverent, genre clashing score that drew heavily on Rice’s beloved guitars. Jesus Christ Superstar was so ahead of its time, Rice and Lloyd Webber initially struggled to find a theatre equipped to stage it.

“We had to release it as a record [in 1970] because you couldn’t get an orchestra and a rock band into a theatre. But then it opened on Broadway [in 1971]. We happened to be in the right place at the right time with a new way of doing things which we didn’t really realise. We were quite lucky.” Within a decade Jesus Christ Superstar had grossed more than $237 million worldwide.

After that came Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, which also began life as a record, premiering in the West End in 1973, and Evita, based on the life of the Argentine politician and actress Eva Perón, first staged in 1978. By this point the pair were the toast of London and Broadway: three smash hit musicals and both still barely in their thirties.

“Andrew didn’t really get Evita,” says Rice, who had to persuade him that Perón, for all her unappealing qualities, was a great subject for a musical. “But because he found her so unattractive, he produced one of his greatest scores, very romantic in places but with this exciting disturbing undercurrent. I heard High Flying, Adored on the radio the other day [in which Che Guevara sings about the perils of Perón’s meteoric rise] and remembered that I really wrote that song thinking about me and Andrew, about finding success very young and how the only way is down.”

There has been no way down for either Rice or Lloyd Webber: they remain the most influential musical partnership this country has ever produced. Yet rumours have always circled about a fall out between the pair who, following Evita, have never collaborated on anything significant since.

The common story is that their musical tastes became incompatible – Lloyd Webber went onto do Cats (which, being based on TS Eliot, didn’t need any lyrics, points out Rice) and then Phantom of the Opera. Rice meanwhile collaborated with Abba’s Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus on the Cold War musical Chess – arguably considered his masterwork – and then spent the 1990s working for Disney.

Still, is it fair to say they’ve had a bit of a rocky time? “We’ve had our ups and downs. But everything is OK. We just had different tastes in music. I was a bit unsophisticated. But we’re a bit like Mick and Keef, innit. We are welded together.”

In fact the pair appear close. Last year Rice, who has four children of his own, attended the memorial for Lloyd Webber’s son Nicholas who died of gastric cancer at the age of 43. Rice, who knew Nicholas well, is still shaken by his death.

“It was terribly sad. Nicholas was incredibly talented. [I’m sure if he hadn’t been called Lloyd Webber he’d have made a bigger impact than he did.] At his memorial, they played a selection of his work – I felt awful, I hadn’t known he was so good. I felt so sorry for Andrew and Sarah [Hugill, Lloyd Webber’s first wife, whom he divorced in 1983].

Nicholas loved cricket, and I’d invite him to Lords [Rice is a cricket nut and has twice been president of the Lord’s Taverners].The day before he died Nicholas emailed me to say he’d love to come with me to a test match I’d invited him to the following day. ‘I’m sure I’ll be ok for that,’ he said, but he wasn’t.”

Rice and Lloyd Webber haven’t entirely abandoned their creative relationship. Earlier this year it was announced they were contributing to a new Sherlock Holmes musical comedy adaptation The 12 Days of Christmas, written by the comedians Humphrey Ker and David Reed and produced by Rice’s son Donald. Rice is quick to play it down. Still, he says, it’s good to be working together again. “But we’re only doing a handful of songs. We don’t want it billed as the new Andrew and Tim musical.”

The public would almost certainly love to have a new Andrew and Tim musical. I put it to him that the style the pair helped develop, namely epic spectaculars fuelled by full throttle emotion, is over – the taste now is for smaller quirky shows, or for more sonically innovative musicals such as the hip hop smash hit Hamilton. Rice demurs – “a musical does need a big story” – but then implies he is unlikely to embark on a new show anytime soon anyway.

“These days you have to be so careful not to offend anyone. All theatre, including musical theatre, has been severely hampered by this. But of course that’s the point of theatre – to offend people.”

Rice knows this only too well: during the 1970s Jesus Christ Superstar was met with protests pretty much wherever it played because of its perceived blasphemous content.

“One chap sat through the whole show, but at the end he stood up, waved his arms around and shouted ‘you are all doomed!’. Because Andrew and I were terribly nice middle class boys, we didn’t want to upset people. But the protesters were terribly sweet, they were not as nasty as they are now.”

Does he think a musical like Superstar would be put on now if it was a new show? “If it was good enough it might be, but the question is whether anyone would write a musical like Superstar today in the first place. I imagine they would think ‘oh I better not even write this because I’ll offend eight other religions’.”

“It’s very difficult, which is appalling. I think my musical Aida [a love story set against the ancient conflict between Egypt and Nubia, which he wrote with Elton John, and which won four Tonys in 2000] has probably fallen foul of modern sensibilities. It’s got slavery in it. It’s not saying slavery is great, for God’s sake, it’s telling a story set 3000 years ago. I had hopes of reviving it over here. But I think Disney [who own the rights] got cold feet about it, so I’ve given up on it coming here. These days you get theatres not wanting to even put shows on for fear of offence. But Andrew and I weren’t trying to convert anyone to anything, we just wanted to entertain. If I was starting out now, I’d do something else, like run a garage.”

He thinks the idea of entertainment for its own sake has become lost among the clamour to say something righteous.

“I thought the musical Six [about the six wives of Henry VIII and a recent West End smash hit] was a great show. I never saw the writers’ follow up [Why I am So Single, which premiered in October and is about relationships and mental health] but it appears to be so right on that no one wants to see it [it was announced last week that the show is closing a month early]. The problem is that [identity politics] isn’t very commercial. If you want to talk about yourselves, then fine, but it has to cut through. Musical theatre should be universal.”

Rice lives in a six acre estate in Henley upon Thames, which he moved to in 2018. He is a bit tight-lipped about his private life, possibly because it has been so lively: his four children are by three different women.

His first marriage, to Jane Artereta, whom he married in 1974, and with whom he shares Donald and his daughter Eva, a novelist, collapsed following his well publicised affair in the 1980s with Elaine Paige (who starred in the both original Evita and in Chess on Broadway) When I ask if some of Chess’ lyrics, which include the classic love triangle duet I Know Him So Well, were inspired by his own romantic tangles at the time, he’ll only say, “a bit, I suppose: everything is grist to the mill for a writer.”

The marriage with Jane was never formally dissolved; he then had an eight year romance with socialite Amanda Eliasch and a relationship with artist Nell Sully, by whom he has a daughter; he also has another daughter following a short lived affair with the academic Laura-Jane Foley. Christmas get-togethers sound a bit complicated and he is vague on who he’ll be seeing when. He is now in a relationship with the literary agent Caroline Michel. “She’s great,” he says hesitantly. “Actually, do you mind if we keep her out of it? I prefer to keep my private life private.”

Fair enough. Rice is genial company and very courteous but he is expert at politely slamming shut the drawbridge. The second of three boys, he grew up in Buckinghamshire: his father worked for the diplomatic service and during the war his mother served in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force. He describes his childhood as “boring, middle class and happy” and although he went to boarding school, says his family wasn’t particularly wealthy.

“We certainly weren’t poor but we had to watch it. My dad would always switch off the lightbulbs.” Some of this frugality has stayed with Rice, who today is worth £150 million. “I’m not Scrooge-like but I don’t like wasting money. I’m inclined to think more about spending 20 quid on a book than £300 on a first class plane fare. I had that drummed into me.”

He wasn’t very musical as a child, but he joined a choir at school and taught himself to sing by imitating other people. “I loved hymns and carols. I found their lyrics intriguing. ‘There is a green hill far away’, Once in Royal David’s City.” He agrees with Lloyd Webber, that all children should have access to music at school. “The alphabet has 26 letters. Music only has seven. It’s not impossible for a young child to read music. And it makes a lot of difference.”

After he left Lancing College, he wrote a single, That’s My Story, which was sung by The Nightshift, in 1965. It was a flop, but back then it was a real achievement to get a record out at all. No one could press one in their bedroom the way you these days can put anything on Spotify.”

In 1966 he got a job as an assistant producer at EMI at a time when Beatles mania was at its height. “Back then the charts really mattered. These days someone like Taylor Swift can have nine singles in the top ten. Or you read that someone has just had their seventh number one, and you’ve never heard of them. Actually I’ve heard of some of them. Charlie XCX. Cardi B. Most of them seem to be quite sexually explicit. They don’t seem to be censored. It’s weird that you can say any number of rude words [but not other things].”

It’s fun to think of the man who gave the world the lyric “All these things you saw in your pajamas/Are a long range forecast for your farmers” (from Joseph) listening to Cardi B. Rice is both a bit groovy and bit fusty, although when it comes to politics, he’s firmly conservative – he voted for Brexit and is a former fundraiser for the Conservative Party.

He tells me he can see why so many Americans voted for Donald Trump. “You had one side saying, our ambitions have to be for the good of human kind. Well, of course we all want that. But if they are not going to achieve anything then it’s better to be practical. Trump is infinitely more practical than Biden. I’m not saying he’s better or a nicer human being, but a lot of people would prefer something that worked.”

He is similarly pragmatic about arts funding. Ahead of the recent Labour budget, the theatre industry in vain petitioned the government for £30 million, saying 40 per cent of venues were at risk of becoming derelict without it.

“It’s difficult for the arts to ask for money given the living conditions of many people, the potholes everywhere. It’s not a priority for most people.” Is he saying he thinks the arts complains too much? “Yes, I think some people definitely think that. They are not a big priority for a lot of people and I think the arts sometimes forget that. They think, “we’re the arts, we’re more important.”

This is odd, coming from someone who has provided so much entertainment to so many people for so many years. It might be an innate modesty: Rice is very contained on the subject of himself. “I don’t want to sound arrogant” is a phrase that crops up often.

He’s equally down to earth about getting old. “It does play on your mind but against that, I made it. If someone said to me when I was 20, ‘You’ll get 80 years’, I’d have thought “great”. I feel pretty fit still, I swim every day. Although I insist on having sugar in my tea and on proper milk – none of this oat milk business.”

What does he think about the recent House of Commons vote in favour of assisted dying? “Instinctively I’m against it. I’m prepared to listen, and of course, it’s something that might come up within my own family. It might even come up with me. But I can’t say I’m happy about the vote.”

Anyway, there is more he still wants to do, including publishing a book of his lyrics. Is there a favourite song of his he’d like to be remembered by? “Ha! That’s pretty gloomy. I haven’t really thought about it. But I suppose, if asked what I’d want played at my funeral, I’d much prefer something by the Everly Brothers.”

Sir Tim Rice will be at theatres around the UK, Ireland and Northern Ireland in 2025 from 11 April with Sir Tim Rice – My Life In Musicals: I Know Him So Well. For more visit www.sirtimricelive.com