I am always surprised to remember that Andrew Lloyd Webber has taste; it must be remembrance of Cats. I was surprised, for instance, to learn that he once owned Pablo Picasso’s portrait of d’Angel Fernández de Soto, which I always thought of as my Picasso because it looks like my friend Hadrian Wise, who used to come to Merton College bar in his pyjamas. We once rolled a joint as long as The Spectator because he loved The Spectator. High as I was after the Spectator-length joint in 1994, I never thought I would write for it. Neither did he.
Now Lloyd Webber, whose masterpiece is Phantom of the Opera, because it is all about him, has decided to host a tasteful restaurant in Victoria called the Other Naughty Piglet. He did this because he liked the food in the Naughty Piglet in Brixton. How I love 1980s tycoons. Even so, I am almost sad to see how restrained Lloyd Webber has become in his ebbing years, because Phantom, which I love — I am a Phan — is all about sex, death and inadequacy, swabbed with velvet and dust; it is an aphrodisiac for straight middle-aged suburban couples, and there is nothing wrong with that. I have seen it many times: in the theatre built for it inside the Venetian in Las Vegas, twice; in Her Majesty’s Theatre, where it has played for 31 years; and even at the Royal Albert Hall, where ‘his’ multiple singing phantoms (yet just one Christine, who was originally played by Lloyd Webber’s soprano doll ex-wife Sarah Brightman) were something obscene.
I have even seen the film of the musical of the novel. The phantom takes Christine to his lair in, sequentially, his arms, on a horse, in a punt.
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