King of musicals Andrew Lloyd Webber has said that he discovered Rihanna while on holiday but chose not to “bring her back” to the UK.
In an interview on Good Morning Britain this week, Lloyd Webber explained how he had stumbled upon the global star while she was singing karaoke at the Sandy Lane resort in Barbados 12 years ago, but he and his creative partner, Nigel Wright, decided not to follow their impulses although she sounded “very, very good”.
“I said to Nigel, ‘If we bring her back, you know it’s like when you see a picture when you’re away and you take it home and you think, why did I buy that?’” said Webber. “I thought: we’ll get her back, it’ll be fine, but then what do we do with her?”
When asked if he had any regrets, he said his missed opportunity was “not something he was proud of”.
Instead, Rihanna was discovered by American producer Evan Rogers in 2003, who saw the singer performing with a girl group while he was on holiday.
“The minute Rihanna walked into the room, it was like the other two girls didn’t exist,” he later said. A year later, Rihanna’s first track, Pon de Replay, was recorded and sent off to several record labels. When the demo reached Def Jam and Jay Z, she was flown to meet the team and famously signed that day.
