If, like me, you enjoyed Andrew Lloyd Webber’s recent observation that the theatre is “hideously white”, you will have loved his turn on breakfast telly this week, where he mentioned that he’d almost discovered Rihanna “about 12 years ago”.
As it goes, it was almost exactly 12 years ago that Rihanna was signed to a six-album deal with Def Jam, on the rapturous recommendation of the label’s then president, Jay Z. I can’t help thinking a straight signing fight between Lord Lloyd Webber and Jay Z would be a plotline too high-camp even for Empire, the Dynasty of our day. But as it turns out, that wasn’t how Andrew remembers it all anyway.
Over to him. “I saw her singing karaoke in Sandy Lane hotel in Barbados 12 years ago,” his lordship told Good Morning Britain. “I turned to my friend and said, ‘She’s very good.’ I wondered if we brought her back, it might be like a picture you buy on holiday and then you get home and think, why did I buy that? I thought I might get her home and wonder what to do with her.”
Well now. As a side issue, I love the way Andrew thinks he’s universalising this moment by comparing it to that totally relatable rose-tinted holiday mistake: the one where you buy an adorable local painting that ends up looking naff when you get it back to Chelsea. Clearly, what he should instead have compared potential acquisitions like Rihanna to is a bottle of the spirit from wherever it is you’re holidaying. You know the sort of thing: tastes like ambrosia on those long hot nights; drink it anywhere in UK airspace and it relieves you of your epiglottis.
The main event, however, is clearly Lloyd Webber’s hilariously excruciating implication that Barbados is still a place from where a powerful British person brings back what they choose – be it a naive painting, a woman of colour, or the deeds to a sugar plantation.
I don’t want to go out on a limb here, but I can’t help feeling Rihanna had a lucky escape not being “discovered” by Andrew. Perhaps we’ll never pinpoint the exact timing of his noticing of her in relation to the moment she was in fact signed to Def Jam. Either way, it’s probably for the best that she didn’t bin them off to accompany Andrew back to the West End, presumably on the promise of starring in a yet-to-be-written period musical called something like Sugar Daddy. Even if he had assured her that the clever thing is that it turns out to be a love story about the slave liberating the owner, rather than the other way round.
