Andrew Lloyd Webber & Tim Rice: The Composer and Lyricist Who Wrote a School Concert Into a West End

Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's first paying job together was writing a twenty-minute musical for the end-of-term concert at a London prep school. It was performed once, on a March afternoon in 1968, by eight- to eleven-year-old boys, for an audience of around two hundred parents in a school hall. That twenty-minute piece was an early version of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, which has since been performed continuously somewhere in the world for over half a century.

Few songwriting partnerships have a starting point that modest relative to where it ended up. Fewer still have lasted, on and off, for sixty years, breaking apart, reuniting for one-off projects, and reuniting again in their eighties for a brand-new show. Understanding how Lloyd Webber and Rice actually worked together, one writing music, one writing words, both operating almost entirely inside stories that weren't their own lives, says a lot about what a composer-lyricist partnership can do that a single songwriter usually can't.

A letter that asked for a "with it" lyricist

Rice, working an unglamorous job at EMI Records and trying without much luck to write pop songs, wrote to Lloyd Webber on April 21, 1965, after being told through a mutual contact that the young composer was looking for a lyricist who was, in Rice's own phrasing, "with it." Lloyd Webber, intrigued, agreed to meet him. Their first attempt at a full musical together, The Likes of Us, was never staged. It was the commission for that school concert, arranged by a family friend and choirmaster named Alan Doggett, that gave them their first real audience and their first real hit, even if nobody involved understood at the time that they'd just written the seed of a decades-long career.

Splitting the job cleanly, and sticking to it

From Joseph onward, the division of labor between Lloyd Webber and Rice was almost entirely fixed: Lloyd Webber wrote the music, Rice wrote the words, and each worked largely inside his own discipline rather than blurring into the other's. It's a different model from a lot of the great pop songwriting duos, who traded lines and melodies back and forth in the same room, and it suited the kind of large-scale, narrative-driven work they were doing. A musical needs a lyricist thinking about character, plot, and stage time as much as sound, and Rice's background leaned toward narrative and historical research, which shaped the subjects the pair kept returning to: Joseph from the Book of Genesis, the crucifixion of Jesus, the rise of Eva Perón. Neither man was writing about himself. Both were writing about outsized historical or religious figures, filtered entirely through what the story needed rather than what either writer was personally going through.

Turning a show nobody would produce into a bestselling album first

By the late 1960s, Rice had become fascinated with the story of Judas Iscariot, reimagining him not as a simple villain but as a genuinely conflicted friend struggling with what Jesus's growing fame was doing to their cause. No producer would back a stage musical built around that premise, so Lloyd Webber and Rice released it instead as a concept double album in October 1970, Jesus Christ Superstar, without ever having staged a single performance of it. The gamble paid off unusually well: the album reached gold status, a million dollars in sales, within about three weeks, proving there was a real audience for the material before a single ticket had been sold. Only after the album's success did the show open, first on Broadway in October 1971, then in the West End the following year. It's a genuinely useful sequencing lesson for any songwriter stuck waiting on a gatekeeper: sometimes the way around a producer who won't take the risk is to let the audience prove the risk was worth taking first.

Writing "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" toward a speech Eva Perón never actually gave

While researching Eva Perón for Evita, Lloyd Webber and Rice discovered that she hadn't, in historical fact, delivered any major balcony address on the day of her husband's inauguration, the moment their song eventually accompanies. What she had done, not long after becoming Argentina's First Lady, was deliver a series of highly emotional public speeches, and it was that emotional register the two writers wanted to capture rather than a literal transcript. They tried other titles for the song's central hook, including "It's Only Your Lover Returning" and "All Through My Crazy and Wild Days," partly out of concern that naming Argentina directly in the title would limit the song's commercial appeal outside the show. They kept the country's name anyway. Released in 1976, the song went to number one in the UK and won the pair an Ivor Novello Award. It's a good reminder that a title built around specificity, a real place, a real name, isn't automatically a commercial liability. Sometimes it's the thing that makes the song feel like it's actually about something.

Drifting apart after Evita, and staying apart for most of two decades

Evita, which opened in 1978, turned out to be the last full musical Lloyd Webber and Rice wrote together for a very long time. Both went on to major, largely separate careers, Lloyd Webber into Cats, Starlight Express, and The Phantom of the Opera with other lyricists, Rice into Chess with ABBA's Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson and, later, Disney's Aladdin and The Lion King with Elton John and Alan Menken. They reconvened only briefly and occasionally in the decades that followed, writing "You Must Love Me" for the 1996 Evita film starring Madonna, and Rice contributing additional lyrics to Lloyd Webber's 2011 stage version of The Wizard of Oz. For years Rice was blunt in interviews that a full reunion wasn't likely, telling one reporter the pair were "not relevant as a team anymore." It's worth sitting with as a model for a long creative partnership: splitting up for good reason and pursuing separate work doesn't have to mean the earlier collaboration was a failure. It can just mean it was right for a particular stretch of both writers' careers and not necessarily forever.

Reuniting for a Sherlock Holmes musical comedy in their eighties

In 2025, decades after Rice's public skepticism about ever teaming up again, he and Lloyd Webber announced they were writing original songs together for a new play with music, Sherlock Holmes and the Twelve Days of Christmas, produced by Rice's son Donald and opening at Birmingham Rep before running through early 2026. Rice has said the two of them wrote one song together in late 2024 and were working on more. It arrives alongside a wave of major revivals of their earlier work, including a high-profile Jamie Lloyd-directed production of Evita at the London Palladium timed close to the show's fiftieth anniversary. Sixty years after a letter asking for a "with it" lyricist, two men in their late seventies and eighties sat back down to write together because a project, not an obligation, finally called for it.

What's worth taking from their partnership

Rice was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1999 and Lloyd Webber in 1995; both have been knighted for their contributions to British theatre, and their joint and separate work has collected multiple Tony, Grammy, and Olivier Awards between them.

What holds their partnership together across sixty years of working both together and separately is a clean, honest division of labor that never asked either man to do the other's job, and a shared instinct for building songs around real historical drama rather than either writer's own biography. They wrote a school concert into a Broadway and West End institution, split apart to build enormous separate careers, and came back together in old age not out of nostalgia but because a new story showed up that needed both of them. If you and a co-writer work best split cleanly by role rather than blended into one voice, their partnership is proof that model can carry a body of work for decades, on and off, longer than almost any songwriting relationship in popular music. If you're looking for the right person to split the job with, go find your co-writer.

Sources: Songwriters Hall of Fame: Andrew Lloyd Webber, Songwriters Hall of Fame: Tim Rice, Andrew Lloyd Webber: When Andrew Met Tim Rice, History.com: Jesus Christ Superstar concept album released, Songfacts: Don't Cry For Me Argentina, Playbill: Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice Writing Original Songs for Sherlock Holmes and The Twelve Days of Christmas, Andrew Lloyd Webber: Great Collaborators — Tim Rice, Irish Times: Tim Rice recalls the genesis of Joseph