Andrew Lloyd Webber on remortgaging his house to make Cats, and the importance of taking risks

Andrew Lloyd Webber is responsible for some of the best-known Broadway musicals of all time. Even if you're not a fan of musicals, you'd recognize many of the songs from his shows: from "Memory" in Cats to "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina" in Evita to "The Music of the Night" in The Phantom of the Opera.

But it wasn't always easy, and Lloyd Webber faced his fair share of challenges, including putting his house on the line in order to bring Cats to life. 

"It was a very fraught, very risky venture with me [putting] a second mortgage on my house and everybody thinking that we were absolutely stir crazy for doing it. That it was going to be the biggest disaster in the history of musical theatre," said Lloyd Webber.

"There was many, many a time with Cats that we thought we were going to kill the show and not go on any further. There was a sort of blind faith that we were doing something completely new and completely original — and actually we were. We were doing something that hadn't been achieved before, and it was it was very exciting as well as being, for me, very scary."

His new memoir, Unmasked, takes a look at his early life, and what led to some of his first successes on stage. Andrew Lloyd Webber talks to Tom Power about that as they navigate a playlist of songs that have influenced him.

— Produced by Elaine Chau

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