West End composer and impresario revealed that he has previously checked himself into a clinic to deal with his addiction to alcohol.
In an interview with The Times, he spoke about attending Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meetings in Switzerland and the UK. He described his decision to get help as "the best thing that ever happened" to him.
"I am a recovering alcoholic. Sixteen months ago I decided that I needed help and it's the best thing that ever happened to me," Lloyd-Webber said.
"You think it’s secret, but it’s not, everybody knows. I started getting into a downhill spiral and about 18 months ago the family were in a desperate state. My wife was feeling she couldn’t go on," the iconic composer explained.
Lloyd Webber is currently attending meetings every day.
"People had always said: 'Oh no, you wouldn’t like that’, and you get this thought that it’s a load of meth drinkers coming in off the streets. Not at all. What I love about it is, you go into a room and everybody’s equal. I’ve made friends that I wouldn’t have thought possible," he explained.
The English composer described the turning point for him and the moment he decided to get help, was when he heard someone else describe the "stupidity" of addiction.
"It was about the ludicrous lengths you go to, the hiding and the pretending. When you’re a wine drinker, you don’t think of yourself as… well, alcoholics drink spirits, that was the shocking thing for me, when I realised that I was drinking vodka to hide it," he said.
"You don’t really think. It’s just: ‘How am I going to get through the day?’ I got that thing of seriously worrying that I wasn’t writing, and panicked. ‘Maybe I’ll have a drink – OK, I’ve written something’, because it does slightly liberate you — but then it’s more and more and more," he continued.
