Andrew Lloyd Webber has said his friends in the US think he is “mad” after he created a song about Jackie Weaver.
Weaver shot to fame for the way she handled a chaotic parish council meeting, in which participants were seen losing their cool and trading insults.
The impresario released a song, on Instagram, about the chief officer of the Cheshire Association of Local Councils.
And he told Good Morning Britain: “When you’re bored, you have to think of things.”
He said of the parish council meeting: “It’s sort of operatic.”
The composer plays the piano and Carrie Hope Fletcher sings, with the lyrics of the new song written by Don Black.
“It was just a laugh, I was doing nothing on a Sunday afternoon,” Lord Lloyd-Webber told the ITV show.
“At the moment. the Americans think I’m stark raving mad because they heard this song. They are saying ‘Who on earth is Jackie Weaver?'”
A friend from New York called “last night and woke me up and said ‘Who is Jackie Weaver?’ and I said ‘Well, it’s a very British thing’.”
He joked of the prospect of turning the song into a West End musical: “You never know! People said Eva Peron (Evita) was a bad idea.”
Weaver became an overnight internet sensation after she kicked Handforth Parish Council chairman Brian Tolver off the Zoom call after he told her to “stop talking”.
Lord Lloyd-Webber also discussed taking part in trials for the Oxford coronavirus vaccine and being told afterwards that he had had the real jab and not the placebo.
“I guessed I might have done … I was around people who got it (coronavirus) in the period after the last lockdown and I absolutely didn’t,” he said.
“I had no effects from the trial whatsoever, I felt right as rain.”
He was told, after a different blood test recently, that he has “got so many antibodies”.
“It’s very encouraging to think… eight months later, I’m teeming with antibodies,” he said.
He described the post-Brexit red tape affecting musicians and other artists as “crazy” and said of theatres remaining closed in the pandemic: “It’s all very worrying… We are all running out of petrol.”
