Andrew Lloyd Webber theatre. He also had originally set music to "Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" at the age of 15. In 1965, Lloyd Webber was a Queen's Scholar at Westminster School and studied history for a term at Magdalen College, Oxford, although he abandoned the course in the winter of 1965 to study at the Royal College of Music and pursue his interest in musical theatre. In 1965, when Lloyd Webber was a 17-year-old budding musical-theatre composer, he was introduced to the 20-year-old aspiring pop-song writer Tim Rice. Their first collaboration was "The Likes of Us", a musical based on the
Julian Lloyd Webber "Front Row" and "The World Tonight". In May 2009, Lloyd Webber was elected President of the Elgar Society in succession to Sir Adrian Boult, Lord Menuhin, and Richard Hickox. In September 2014, the charity Live Music Now announced Lloyd Webber as its next public spokesman. On 28 April 2014, he announced his retirement from public performance as a cellist because of a herniated disc in his neck. His final public performance as a cellist was on 2 May 2014 at the Festival Theatre, Malvern, with the English Chamber Orchestra when he played the Barjansky Stradivarius cello (dated c. 1690) which