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
Andrew Lloyd Webber to be used on a party promotional film seen by an estimated 1 million people before the 2005 general election. In 2009, he publicly criticised the Labour government's introduction of a new 50% rate of income tax on Britain's top earners, claiming it would damage the country by encouraging talented people to leave. In August 2014, Lloyd Webber was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to "The Guardian" opposing Scottish independence in the run-up to September's referendum on that issue. In October 2015 Lloyd Webber was involved in a controversial House of Lords vote over