For context, the meeting came about at Lloyd Webber’s insistence. The BBC asked him to fly the flag for the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest, to be hosted in Moscow.
That entailed him co-writing the UK entry and co-presenting a BBC series with Graham Norton (“Your Country Needs You”). The aim of the show was to come up with a winning act, or at least one capable of overturning the UK’s awful track record – something Lloyd Webber in fact achieved with It’s My Time, sung by Jade Ewen, which came fifth in the contest. “I said, I will do this, providing I can get an interview with Putin,” he explained in 2017. “The BBC said ‘No way will you get this’, so I rang up his sidekick [press agent] Dmitry [Peskov].”
And so it came to pass that the odd couple sat down to chew the fat, Putin telling his guest he was quite happy to be addressed by his first name.
Every scrap of the chat is interesting, but Vlad’s opening gambit memorably conjures an image of his younger self checking out the Hamburg production of Cats, in the early 1990s, having travelled to the city on ‘business’ (he was working in the Mayor’s office in Saint Petersburg). “I think it had been running about 10 years by that time,” he states, flatly. There’s no sharing his thoughts on the show’s evocation of scavenging, resurrectable moggies.
Asked to talk about his earliest musical influences, he cites “something like a lullaby” – “connected with Russian folklore” – sung him by his mother. As a teenager and student, he was taken with Tchaikovsky, but proved no diehard nationalist in his taste, admiring also Mozart, Schubert and Liszt. That non-jingoistically said, he can’t resist proprietorially pointing out that “Your world-famous works, such as Jesus Christ Superstar, have some elements reminiscent of Prokofiev, some melodies, some ideas, feelings. It is not even so much the melody as a feeling.”
Putin further professes himself unbothered by the suggestion that Western pop is influencing its Russian equivalent; he characterises this as a passing “catch-up” phase. “For example, European and Latin American soap operas were very popular here at one time. Not so much today.” Russian soaps are getting better, he says; “the same is true of the sphere we are discussing.”
It’s worth noting that Putin has resembled a musician manque at points. In 2011, he was filmed tickling the ivories – jabbing with two fingers – at a Moscow theatre. In 2017, in Beijing, he attempted a few chords of Soviet-era compositions (Moscow Windows and Evening Song) ahead of a meeting with Xi Jinping, blaming an “out of tune” piano for his halting handiwork.
In 2010, more bizarrely still, he took to a stage at a charity benefit for children with cancer in Saint Petersburg, in front of Hollywood celebrities, including Kevin Costner and Sharon Stone, and impassively crooned On Blueberry Hill. Is it possible that the lines “Though we’re apart/ You’re part of me still/ For you were my thrill” related in his mind to long-lost dominions not some unspecified sweetheart?
