CD Review – Andrew Lloyd Webber – Unmasked: The Platinum Collection

ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER – UNMASKED: THE PLATINUM COLLECTION (UMC/POLYDOR) 

Star rating: two stars ★ ★ ✩ ✩ ✩

Apparently Andrew Lloyd Webber will be 70 this year and so, guess what? Yes, there is a new collection being released called Andrew Lloyd Webber Unmasked: The Platinum Collection. For some reason, don’t ask me why, the record company are releasing this collection either as a two or a four CD collection – very strange. It’s like issuing a new musical on two different CDs – one CD with only one act on it and the other with both acts!

Although I believe the four CD set contains a booklet with a personally penned introduction by the great Lord himself and in-depth notes on the tracks. So, if you can’t afford the four CD version then I’m afraid you will have to make up your own notes.

Ok, so what about this collection? Is this one different from the many collections that have been issued in the past? It isn’t, I’m sorry to say. Out of the 70 tracks on the four CD version there are about seven tracks that have probably not appeared before.

The rest of the tracks are all from previous recordings and, if you are a huge ALW fan then you probably will have them already. I thought maybe, for this special occasion, there may have been a song from the obscure ALW musicals The Likes of Us and Cricket – but no, just the usual stuff has made the final cut. What about Fields of Sun which he wrote with Mike Batt for Watership Down? Maybe something from the elusive original Jeeves?

There is a bonus track of Beyonce singing ‘Learn to be Lonely’, taken live from the Oscars with Lloyd Webber on piano. Also a couple of versions of songs that have been newly recorded: ‘You Must Love Me’ sung by Lana Del Rey; ‘Memory’ sung by Nicole Scherzinger; ‘Light at the End of the Tunnel’ sung by Gregory Porter.

Andrew Lloyd Webber fans will probably all flock to their computers to order this collection but I was disappointed that, if you wanted to celebrate the great man’s achievement of reaching 70, then wouldn’t it have been good to have some real treasures in there that you couldn’t find on earlier compilation albums or YouTube. Or maybe I am just get old and crotchety and fed up with endless collections.

Nick Wakeham