For more than half a century Andrew Lloyd Webber has built his worldwide musical theatre empire on being fashionably unfashionable, pursuing his vision and cheerfully ignoring whatever the trend of the day might be.

Despite inevitable misses along the way, he has amassed with this idiosyncratic single-mindedness a string of hit shows including Jesus Christ Superstar, Cats, Evita and The Phantom of the Opera.

It seems perfectly fitting then that the composer arrives for lunch – bang on time – dressed down in jeans and polo shirt, looking more suburban grandad than a peer of the realm with a net worth, if the Sunday Times Rich List is to be believed, that hovers around $1 billion.

He’s visiting Sydney to cast an eye over Opera Australia’s new Simon Phillips-directed production of Phantom. Lunch is at Il Pontile, on the wharf at Woolloomooloo, and Sydney has turned on one of those classic glittering days we have almost forgotten about this summer. Across the bay and just hidden from view, Opera Australia workers, with fingers crossed for clear skies on Friday’s opening night, are putting the finishing touches to the over-water stage on which Phantom will play.

As we settle down to a light meal (rigatoni alla Genovese and salad), I wonder whether watching a fresh production of Phantom causes the slightest butterflies. On the contrary.

“It’s completely out of my control,” he says. “I have absolutely nothing to do with it. At my old age, I actually think that productions I don’t have anything to do with seem to be rather better than the ones I do. So, I rather look forward to this.”

Lloyd Webber was born in London on March 22, 1948 – which makes our lunch date his birthday, a fact he skips over, saying at his age it’s scarcely cause for celebration.

His father William was a composer and organist, his mother Jean a pianist, and younger brother Julian a celebrated solo cellist. In his 2018 autobiography Unmasked (“autobiographies are by definition self-serving and mine is no exception”), he describes a bohemian upbringing populated by an endless parade of eccentric relatives and family friends.

Lloyd Webber was an unusual child whose earliest memories are dominated by his fascination with architecture – particularly unfashionable Victorian architecture – and equally unfashionable musical theatre. Exactly where these twin obsessions sprang from, he finds hard to pin down.

“I can’t explain where the theatre came from,” he says. “It’s very hard. If only I knew. The theatricality of things and performance go back as far as I can remember.”

Much of his childhood was spent mounting his own musical productions in an intricately detailed toy theatre dubbed the Harrington Pavilion after the family home at 10 Harrington Court, South Kensington. The origins of his fascination with architecture, which resulted in many family holidays driven by his precocious desire to tick off this church or that grand house, remain equally opaque. That passion still burns as strong. Despite having been in Sydney only a couple of days, he had already found time to take in the Gothic Revival charms of St Mary’s Cathedral.

Due in large part to this passion he ended up at Magdalen College, Oxford, to study history. With a head full of theatre he was a less than diligent scholar, however, when the possibility arose to switch to study music instead, his father wisely counselled against it, saying formal instruction would only “educate the music out of him”.

He dropped out of Oxford after meeting Tim Rice who was to become his frequent lyricist collaborator, and the pair were on their way to their first Broadway show, the rock-infused, revolutionary Jesus Christ Superstar. He has had a show on Broadway continuously since 1979 and Phantom, which opened there in 1988, is its longest-ever running production.

At the heart of all these productions lies a succession of killer melodies. Even if you’ve never seen a Lloyd Webber show, you almost certainly know Memory (Cats), Any Dream Will Do (Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat), Don’t Cry For Me Argentina (Evita) or The Music of the Night (The Phantom of the Opera).

So, where do they come from?

“I wish I knew,” he says. “Sometimes I’m just playing around on the piano and I’ll find a phrase I think is good or strong. Sometimes they come when you are not thinking. I don’t find there’s a rhyme or reason at all. Sometimes I wake up with a tune in my head and then sometimes I’ve got an idea and I’ll work on it and work on it.”

In his book he recounts the story of walking down London’s Fulham Road when the signature theme to Jesus Christ Superstar appeared in his head, prompting him to duck into a restaurant to jot down the melody on a napkin before it returned to the ether.

Fifty years later and Lloyd Webber’s latest show, an updated Cinderella now playing successfully in London’s West End and set for a Broadway run later in the year, has all those same melodic hallmarks, part of his dogged insistence that a good tune remains a good tune despite current musical trends.

“The majority of records have no melody at all now,” he says. “It’s all about rhythm and rapping. You don’t find young people are as passionate about melody.”

But melody alone is not enough – the other pillar on which Lloyd Webber has built his most successful shows is plot.

“I think it would be fair to say that a great story can carry a fairly average musical score, whereas even a great musical score can’t carry a not very good plot.”

However, even Lloyd Webber doesn’t have the Midas touch for everything. For every Evita or Phantom there is a Jeeves or Stephen Ward.

He remains philosophical about productions that, by comparison, haven’t soared.

“Musicals are such an incredibly collaborative thing that, in the end, any one ingredient, particularly the look of the show, can bring the show down,” he says. “It won’t be as simple as just saying the story was wrong or the script was wrong or the book was wrong or the music was wrong. It’ll be more complicated than that. But broadly speaking, you have to remember if a show isn’t working it’s because the public haven’t actually liked it.”

And then there are the projects into which he has no input including the much maligned 2019 film adaptation of his huge hit, Cats.

At the time, he told Variety that it was “off-the-scale all wrong”. A lifelong cat-lover, the trauma of seeing the film was so great that he was driven to buy his first dog, a much-loved Havanese called Mojito who “couldn’t be truer”.

Even at 74, there is no sign of Lloyd Webber slowing down. He has just been in Madrid talking to Antonio Banderas about translating some shows into Spanish and is constantly casting around for the story that will inspire and drive his next show.

“I’m very restless at the moment because I can’t find a subject,” he says. He has publicly floated the idea of a musical about the worldwide refugee crisis, following on from a gala performance of Cinderella raising funds for Malala Yousafzai’s charity. But the idea has yet to crystallise.

“I have to have a story,” he says. “It’s no good just saying I want to write a musical about refugees. I have to have a specific storyline that is good. And I haven’t so far read anything that I say, ‘Wow, I can do that’.”

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But until that story arrives he will continue running his global empire but more importantly tinkering at the piano, searching for that elusive melody, and continuing to indulge his other passion.

“I’m happiest really when I’m looking at buildings,” he says, before ambling off with a couple of young assistants, barely attracting a glance from the lunchtime crowds.

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