Biografía

Was working on lyrics for El rey león (1994) when he was approached at the last minute by Jeffrey Katzenberg to write lyrics for Aladdín (1992) because Aladdin's original lyricist, Howard Ashman, had passed away.

Was knighted in 1994

Wrote songs with Andrew Lloyd Webber that were not intended for musicals including a song "It's Easy For You" recorded by Elvis Presley in 1976.

Originally wrote the lyrics for the song "Memory" for the Andrew Lloyd Webber -Trevor Nunn stage musical Cats. However, the show's director Trevor Nunn and Lloyd Webber had problems with his lyrics, which eventually led to Lloyd Webber commissioning Nunn to write his own lyrics for the tune. This drove a final nail into the already-splintered relationship between Tim Rice and Lloyd Webber, whose feud dates back to the days of their work on the original Evita concept album.

Supporter and promoter of the British Conservative Party.

[on Elton John] As you can tell by looking at his great oeuvre with Bernie, his songs cover a wide range of styles, from hard rock to beautiful ballads, a bit of country influence, blues influence, so he's able to take a lyric and do lots of different things with it.

Nowadays, I think most composers, if it's a team, if it's A and B, one doing music, one doing lyrics, it would tend to be the music would come first, and with nearly everybody I've worked with that's been the case. The one great exception is Elton, who will only write a tune if he's got a lyric, so all those wonderful hits he's written with Bernie Taupin, they all came from Bernie first.

We are chronically short of original musicals, and if there are original musicals, great ones like Matilda or Billy Elliot, they're often written by people like Sir Elton who've been around for quite a while, and what we need is new, young composers.

I think any song, to become a standard, i.e. a song that will be sung by lots of different people in different styles, I think you've got to have a good lyric as well as a great tune.

[on Tony Christie] Tony has a timeless voice. If he has a song that tells a story, there's no one better really.