Julian Lloyd-Webber is the lesser known and the poorer of the two Lloyd-Webber brothers - which isn't saying a great deal, says Kevin Myers, because Andrew is richer than Luxembourg.
Andrew also collects works by that winsome bunch of simpering sentimentalists known as the pre-Raphaelites, whose works are just about suitable for inclusion in a 13-year-old girl's first diary, but nowhere else. Pre-Raphaelites invariably painted their subjects with their tear-filled Bambi-eyes gazing mistily into the horizon.
Words alone cannot convey the winsome ghastliness of this school, but fortunately - for the purposes solely of illustrating what a blot they were in the history of European culture - one of their number, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, turned his grisly appetite for the sentimental to literary expression also. Here follows one of the most egregious pieces of verse in the entire canon of English literature, and if you cannot find in your heart to forgive me for inflicting this horror on you, then frankly I do not blame you. Deep breath. Here goes.
The blessed damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth
Of waters stilled at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.
"And the stars in her hair were seven". Have you ever read such frightful, bathetic bilge in your entire life? How could he try to rhyme "even" with "seven" without vomiting all over the page? But at least this gives you an impression of what the Pre-Raphaelites painted like, and so you can roughly work out the taste of a man who has spelt scores of millions collecting their works, not for the purposes of stoking the boiler, but to assault his guests with from their vantage point on the Lloyd-Webber walls.
You might think that for one brother to have such appalling taste must have exhausted that family's ration: that there would not be enough bad-taste DNA within the Lloyd-Webber gene pool to allow any other member of the family to indulge in more than a questionable tie. Perhaps this was why I attended a Julian Lloyd-Webber bossa nova concert in Chelsea in London last week. So let me now tell you that if J L-W ever comes to a town near you with his bossa nova concert, lick your tongue along a red-hot iron, take an electric fire into the bath with you, become a Christian evangelic missionary in Falluja, have sex with a Siberian tiger - anything, rather than going to the concert. Please. Please?
Firstly, his appearance. Julian Lloyd-Webber is, I suppose, in his forties.
He has thinning, suspiciously monochrome black hair, which he has brushed forward in a page boy pudding-bowl style, hanging across his forehead and over his ears. Believe it or not - and I know you don't, but stick with me here, because it's vital that you do - it gets worse. For even worse than the hair was his black headband, which ran under the "black" bangs hanging down to his eyebrows.
Is there more? Yes, there's more. He was wearing a billowy white smock, and tight black trousers, and dancing pumps, and frankly, the moment he walked on to the stage, I simply wanted to cosh him, put him in a bag, take him home, and free him in Darndale shopping centre at midnight, and see what happened to him next. That alas, was not to be. Instead, what followed was musical torment as J L-W led us through - for the most part - the music of Antonio Carlos Jobim and João Gilberto.
Now this has already been done definitively and finally by Stan Getz and Charlie Byrd, collaborating with Jobim and Gilberto and Gilberto's wife Astrud in the 1960s. The fusion of jazz and bossa nova (which is Portuguese for "new tendency") created an entirely new and entrancing musical form. But that was a long, long time ago, when bossa nova was nova: if J L-W wanted to be really trendy, he would have tried to a fusion of rap with his cello.
Ah, his cello. I have not yet mentioned his cello yet, have I? An oversight, although you are probably aware that he plays the cello: it is a Stradivarius, and in order to match the volume of sound coming from his amplified backing band, he played it into a microphone. This is the equivalent of smothering a Clarinbridge oyster with HP sauce.
And so he proceeded to lead us through the exotic semi-samba beat of the bossa nova with his Stradivarius. It was like listening to a bad pub band.
Worse than this - yes, I know I keep saying "worse than. . ." but it's my way of dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder, OK? - were the looks of anguished ecstasy which regularly crossed his face. Rock musicians do this a lot, when they hit a riff, or manage to pull off an elusive chord. But in J L-W's case, it merely looked as if he was struggling with a particularly troublesome bowel movement.
Tragically, he paused to give us some unamplified Bach: it was quite beautiful, and showed us what he is capable of; and then even more tragically, he reverted to bossa nova, plus some rock and roll, in the course of which - well, to judge from the expression on his face - he unsuccessfully attempted to purge his colon of a grand piano. He pursed, he frowned, he grizzled, he gurned: but the old Steinway stayed where it was, sideways on, just north of his rectum. It's probably there to this day, and as far as I'm concerned, it can jolly well stay there.