Andrew Lloyd Webber said to me: “I have this story.”
It was going to be an animated film based on Thomas the Tank Engine, but animation back in the early 1980s was really expensive, so that never happened.
Then we started working on something called Rocky Mountain Railroad. That was going to be a train race across America to see who would have the honour of taking Prince Charles and Diana on a royal tour. There’s history for you. Andrew had a train set in his attic. I’d had one as a boy. It didn’t seem to be a daft idea. The previous show we’d done was people pretending to be cats, so people pretending to be trains wasn’t such a leap.
Writing Starlight Express was an education. Up till then, I’d always written my own music. I had to learn quickly to fit words to somebody else’s tunes. By myself, I could write a verse one and a verse three I was happy with and then shove any old nonsense in the middle. But with Andrew, it all had to be good.
There was a wonderful day in 1983 when Andrew, our director Trevor Nunn, our designer John Napier and I stood in the ruins of Battersea power station, seriously discussing whether Andrew should buy the building to put Starlight Express on in it. It was one of the many days when I have felt I am definitely out of my league here. I had impostor syndrome to an amazing extent.
