After Jesus Christ Superstar, I wrote a musical called 'Jeeves', which was not plain sailing at all. It was the musical that I learned an awful lot from because it became quite clear that the production was totally out of scale with what the show was intending to be. Evita came very, very quickly on the heels of Jeeves; in fact, I was writing it when I knew Jeeves was failing.

Absolutely, Billy Wilder was a great support to us, shortly after it was first performed at the Sydmonton Festival in 1992, I sent him a video and asked for his comments; he felt that we had gotten it about right and he gave us some helpful tips.

Hugely. If you have a tune in the middle of nowhere, it will be beached like a whale, so it's really vital that there is a story to support it. It's no good just writing a song and saying "I'm going to fit it into the story". If the story has a moment for a song you've written or an idea you've written before, then fine. But it's got to be the story first and the music will come from the story.

Because it's a superb melodramatic tragedy. It is a tragic story, and a triangle that involves emotion and love, well it isn't really a triangle as it involves four people, if you include the butler, Max, and the two women in Joe's life, and they all in some way interrelate. It's just a marvellous subject for a musical. It has operatic potential and it could have gone much more so that way. It's got marvellous dialogue by Billy Wilder from the original film, so I felt reluctant to remove all the famous lines and have them sung.

What I was trying to do in that scene was to suggest that the Phantom is writing music that is completely ahead of his time. Whenever the Phantom plays any music in the show, he uses a lot of whole-tone scale, which would never have been around in an opera house at that time. So when he plays 'Don Juan Triumphant', most of the audience will think it's cacophony - it's nonsense. There is a joke in Phantom, which in fact conductor Lorin Maazel came up with, which is the line "after 7" because the Phantom writes in 7/8 time a lot in my piece - it's a little musical joke.