Why have the three earlier projects proved abortive?
Well firstly, I did them on a very large scale visually, with the designer Sean Kenny, and when he died, I couldn't envisage doing them with any other designer, because they were really huge. If one was to do them today, they'd cost a great deal more than "Chess" or "Time".

That was one factor. Another factor was problems with producers and publishers. I really got fed up with it all. So many people claimed to own what I wrote. One mad publisher said, "You can't even write a couplet without me owning it - even before you write it!" All these people - the bent managers I'd had and these publishers I was getting involved with - they were basically accountants. The nearest they got to music was fiddling the books! I just really went on strike.

Do you go to the theatre much? Do you try to keep tabs on the musicals in particular? Have you been to see "Time"?
I had two tickets for the opening but I haven't been to see it.

They say the sets, visually, are staggering. Bearing in mind what you said about the scale of your unproduced shows, you ought to like it!
Well, whilst I do think visually, I think characters and plot are very important, too! And I think melody is very important.! guess that is a heritage from music hall for me.

! really believe that people want to remember music, remember tunes. I don't think it's sufficient just to have a one-song show. It seems to me that that is almost the aim, these days, to have just one song in a show that's retentive!

What do you think of Stephen Sondheim?
I admire Stephen Sondheim immensely. He has great theatrical flair and he's a great lyric writer - albeit sometimes I can smell the rhyming dictionary! But that's all right!

Do you have an absolute favourite songwriter?
My favourite lyric writer is Lorenz Hart and of course, my influences were W.S. Gilbert and Noel Coward, to a great degree.

I'm sure you once wrote a song for the Eurovision Song Contest! I'm talking about a lovely song called "Choose", which I had on a record by Sammy Davis Jr., but I'm sure it was originally done by Matt Monro for Eurovision!
You're right! I was asked to do Eurovision way back. And my Dad, bless him - he's not alive today - but he said, "Lionel - don't enter no competitions, because you can lose!" But it came up that Matt Monro was going to sing all the British contenders, and I'd done the lyrics for "From Russia With Love" for him, and I thought, "Ok - let's go for it". But I'd totally forgotten that Sammy Davis had covered it.

In those days, they commissioned Eurovision songs from the top British writers?
That's right. I don't know much about Eurovision today. Most of them sound as if they've been produced by computer - and I'm not just talking about synthesisers, I mean the general structure of the melodies. But there's some good things come out of it, in spite of all that. The Abba thing was, I think, sensational. Their record production was so good. And then they became the second largest industry in Sweden!

Your technique - has it changed at all over the years?
No.! still sing and I still get behind the person or the character I'm writing for, and if there's no musicians around, I just use my same old one finger at the piano! It's funny you should ask whether my technique has changed because I'm having some lessons at the moment in basic computer, and I am interested in some of the things a synthesiser can do.

I'm not going to say it's going to be my main tool, but I certainly wouldn't pooh-pooh the use of it. Out of my huge family, it turns out that one of my nephews is a very good key-board player and writer - he's about 23 - and he took me into a studio with just one engineer and one keyboard guy and all this incredible equipment. They were talking a foreign language! I felt like Rip Van Winkle in a space capsule. I really did! Well, I don't think I could ever get as good as those kids are, but basically I found that if I levelled with them, and just sang what I'd got in my head, we could communicate.

A lot of writers of great standard songs - particularly Americans - pour cold water on the word 'inspiration'. They say it's a 'craft'. Would you use the word 'inspiration' about your songwriting?
Yes I would, definitely. And the inspiration could be someone else's enthusiasm on an idea, or it could be a bird singing, or it could be an ambulance siren ... anything could be an inspiration. And I would once have poohpoohed inspiration, but I have to remember that there have been times in my life when it was as though something else was helping  me.

For instance, when I was doing "Lock Up Your Daughters", I was writing these Restoration lyrics (to Laurie Johnson's music) in the language and approach of that period, yet I'd had no scholarship of English at all.

Perhaps I thought it was instinct or I'd lived it in a previous life! But I've had that on a number of occasions and have to now accept the fact that - call it God or inspiration or whatever you like - it's there. Certainly you have to apply it; and sometimes you have to get a blank piece of paper and start something... but it's there.

And your hopes for the future?
I feel good with myself today and I just have to go with what I've got now. These last ten years have been very strange, let me tell you, but you've caught me on the upturn, as it were, and although I don't know exactly what's going to emerge, I'm quite looking forward to it.

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