I REMEMBER...Tim Rice

English lyricist and author Tim Rice, 77, is known for writing lyrics for the world's best-loved musicals, including Joseph, Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita

- Maureen Paton

THE VERY FIRST THING THAT I REMEMBER is seeing a snail on a gatepost when my father Hugh and my mother Joan lived in Croxley Green in Hertfordshire. I doubt if I was even three years old; it would have been around 1947. Obviously I couldn't foresee that 20 years later in 1967 the pop star Donovan would write a song, "There Is A Mountain", whose lyric referenced a snail on a gatepost! But it seems very serendipitous in retrospect that I grew up to have a career as a lyricist.

MINE WAS A SUN-DAPPLED CHILDHOOD WITH MY TWO YOUNGER BROTHERS JONATHAN (JO) AND ANDREW. We weren't incredibly wealthy, but we had a very nice middle-class upbringing. Dad worked for the de Havilland Aircraft Company as its Far East representative. A wonderful thing happened when he was sent to Japan for a year in 1954 and took the whole family with him. It was a great childhood adventure and I was old enough, at ten, to appreciate it. There I listened to the American Forces Radio, which got me hooked on popular music.

I WAS A KEEN STAMP-COLLECTOR AS A CHILD, which was what first made me aware of Eva "Evita" Perón-whose glamorous image on Argentinian stamps as its First Lady was one of my favourites. I recall feeling sorry at the news of her death in 1952; like my father, I was already an avid newspaper reader from the age of seven.

Then in 1955 while we were still in Japan, I remember reading that her husband, President Juan Perón, had been ousted. So, unlike most British people, I was always vaguely aware of the Peróns long before I heard a radio documentary about Evita in 1973. I suggested to my collaborator Andrew Lloyd Webber that a musical about her life would make a great follow-up to our hit with Jesus Christ Superstar.