George and I both went to Exeter University, and we are both the same age. We were sort of rivals when we first met. I was running a new society I had formed to produce my brother's musicals, because he was a composer, and I had set up a company called STAGE DOOR to do new musical comedies.

At the same time George was the musical director of the Gilbert and Sullivan society which was very well established within the university. We were always vying for the same student talent because the two productions which were produced at the Northcott theatre in Exeter happened so close together that it was hard for a student to be in both shows.

I remember one day I was in the library, waiting to get onto the photocopier to photocopy some of my brother's music. There was this person in front of me who was photocopying Gilbert & Sullivan music. I said to him

“You must be George Stiles”, and he said to me

After having been told that we would not get on because we were too similar in character we got thrown out of the library for talking so much, and just became best friends.

While at Exeter University we went to see a production of Sweeny Todd in Plymouth at the Drum theatre. Which was fantastic! It was literally in the car on the 40 mile journey back to Exeter we said, shall we try and write a musical. We were both about to do our finals, and we both had places at teacher training colleges. I was going to teach Biology and George was going to teach Music. We wanted to postpone our entry into teacher training college for a year to see if we could write a musical in that year.

So rather recklessly we went out the next day and booked a theatre. Not knowing that we could write together, we booked the Northcott theatre and we knew that in nine months time we had to have a show delivered otherwise we would have a bill for an empty theatre. It was probably a bit stupid, but we were only 21 at the time, but it made us write.

"It was a miracle really. I wrote a lyric, and George played it on a church organ, and we said, oh alright, we can do it, let's write a show now!

Just So is a story that we wrote together in 1985 based on twelve unrelated stories by Rudyard Kipling. And it seemed that our Yellow Brick Road within that show was The Limpopo River, which is the location where the elephant child finds the crocodile and pulls out his boot like nose and makes a trunk. Which is the back bone of our show."

"We are often asked why we wrote a musical based on the show Peter Pan. I think in a funny sort of way, Peter Pan was so obvious for us to write that we put it off, and we put it off.

It was only really after a conversation between Stephen Spielberg and Cameron Mackintosh. (to drop two names in very quick succession). Spielberg had an option on Just So to turn it into an animated feature film.

So in 1990/1991, Cameron, George and I went out to Los Angeles to meet him. It was around the time that he had made Hook as a movie, and he was saying that he didn't feel that he had got Peter Pan out of his system, and that maybe he would hang onto the film rights and he would re-visit it some day.

Cameron turned to us and said “Well why don't you boys think about doing a musical version of Peter Pan and then Spielberg will do the film as a musical?”

"In a way I think that the Barrie play has always had a difficulty with the way it ends and I think that is shown out every time you see it on stage the director and the adapter has gone for a different solution as to how to represent the sense of this story going on, and that Peter Pan will always visit, and that it will be passed down by generation to generation.

Because when Hook falls into the gaping mouth of the crocodile about 15 minutes before the end, one of the stories is over and the rest is an epilogue – back in the nursery getting the children back to their parents.

Then to go back and do an epilogue about Pan, it all just extends the story too much.

With the help of the song THERE'S ALWAYS TOMORROW and with the help of the narrator turning out to be an older Wendy, an adult who can no longer see Pan, but senses him – its hugely touching and makes the point that I think Barrie really wanted to make."

"There is a 1987 videotape, under lock and key, which features two fresh faced young men on a program called New Faces. We performed a song we wrote, one of the first ‘out of context' songs we ever wrote – with a vague idea of going to the Edinburgh festival with it. Just before we went off, by a strange set of miraculous circumstances we ended up auditioning for New Faces.

We were desperate for money! We got through to the heats, and we went to Birmingham to record the show. It was a hugely nerve wracking experience. We sang this song about the new food fad – Nouvelle Cuisine – the notion of the ridiculously overcharged and overly well presented restaurants. However to be fair, most of the audience who had come to that show had not eaten in such a restaurant so when we did our little warm up, there was not a titter. The whole thing went down like a pork chop at a synagogue."

We wrote Honk! very quickly in 1993. I had seen a couple of shows that were written for the family. I had had two near misses with Hans Christian Anderson stories. I was going to do THE RED SHOES with Julie Styne at one point. I was also going to do Thumbelina with Claude Michel and Alain Boublil.

As a result of nearly doing both of those shows, I'd bought an anthology of Hans Anderson's stories so I flicked through the whole book and settled on two stories. One was The Ugly Ducking, one was The Tinderbox. And because of my Zoology I thought I will do the duckling – it was so obvious.

I rang Jill Fraiser at the Watermill theatre and asked is she had a show for the following Christmas. This was in January. She hadn't so I said “I'm writing one – so don't book anything!” and she took it. Then George and I just started writing songs, and it was a very easy process, which is why we feel slightly guilty that is has been our most successful show. I wrote the book in three days, and we added the songs over a six month period."

"It has like all shows, gone through a period where it was 'Nearly Quite Good' to being something more than that when Julia Mackenzie came on board. From there it made a huge leap at that point, and then it made an even further leap when we went to the National in the winter of 1999 – and eventually, unbelievably, got the Oliver Award over The Lion King and Mamma Mia – which caused both of us to age about 15 years on the spot."