One thing that both Sir Tim Rice and Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber agree about is that Evita is the best show they have collaborated on.

“I think my lyrics for Chess are pretty good too, but with Evita everything worked. It all came together,” says Tim.

Both shows are heading for Bradford’s Alhambra before the end of the year.

Evita may never have been created at all had it not been for Tim running late for a dinner party. Driving in his car, he heard the end of a programme that immediately caught his attention.

“I suppose if I’d been early I might have heard the beginning, but I only heard the last five or ten minutes. It was about someone called Eva Peron,” he says.

“I remembered her from my stamp-collecting days as a kid – her image on Argentina’s stamps had been one of my favourites – so I knew who she was, where she’d come from, and that she was dead, but not much more.”

It was another four years before Tim brought Evita to the stage. He began by trying to hear the complete radio show. “I went to the BBC and managed to get a listening session. It was an incredibly long, boring procedure – this was long before ‘Listen Again’ and the internet – and they wheeled out an old acetate disc of this programme. I listened to it again and took notes,” he recalls.

“I went on a search of libraries to see if I could find anything more about her and picked up a book by Frank Owen, a former Labour MP, about Peron, her husband.

“Then I found there had been a television documentary about her made by Argentine director Carlos Pasini. It was called Queen Of Hearts, and Diana Rigg narrated it. I watched it several times and took lots of notes.”

Tim and Andrew Lloyd Webber had been working on the idea of a musical of P G Wodehouse’s Jeeves stories, but Tim wasn’t happy with it and bowed out to continue researching what would become Evita.

“I spent two or three months half-working on it, then went to Buenos Aires, where I had to keep a fairly low profile,” says Tim. “Jesus Christ Superstar had opened there not long before, or tried to open, but the theatre was blown up by right-wing extremists saying it was anti-Jesus. Nobody said ‘the show must go on’ – they quite wisely said ‘the show must come off!’ By now Tim knew that the story of Eva Peron was a great real-life story, but would it work theatrically?

He needed a device to handle the storytelling, which led to the Che character, who is based on, but isn’t specifically, revolutionary Che Guevara.

“While I was in Argentina, I found another book on leaders of Latin America and there was a chapter on Eva, and another one on Che Guevara. I read it thinking he was Cuban, but discovered he was born in Argentina,” says Tim.

“He almost certainly never met Eva, nor had any conversations with her, but he was very aware of her and was probably influenced strongly by his distaste for the Perons’ regime.

“It was Hal Prince, our original director, who had the idea to make him look like Che Guevara.”

Next came Lloyd Webber setting it to music. Tim believes it’s his best work. “Tune after tune is just wonderful. It’s my favourite, but then maybe I’m biased,” he smiles.

It was decided to follow the Jesus Christ Superstar model of making a hit record version of the score first, before trying to put it on the stage. “That was one of the things that had made Jesus Christ Superstar great. No-one wanted to stage it at first, so we cut the book and made the score much more rocky and contemporary.

“Because we were making it for a record first, we were able to go the rock route and do something different.”

Likewise on Evita. The instant success of the album, including a chart-topping single in Don’t Cry For Me Argentina, generated interest in the show, before the introduction of Broadway legend Hal Prince as director led to its striking stage debut at London’s Prince Edward Theatre in 1978.

The reviews were far from unanimously good – “one critic even gave the audience a bad review,” recalls Tim. “Another said I was the worst lyricist in the world. I toyed with the idea of replying, ‘Can you please tell me who the best is, so I have something to aim at?’”

The show’s enduring success proved the critics wrong. “I don’t know what it’s got, but it’s got something that the public always wants,” says Tim. “In the first big interview we gave about the show, the interviewer asked me, ‘Haven’t you written a story about a very unpleasant woman who was virtually a fascist?’ And I replied, ‘Yes.’ There was a long pause – that was all I had to say!

“We’ve had people say we’re too nice to her, and others say we’re too nasty. I think we got it right; she was a very interesting person, I’m not saying she was a good person, but there was a lot you could admire about her.”

Evita runs at the Alhambra from October 4 to 9. Chess runs there from November 9 to 13. Tickets for both shows are available on (01274) 432000.