World premiere of The Van Gogh Musical in Eastbourne

“I had the original idea in 1972. I didn't exactly rush into it! But I was living in London at the time and a friend gave me a book of Van Gogh’s letters.

"He knew I already loved the paintings and when I read the letters and all the emotions within them I thought that this would just make a marvellous musical but I didn't think that I could write it at the time because I had only just started writing songs.

“And then about 20 years later, I think it was 1995, a friend of mine died unexpectedly from a stroke.

"He was about 40 and it was a terrible shock and it just made me think that you have got to get on with the things that you want to do in life and so I thought that I had to have a go at this Van Gogh musical.

"By then I'd been writing songs for about 25 years. I started writing the songs on an acoustic guitar and the songs started flowing but I always referred back to Van Gogh's letters.”

The musical (www.vagabondskies.com) looks of the last ten years of his life.

“His biggest supporter was his brother who was called Theo. His brother encouraged him to be a painter, and a big part of the musical is the relationship between the brothers Vincent and Theo. He sponsored Vincent and Vincent went ten years before he sold a painting but for those ten years Theo never let Vincent down.

“With this I wanted to take a different approach to what has been done before. Van Gogh is often seen as a manic person daubing paint and also there are some incredibly bad jokes about him cutting his ear off. I reject those those cliches that he was a manic painter all the time.

"He did a painting during his final days of a church in a village and I went there with my wife and we stood by the church with the painting in front of us. You could see it was a very difficult building to paint but the picture that he did was just so accurate.

"He was a craftsman. But people see him as mad and slightly weak but I think if you look at it analytically and you see that he went those ten young long years of painting with no encouragement he must have been a very strong and very determined man and I don't think that's ever properly been given credit for. He had a lot of inner strength that came out in him as a painter.

“The musical was virtually finished five years ago and in the interim we have been trying to get it staged. We did a showcase in London and we got some good feedback and I could see what I needed to change. I wanted to work on it and strengthen the fact that I wanted him not to be seen as this weak man and I wanted to show how determined he was.”

Tony and the team investigated staging the musical for a day in the West End but it was prohibitively expensive: “And I just thought I wanted to see it happen. In September I'm 77 and I want to see the musical put on the stage while I'm still on this planet. I just thought it would be lovely to see it on the stage in Eastbourne and that I'd be happy and if anything came from it afterwards then that would be great.”

Tickets from the Devonshire Park Theatre in Eastbourne.