The Tony Blair Rock Opera hits the Brighton stage with tale of pop PM

“I blame (co-writer) Harry Hill,” says Steve. “I always blame Harry. He twisted my arm. He telephoned me and his idea originally was to do a deliberately awful jukebox musical using really cheesy one-hit wonders one after another from the late 60s and the early 70s, to do a musical about Tony Blair like that and he thought it would be really funny to use really trivial music when you are dealing with a really serious story. We had a try-out and it was awful to hear these terrible records one after another so he just said to me ‘Why don't you write some original songs?’ and I said ‘Let me think about it for a couple of years.’

"I thought about the idea of it being a rock opera although it isn't but it’s just the fact that we called it a rock opera. But I was thinking that there has to be a reason why an idea sings, why it's a musical rather than a comedy and the reason I came up with is that Tony Blair was the first pop Prime Minister.

"He was the first Prime Minister that was younger than me and he had the whole Britpop scene going on at the time and that was just all part of the whole. I just thought that it might work and we've allowed ourselves moments of hyperbolic histrionic music alongside a lot of proper rock and roll.

"What we didn't want was to present a didactic hectoring agitprop style political tract. The main thing is that we want to entertain people and we want to make them laugh but if that's all you do then it's a bit like a Chinese meal. It's really delicious and you love it but you're hungry again in an hour so we wanted something a bit more to it.

“The point is that the art in artistic statement is to present the general through the specific, and the specific is the story of Tony Blair in this case but really it's a story about the corruptive nature of power.

"We acknowledge the good things that he did but we don't shy away from the stuff that has made him in effect more reviled now in people's memories than Thatcher is. And I feel that one of the reasons that so many people blame him so much now is that there was so much promise when he arrived. I was never particularly a fan. I was more of a Gordon Brown guy but you just remember the promise… and the disappointment.”

Playing John Prescott and Osama bin Laden – among others – in the piece is Rosie Strobel: “I'm from Liverpool and I know fellas like John, good honest men that don't mind raising a fist if somebody throws an egg at them which is a perfectly good response. With bin Laden I would say it’s much less of an impression. It would be wrong to try and do an impression or to portray him accurately but really both are treated as mirrors to be held up to what happened and to look at a really serious subject in a humorous way.

“The show is very high energy. You can't phone it in. It is just kind of gag, gag, gag and it's a massive ensemble piece. There is no time for anyone to go back to the dressing room, no time that anyone to be really off stage much. Once you're in there, you are in the cart and you just keep going. You get on the train and you just whizz through to the end.”

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