SAY WHAT you want about Andrew Lloyd Webber - and many have - he couldn't have chosen a better lyricist than the late poet TS Eliot.

Of course, the fact that Eliot was already deceased when he wrote Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, the text the composer raided for his musical, does mean they didn't exactly conceive the project together. But the synthesis of Eliot's deceptively complex rhymes and Webber's melodies translates into a simple and affecting musical that transcends its unusual origins.

Cats, coming to the Bristol Hippodrome next month, is the longest-running musical on the West End and Broadway and has been performed in 26 countries nationwide.

And it all began because Webber wanted to try writing a little differently. He said: "It started as a personal experiment to discover if I could set existing words to music.

"I began to realise that these poems, poems that my Mum had read to me when I was a little boy, were very special. Their irregular, even angular meters were like lyrics.

"I sensed that there was some sort of theatrical future in the project although I had no clue what it was or how it could be achieved. "I staged my work so far in a concert at the 1980 Sydmonton Festival. In the audience was Valerie Eliot. Afterwards she gave me unpublished material that her husband had written about a cat entertainer.

"I took the idea of Cats to the then relatively untried producer Cameron Mackintosh. To be truthful, people thought that Cameron and I were stark staring bonkers.

"We opened in May 1981 with half our investment missing and a second mortgage on my house.

"The resulting show changed not just my life, but that of so many people close to the show so profoundly that three of us, me included, married girls in the original cast."

Cats is at Bristol Hippodrome from May 11 to May 29. Tickets range from £12.50 to £32.50 from the box office on 0870 6077500.