Catapulted to fame in his twenties, then plunged into obscurity after going bankrupt, the composer of Oliver! is back on top as his best-known show hits the West End.  He talks to Michael Freedland of the Daily Telegraph, December 1994.

Last night a new production of Oliver! opened at the London Palladium, 34 years after the show made a celebrity out of its young composer and lyricist, Lionel Bart. It's a happy ending to what Bart called a "horror story". in those years of fame he lost all the money he had made and ended up bankrupt. Worse, he sold the rights to his one big show, the same Oliver!, that still bears his name above the title.

Now he's back in the money, and a working writer again. For this new staging , producer Cameron Mackintosh commissioned him to write new material, for which he is being paid, not just a fee, but a percentage of the profits. If the show is a hit, he could be back on the road to being a wealthy man. Mackintosh bought half the show's rights and has handed some of them back to the man whose idea this money-spinner was. The impresario takes the view that without Bart there would be no Oliver! and he ought to say thank you. In return, Mackintosh is getting a new-look production with new lyrics and other changes to some of the best-known songs in the theatrical catalogue. All the incidental music has been changed and virtually everything else has been rearranged. "People's ears are attuned now to different sounds from those in 1960," says Bart, now 63.

When we met in Mackintosh's Bloomsbury offices, he was writing new words for Bill Sykes to sing and a revamp of the street-cries chorale, Who Will Buy?. "We've come up with something that is, from the back of the neck down, spine-tingling," he says. "We're trying to make the whole thing more real. It's been completely reworked." Neither he nor his producer has been relying on sentiment to get this show working again so long after its first performance. "It's a whole bunch of new people having a rethink of what I did in 1960," he explained. "What really knocked me out was the first rehearsal, when we all met, the company of 30, plus three gangs of 26 kids - the law compels us to have three separate children's companies - plus the director, plus Cameron Mackintosh, plus me and all the technicians. More people there on the stage than had been in the first-night audience at Wimbledon. Well,  we just sat down and started singing the songs written 35 ago, and those kids knew every word. It sounds corny, but it was very humbling to think that they had been brought up on the songs and could relate to them in their own terms in 1994."

What Bart suffered when he said goodbye to his stage and film rights was the agony of watching revival after revival of Oliver!, both amateur and professional, in practically every country of the world - and not getting a penny from the deal. As he watched the box-office take piling up and yet another showing of the movie Oliver! on TV or in some cinema revival, he could have been forgiven for wishing no one remembered the piece any more than they remembered Bart himself. For this was a one-man Gilbert & Sullivan. Before Oliver! he wrote Fings Ain’t Wot They Used To Be for Joan Littlewood, Lock Up Your Daughters for Bernard Miles's Mermaid and tunes for Tommy Steele (he used to play in Steele's skiffle group). He might have expected to become a British Cole Porter or Irving Berlin, but nothing after Oliver!, which he wrote at the age of 29, was ever in the same class. Blitz! and Maggie May appealed more to the critics than to the box-office, and his Robin Hood story Twang!!! was about as popular as the Sheriff of Nottingham.

Meanwhile , he spent like a pools winner. "When people came to me - strangers as well as friends - with sob stories, I'd write them cheques."  He admits that boozed a lot of his money away and couldn't get his private life in order. He ended up in the bankruptcy court. "Even the judge said I was ill-advised and should never have opted for bankruptcy. It was clear that my performance royalties were enough to pay everyone back." After the bankruptcy he sold the stage and film rights for Oliver!, as well as the publishing rights, which would have given him the income form the soundtrack (the publishing rights are now held by Max Bygraves). Fortunately he kept the performance rights, which meant regular cheques from the Performing Rights Society. "People think I sold myself totally into penury," he told me, "But I was always sheltered from want and was never starving."

His talent resurfaced a few years ago with his Abbey National commercial Happy Endings on television, though there had to be a press announcement to drive home the fact that it was indeed Bart playing the piano and singing for the children in the commercial. Now there are other projects on the horizon. Bart is hoping there will be a new version of Things Ain't Wot They Used To Be next year. There is also talk of a Disney movie, a new musical "based on a contemporary London theme", which may turn out to be a kind of musical East-Enders, and four other musicals that have been stored away in his trunk, work done when recovering from the horror story.

For the moment though he is basking in the pleasure of working on this new Oliver! "I'm a bit like a tailor," said the man whose father was indeed an East End tailor. "I love working with the ensemble and making things to measure, as it were. I'm sure I'm as quick as I ever was. I may not be so driven by ambition. I'm now driven by life."