The ex-member of Brother Beyond now writes chart-toppers for stars. Why has he decided to make a musical of seedy, gutter-life classic Midnight Cowboy, a film he can’t bear?
Troop into Eg White’s living room, past the bright, spacious kitchen and the yapping terriers (“Meet the unwelcoming committee!”), then descend into the snug basement studio with its underfloor heating and you will have reached the place where pop bangers are born: hits for Adele (Chasing Pavements), Will Young (Leave Right Now), Duffy (Warwick Avenue) and countless others. The Ivor Novello award-winning songwriter, born Francis White, sits in front of a desk cluttered with screens and consoles and thingamajigs. In T-shirt, jeans and trainers, he looks as lean as the neck of a Stratocaster. When he is in quizzical mode, as he very often is, four deep grooves appear on his forehead like the strings on a bass guitar.
White’s newest project is the music for a stage version of Midnight Cowboy, the Oscar-winning 1969 buddy movie with Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman as deluded outsiders adrift in New York, adapted now by Bryony Lavery. Most of its 15 songs – from sanguine ballads to Latin-tinged stompers – were composed not here in White’s west London home but on a family holiday to Colombia. For two hours each morning, while his wife and children were still in bed, he wrote on a cheap baritone ukulele, which he plucks off the wall from between rows of guitars to show me. “You can take it in the hand luggage,” he says cheerfully. “If your kid sits on it, which happened a few times, it lives.” Presumably he means the ukulele, not the kid.
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