Whatever advice other people might give, I'm just not interested. If we have to finish something by a deadline, Alain knows I will do my share, and I know he'll do his. I hear so many colleagues complaining about the laziness or slowness of their collaborators, but that will never happen with Alain. If we have to fight against a director it's always two against one, so that makes us stronger.We are just as complementary on the business side. Alain is very involved in all of the contracts, I'm much more involved in travelling around as a composer to check that a show that's been running for a few years is still in good shape. We have never really fallen out over an artistic decision.About a year after our success with La Revolution, I was still writing songs that nobody wanted to sing, and Alain said "Why don't you sing them yourself?" It was not what I wanted to do, but he persuaded me.

He and Frank Pourcel produced my album Le Premier Pas, which was number one for 16 weeks in France and sold 850,000 copies. That was another very happy experience together, and I'm pleased that he pushed me like that.Both of us were ambitious when we were young and we went to Paris to fulfil those ambitions. When I was a little boy I used to say to my parents: "If tomorrow I become a butcher, it's to be the best butcher in the world." But there was no choice about what I would become. I was born a composer.It took Alain longer to decide that he was going to make lyrics his life's work. He was not as sure as I was that there was a strong artistic capacity within him.He used to be very, very insecure about his talent and his position in society. After what we've achieved, he's become a much more secure person, more relaxed and open to the whole world. I would like everybody to have the second chance that he has had, to be as happy as he is with his second wife and children, and his work.

He is blooming.For the last two summers, my family has spent time with his family at his house in Tuscany, with all the children together, and they sometimes come to my place in the South of France.I'm not someone who talks very easily - that's more Alain's style. But when we are in company socially, neither of us talk much about our work.We are both getting older, so there's a little bit of wisdom coming to us, although I feel my defects becoming worse and worse I'm more and more paranoid about the music in our shows. When someone doesn't sing well or play well, I take it very personally. Maybe that is a necessary flaw if standards are to stay high.Money is no longer a worry for either of us, but I don't think that has really changed us As a good Jew I always feel guilty about what's happening. Money gives me an opportunity to help people - not because I'm generous, but so that I can have the image of myself that I want to have.When people ask me why Alain and I collaborate so well, I say it's because our wives are very good friends. If problems arise when two men work together as closely as we do, they usually come from the wives' jealousy of that relationship.Through my collaboration with Alain I achieved what I wanted to do.

Before meeting him I wanted to be Leonard Bernstein or Andrew Lloyd Webber. After Les Miserables, for the first time in my life I wanted to be myself.! 'Martin Guerre' is at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, 8 Dec-13 Feb (0113 213 7200).. SO IS Damien Hirst worried? Not only does the publicity-loving not-so-enfant terrible of BritArt have to cope with one of his famous fishy creations dismally failing to reach its reserve price at auction, but now his shark's going soft too It's time to call in the art conservators. If you thought art conservation was just public school types squinting at an old canvas and gibbering on about brush strokes and the artist's use of gestural impasto, think again.