From watching his father star in Lloyd Webber’s mega-hit in futuristic 1980s Japan, to taking his own family to its reboot in London this year, writer Johny Pitts recounts how Starlight Express has been a thread in his life that has also charted his changing perception of the world

If I had to choose a cultural artefact that most underpinned my 1980s childhood, it would be the Andrew Lloyd Webber mega-musical Starlight Express. The show is around the same age as me, and I’ve come to think of it as the prism through which it is possible to unpick more than my own memories, but the dreams and nightmares of the decadent decade that gave birth to it.

When Starlight Express launched in 1984 at London’s Apollo theatre, the world had never seen anything like it before. A truly immersive experience, it involved actors on roller-skates racing through and around the audience in a purpose-built auditorium, and broke ground with its diverse casting, at one point hiring more Black actors than the rest of the West End combined. James Baldwin was often backstage to visit his friend Lon Satton, a longtime cast member, and another member of the cast, Jeffrey Daniel, invented the moonwalk that Michael Jackson made famous (MJ was also a fan of the show, and visited on more than one occasion).