'I wanted to be a singersongwriter like Billy Joel'

Disney composer Alan Menken has won more Oscars than anyone alive. As 'Hercules' the musical hits the West End, he speaks with Lydia Spencer-Elliott about finding the 'whoa'

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You wouldn't clock Alan Menken on the street. The composer spiky grey hair, crinkled forehead, encouraging grin – is altogether unassuming. To see his oeuvre, though, is to realise this 75-year-old soundtracked your childhood. The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas - the man is almost more Disney than Walt himself. With eight Oscars, Menken has more golden statuettes than anyone else alive. Plus 11 Grammys, an Emmy and a Tony. Meryl Streep, eat your heart out.

"If I showed up at the Oscars now, the car would pull up in front of all these photographers, the door would open, I'd walk out and they'd go, 'Oh..." Menken laughs.

We're speaking at the Marylebone Hotel off the back of Menken's two sold-out shows at the London Palladium - his first ever solo concerts in the UK. The setlist branches across his repertoire of Disney hits to a medley of songs from his Tonywinning Broadway show Newsies. Simultaneously, he's prepping for a musical adaptation of 1997's Hercules, which lands today in the West End for a seven-month run. He's exhausted, he admits: "I'm singing the songs and telling the stories behind them. So, I want to be emotionally and mentally present. You're doing it twice in a row, and the concerts are about two and a half hours each."

After school, to appease his family of doctors, he enrolled in premed at NYU. It didn't last long, though, and he drifted from anthropology to philosophy before eventually graduating with a degree in musicology. He then enrolled in the legendary composer Lehman Engel's Tony-winning BMI Musical Theatre Workshop. It was there he learnt his craft, making a living penning jingles, writing songs for Sesame Street and playing his early material in clubs to keep him and his wife Janis Menken, whom he married at 23, afloat.