QUOTE : The idea for the musical album began when Rice heard a radio play about Eva Perón in 1973. He tried the idea out on Lloyd Webber. Evita's appeal- a puta with a heart of steel was undeniable "A glamorous sexy super-bitch who swayed the fortunes of an entire nation", To quote Webber's biographer Gerald McKnight. Evita was a sexier, needier Margaret Thatcher. At the time there was a miner's strike in England that paralyzed the country, and Lloyd Webber said, "Things were getting pretty ugly and we found a kind of parallel in the story of Evon Perón... a cautionary tale of how a liberal democracy is a fragile flower that can be overturned by an extremist.