Drop the needle and it's midnight in a London junkyard, where the ordinary rules have quietly stopped applying and every cat you meet has somewhere better to be.

A clubman lunching his way across St James's. A conjuror who vanishes things purely for the applause. A railway cat keeping the sleeper in order. Eliot's verse reads like a nursery rhyme and thinks like a grown-up, which is why you learn it at six and still love it at sixty.

This is the record that started it all - the original 1981 London company, captured at full strength.

You'll hear the whole ensemble singing together, then peeling off one by one to introduce the cats: the swaggering rock number, the old music-hall turn, the train song that picks up speed as it goes. There's a rock band tucked inside the orchestra, and ten minutes of dance music with no words at all.

And there's "Memory" - held back until the very end, sung by Elaine Paige with the entire company behind her.

Two years after London, CATS landed in New York.

Recorded across October 1982 with the entire Broadway company, understudies and all, Andrew Lloyd Webber flew in to oversee the sessions.

Nothing is rushed here. The Jellicle Ball runs past nine minutes, Growltiger's swashbuckling nearly twelve, complete with the Italian aria written for New York.

And there's "Memory," sung by Betty Buckley - the performance that won her a Tony and this album a Grammy.

Platinum, two million copies, and still one of the best-selling cast recordings ever made.

Some of these names you won't have heard in a junkyard before.

Jennifer Hudson takes "Memory." Idris Elba is Macavity, Ian McKellen is Gus, Jason Derulo the Rum Tum Tugger - and two Royal Ballet dancers, Francesca Hayward and Steven McRae, sing as well as they move.

There's also a song that didn't exist before. "Beautiful Ghosts," written by Andrew Lloyd Webber with Taylor Swift, went on to a Golden Globe and a Grammy nomination.

And Judi Dench is finally in CATS - thirty-eight years after an injury cost her the original Grizabella.