"A year or so ago, I found myself at No 6 on a list of “improbable couples”. This happened because, on one of Andrew Marr’s first programmes, Brian Eno and I were doing the paper review. Towards the end of the programme, Brian and I, off camera, gave one another a hug. We simply had not seen one another for a long time. This so astounded Andrew that he announced it, the result being the “improbable” list and an obviously shocked compiler. The list surprised and slightly annoyed me because it had not occurred to me that anyone would find the fact that Eno and I were close friends as something bizarre. We have known one another for more than half our lives, and will probably continue knowing one another, to the bewilderment of a few, it seems. But it was this reaction that made me alive to the link between Marilyn Monroe and Ella Fitzgerald; and Miles Davis and Juliette Greco, the subjects of my two latest works for the stage." - RAPatton

"Marilyn and Ella were both abused children, both left on their own at early ages, both driven, and both utterly reliant on their own vision, their own inner certainty. Marilyn desperately wanted to be seen as a woman with brains and wit — which she had in abundance. Beauty, she knew, was in the eye of the beholder and she was an expert manipulator of the eye, her creation of the artifice of MM was supreme. Ella wanted to be seen as beautiful. She always said that what she wanted to do was “stop traffic”. Her singing career came into being because she did not have the self-confidence to compete with the tall, lithe, light-skinned showgirl types who came up against her at the legendary amateur nights at the Apollo Theatre in Harlem. So, she simply stood there and sang. She knew that her voice, her timing and her impeccable musical ear were quite simply a gift, and because of this her voice retained its exquisite girl-like quality all of her life. Marilyn, who was billed simply as “The Girl” in arguably her second-most famous film, The Seven Year Itch, did not want to be fluffy and frivolous and dainty. And so their similar battle to be seen and accepted as how they saw and accepted themselves was exactly the same beneath the surface." - RAPatton

"Ella, a workaholic and perfectionist like Marilyn, continued to tour right up until the end of her life. As Fitzgerald’s career rose after Mocambo, Marilyn’s began to decline, even as she made some of her most memorable films. Miles Davis walked away from Juliette Greco, who was arguably the love of his life, because, he stated, he “loved her too much”. The daemon is about truth, about authenticity, which the young seek today and which I believe that the coming generations have in abundance. Today, this search for the authentic, the real, is what drives us on the inner level in a world drowning in lies, and spin, and false glamour. Art can present the daemon to us, allow us to grapple with it, and perhaps to reconcile ourselves to the “improbable couple” within us that drives us to seek its manifestation in the outer world, causing us to create, and to live and die attempting to reveal the face of what lies beneath." - RAPatton