My interest in art began when I was very young and it began through architecture. For as long as I can remember I have been interested in buildings. From my early childhood I used to beg my long-suffering parents to take me on holiday to places where there were loads of castles and abbeys to see.

My family couldn’t afford to go abroad, but by the time I was 10 we had been on holidays from the Wye Valley to Scotland and Yorkshire and even stayed, thanks to an act of staggering self-sacrifice by my parents, in semi-industrial Glamorganshire. It was there that I discovered the Victorians.

It dawned on me that the last bits of Cardiff Castle weren’t mediaeval, they were the glorious creations of that fabulous architect and designer William Burgess. Soon my passion embraced Victorian churches and shortly after Victorian art.

I was lucky enough to go to school in London in the '60s, when churches weren’t locked. So a huge treasure trove of Victoriana was available on tap, so to speak. In these churches were the works of [Pre-Raphaelite painters] Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones, often in stained glass and the applied arts.

Soon I was a regular at the Tate Gallery, remarking not only at the great pictures but also at the crowds there who always seemed to be in the Pre-Raphaelite gallery. For these were the pictures that everyone from my family to my school teachers thought were so awful that you could scarcely give them away. I loved them.

Although I did buy a few bits and pieces of no major consequence when I started to sell the odd song, it wasn't until after Jesus Christ Superstar in the early 70s that I was able to collect at all seriously.

Even then I missed a lot of wonderful things that I thought were out of reach. My accountant kept saying Jesus Christ Superstar was probably a flash in the pan, so it wasn’t really until about 30 years ago that I felt confident enough to collect art in earnest.

Although Victorian art forms much of my collection, it is by no means all of it. It amuses me for instance to own a major work of the artist that the Pre-Raphaelites most hated, Sir Joshua Reynolds. At home his magnificent portrait of the Prince of Wales and his superb horse hangs on our main staircase and presides over the artists who dubbed him Sir Sloshua.

My collection today has moved away from the Victorians and taken me into fields as diverse as 20th century American, South African and Second World War Jewish art, but my Victorian heart still beats, as I hope this programme will testify.