David Byrne is not a fan of musicals. In fact, the former Talking Heads frontman, says he avoids “the whole singing style associated with musicals” at all costs. “I just don’t like it very much,” Byrne adds, laughing.

It would be an unsurprising admission from this respected, avant-garde musician if not for the fact that his musical, Here Lies Love, is about to make its London debut.

Yet to put Byrne’s sequinned, disco-dancing spectacle, charting the rise and fall of Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, in the same box as its West End or Broadway peers would be to misunderstand it.

The show, written and composed in collaboration with DJ Fatboy Slim, opens at the National Theatre’s newly renovated Dorfman Theatre (formerly the Cottesloe) on September 30 after a long and successful New York run.

Discussing the reason he chose Marcos, the polarising widow of former Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, known for her vast collection of shoes, as his unlikely musical muse, Byrne said her embodiment of the excesses and indulgences of power had drawn him to her story.

“I knew that Imelda was given to memorable pronouncements and aphorisms and outrageous behaviour, some of it amusing and some of it horrific,” he said.

“But the fact that she immersed herself in the disco club world was a big selling point.

“When I heard she had a giant mirror ball in her New York townhouse and turned the roof of the palace in Manila into a dancing club, I thought ‘she really surrounded herself with this music and created her own soundtrack to her life.’ Disco was a genre that I was uncomfortable with but keen to explore, so with those factors in mind I thought, ‘let’s see if there’s a story to be told here’.”

It is a show that has been nine years in the making, taking Byrne to the Philippines and back researching Marcos’s story, from her birth into the poorer side of an influential family, to her 11-day whirlwind romance and marriage to Ferdinand Marcos, who became president of the Philippines. Byrne follows their regime of terror, corruption and excess, to their exile.

The project was first realised as a concept album, released in 2010, which Byrne said helped him to “refine the songs” before he eventually got the project transferred to the stage before the project eventually made the leap to the stage.

He had originally envisaged the show taking place in a “megadisco”, but after discovering a lack of such venues (“they used to be everywhere,” he bemoaned), he was forced to look to more conventional spaces to stage the piece, creating a hybrid between a club and a theatre where the audience watches standing up – and dancing.

The singer cites his distaste for the musical genre as an asset for originality – as he is keen to stress, this is no Evita. Just as Byrne and musicals may seem an unlikely combination, so too are disco and dictators. Yet there are similarities, he says.

“The mindset of the Marcos regime and the mindset of disco music to me doesn’t seem all that distant. The hedonistic, escapist feeling of losing yourself and being transported to another world, like you feel on the dance floor and like you feel in a dance club, that’s a means to divorce yourself from the rest of the world, just as Imelda did.

“When you’re dancing, you’re in this psychological and sonic bubble, in the same way that powerful people create a bubble around themselves. So I wanted to give an audience a taste of that feeling.”

Getting into the head of his controversial heroine, and the ambiguous moral implications of that, were part of what made the project appealing to Byrne.

“In the first half, when the play is dealing with her childhood, her upbringing and her meeting with Ferdinand Marcos, it’s meant to get the audience to empathise with her and understand what’s driving her and then they’ll understand how that manifests later on,” he said.

“And it’s kind of frightening because in most cases, not every night but in most cases, in the scene when the Marcoses get elected, you have the whole audience cheering them on.

“Occasionally I’ve had Filipinos in the audience coming up to me afterwards and saying ‘I didn’t feel really good doing that, knowing what’s coming later’. But the Marcoses were really popular to begin with and this really mirrors that. I didn’t want to subvert the image of Imelda completely, more get inside of her head. She probably won’t agree, but I wanted to understand a little bit of what made her do those things and how it’s possible to get into that corrupt position.”

Byrne approached Norman Cook, better known as Fatboy Slim, having been a long-time admirer of his work.

“When I realised that I wanted the whole show to be a medium for dance music I went to Norman Cook to see if he could help out in that department” said Byrne.

“I was a fan and I thought that his stuff had a real range to it, it’s not all techno or one kind of beat, and he was in a band at one point so he understands there is such a thing as a song.”

Lyrics in Here Lies Love were often lifted directly from speeches, interviews, recordings from the time and even Marcos’s high school yearbook. One song is taken verbatim from a speech that Benigno Aquino gave about President Marcos building arts centres and not doing enough for the shanty towns in Manila, while another is based on quotes from an oral history of the People Power revolution that Byrne stumbled across.

The title of the musical comes from Imelda’s self-proposed epitaph.

Byrne did concede that writing a show, particularly a musical, about someone who is still alive and whose legacy is viewed with either deep reverence or ripe loathing, was “very intimidating”.

Marcos, 83, is back in the Philippines as a congresswoman, and two of her children are also in national office. Marcos is also aware of the musical (she was reportedly “flattered” when she heard the songs). Byrne admits that, while he can’t really stop anyone from coming to see it, he said “a group photo with Imelda and me and the cast all together would be really unfortunate for us”.

With 110 speakers, two balconies, and featuring, amongst its numerous oddities, a miniskirt-clad dancer in a Fidel Castro mask Byrne is confident that the all-dancing production is enough to “break through even the British reserve”.

Yet, he is offended at the notion that Here Lies Love is simply a superficial platform for feel-good pop songs, and, as a restless creative force, says the production has had a notable influence on his myriad musical projects – he even brought in the same choreographer on his 2013 tour with St Vincent.

“I still find the show very moving,” he added. “It’s a lot of fun but every time I go to see it I’m emotionally devastated at the end.”