Hello I'm Kirsty Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1995,

and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a record producer, his is a rags to richest story if ever there was one.

Born into a poor family in Coventry, he received virtually no formal education and still can't do joined up writing.

A passion for pop lured him to America and then to London,

where in the mid-80s he and his company wrote and produced enough hit records to have one in the

top 40 every week for four years.

Kiley Minogue, Jason Donovan and Banana Rama are just a few of the stars he helped propel to success.

These days he's estimated to be worth at least 60 million, enough to allow him to indulge

in his hobbies of collecting koi carp, fast cars and railway engines.

He is Pete Waterman.

It is an incredible success story, Pete, but do you feel these days as if you've always been wealthy?

I mean, have you got entirely used to it?

It's something that I've never really stopped to think about. I've always spent money as if I had it, you know, albeit relative terms, but I mean even when we didn't have any, if I thought it would help make a record I would find it from

somewhere. So you were born to have money were you? I would yes I don't think I've

ever been shy of spending it. But you do splash it around a bit I I mean, you know, thousands of pounds on a fish here or 3.1

million on a fast Italian car there. Do you have, does it not worry you? I mean, you cope very easily

with spending.

Yes I think sometimes in fact I've done it deliberate to make sure that I keep working.

I mean it was very easy to sort of put money in the bank and sit it there and it doesn't give me any pleasure.

Money itself has no value to me, it's what it can do.

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