Simon Cowell

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Music, Personal Journals, Society & Culture, Music Commentary

4.3 • 14.3K Ratings

🗓️ 13 August 2006

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the television star Simon Cowell. Simon Cowell is one of our most successful pop music moguls. He is the mastermind behind more than 100 number one songs in Britain and abroad and Westlife, whom he signed, holds the record for having seven consecutive number one songs in the UK. A lot of his early successes were gimmicky hits - singing wrestlers, the Power Rangers and Teletubbies - but it was first Robson and Jerome and then Westlife who brought him credibility. His tenacity and his ability to spot a seller were already legendary within the music world when he devised a format for a television show that would bring new talent to the fore. Pop Idol, American Idol and now The X Factor launched the careers of Will Young and Gareth Gates among others. They've made Simon Cowell a celebrity too. His shows play to the aspirations of the young, who believe fame and fortune can be theirs. But when their ambitions exceed their talent, he's there to tell them. He's reduced many contestants to tears and been threatened by others but, he says, he's only being cruel to be kind.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Mack the Knife by Bobby Darin Book: Hollywood Wives by Jackie Collins Luxury: A mirror

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Kirsty Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2006, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My cast away this week is a television star, fabulously rich and astonishingly successful.
0:34.8	He's the self-created hitman of one of the world's biggest franchises, Pop Idle.
0:39.7	He squashes the hopes and raises the aspirations of one of these with a carefully blended mixture of arrogance, disdain and charm.
0:48.0	Born in the home counties, he was a washout at school, but immediately did well in the record business that he joined at the age of
0:53.6	19. Ten years later he was driving a Porsche and living it up in Fulham then he
0:59.0	lost all that before starting the long climb back to his present success. He produced a string of money-spinning
1:05.8	recording artists and it was his experience in working with new talent that gave him the idea
1:11.1	for Pop Idol, a program that's led to American Pop Idol and then today
1:15.6	to the X factor. I have, he says, with the self-confidence that is his trademark, an instinct for what the
1:22.1	public want, and there are very few people who have it in my area.
1:26.1	He is Simon Cowell.
1:27.7	Sounds a bit big headed, isn't it?
1:29.7	So.
1:31.7	How do you know though when you hear it? I mean do you know immediately is it like
1:36.2	tasting food off a plate knowing immediately when this is well cooked? I was
1:40.7	40 years old when I had that eureka moment I'm 46 now. I was 40 years old when I had that Eureka moment. I'm 46 now. I was making a record one day and I was driving the producer crazy because I couldn't tell him what was right, what was wrong.
1:51.0	And eventually it suddenly occurred to me I have to like it and I have
1:55.6	quite broad popular tastes so I took the view that if I liked it I think other
2:01.4	people will like it. So you're the embodiment of popular
2:03.9	taste, modern popular taste. Well I think I'm a typical example. I loathe
	...

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