Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My My cast away this week is Vidal Sassoon. He calls himself an old hairdresser, which is a bit like saying

Picasso knocked out the odd painting. An iconic figure he is the father of

modern crimping, making his mark in the 60s when he became the king of the five-point cut.

His scissors and ambition lifted him out of the grinding poverty of his childhood he spent six years in an orphanage and

elevated him to the very pinnacle of glamour and international recognition.

He says, I've met Prime Ministers and Hollywood

directors, screen legends and football superstars. I have cut the hair and listened to

the secrets of some of the most beautiful women in the world. Why is that Vidal Sassoon? Why do we tell our

our hairdressers our secrets?

Because after the shampoo, if it's a good massage. You're totally relaxed and some people verbalize it. That relaxation,

others of course stay very quiet.

You gave Mary Quant of course the, I mean really the perfect Bob, Mary Quant's Bob was as famous

as Mary Quant's mini skirts.

Did she, when you did that to to her did she know that almost it would

she's still wearing it today it is her signature real. Did you have to persuade her to

get it in the beginning? Well she came in in 1957 with Alexander Plunkett

Green you know that was her husband. Yeah. Charmer I did something I'd never

run in my life before. As I was dancing around the chair I nipped

her ear.

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