Pete Waterman: The winning formula

Pete Waterman is the ultimate producer, the man responsible - bless him - for the singing careers of Kylie, Jason, Steps and, it has to be pointed out, Sinitta. Recently, he's been cast as the brutally honest face of Pop Idol and Popstars: the Rivals, and is about to present a Songs of Praise. Not bad for a Wagner obsessive

I rather love Pete Waterman's use of language. Pete was, as is well known, virtually illiterate until he was 38. Gosh, I say, you must have had some shaming experiences. "You will never shame me!" he cries – and now sort of makes up vocabulary as he goes along, in a most delightful, unknowing, un-Dylan Thomas-ish way. For example, at one point I put it to him (rather rudely, I admit) that there is this view that, maybe, he could spare us all the music and just go out and mug a few schoolchildren for their pocket money instead. I add that this isn't my view particularly – heavens, I'm such a coward – but it is a view. What does he think about it? "It's just so... affrontative!" he exclaims, in his extremely loud, exclamatory way. "And it's affrontative not just to me, but to the public as well. This whole theory that you are mugging people... if I don't entertain people with my songs, they don't buy my records. It's as simple as that, in simplistic terms."

I apologise. I say I didn't mean to cause such affrontation. I try to make up by saying that when The Bay City Rollers (whose first tour was managed by Pete) were at their height, I had a tartan bedspread, with matching curtains, shang-a-lang-a-lang. He looks happier now. I don't say that I was ever a Sonia fan, or am now a Steps fan, as that would be preposterative.

I meet him at his studio/office/home in Borough, south-east London, where he has lived "since before it was trendy". Interestingly, the building is the one where, he says, Charles Dickens lodged when his father was in the Marshalsea prison. Pete, it transpires, is a huge Dickens fan. Once Pete was up and running on the literacy front, almost the first thing he read was Dickens because of the association with the building. He started with Our Mutual Friend, which, he says, he'd worked out in the first 30 pages. "I knew the end, and I was right. Because I'd done that I instantly picked up another Dickens, to see if I could suss it out in 30 pages, and I could! I then realised Dickens was a great formulised [sic] writer." Dickens, he continues, has influenced him a great deal as a songwriter. "You think Charles Dickens has nothing to do with songwriting, but you look at the way he observes life, and you think: I must look at things differently. Colour things like he did. I've got to write about emotion..." The other thing I rather admire about Pete Waterman is his absolute, genuine, honest belief that what he does is not purely a capitalist exercise. Still, I'm struggling to spot the Dickens subtext in, say, the horribly catchy, chirpy "I Should Be So Lucky". You wouldn't say it was exactly (bleak) house music, would you?

Anyway, into the building, which houses Pete's office with his lacquerwork throne, and another room with sofa and wall-to-wall gold discs – Mel & Kim, Kylie, Jason, Sinitta, Rick Astley, Bananarama, Sonia, Sam Fox, Westlife and Steps who, apparently, have a sound that's part Abba and part Bananarama and might, perhaps, have been better named AbbaBanana? (First album: Don't Mind if I Do?) I ask him: if the building were on fire, and you could save one of these gold discs, which one would it be? "Mel & Kim," he says, "because without them, nothing." Who had the best voice? "Rick. Fantastic voice. Fantastic. FANTASTIC!" Pete can be very repetitive, as well as loud and exclamatory. I ask him: if no one had heard the Pete Waterman sound, what single song would you play them, what most captures the essence of what you do? He thinks it would have to be "Love in the First Degree", which he wrote for Bananarama:

Last night I was dreaming
I was locked in a prison cell
When I woke up I was screaming
Calling out your name (whoa)...

Only you can set me free
'Cause I'm guilty (guilty)
Guilty as a girl can be
Come on baby can't you see
I stand accused
Of love in the first degree

Maybe that was inspired by the Marshalsea. I don't know what Pete is working on now. "Let's Oliver Twist Again", perhaps?

Whatever, Pete, now 55, might not be looking at his best today. Sure, he's very sparkly, what with his diamond ring and huge Breitling gold watch, a recent present to himself. "Jason had one and I always wanted one. This is one of the cheaper ones, £3,500. You can go up to £20,000." Pete's not as excessive as he was during the Kylie years, when he owned 18 Ferraris, one of which cost £3.5m. "That was excessive." In The Sunday Times Rich List, his worth is estimated at £45m, which he disputes. "I think I've got a bit more than that."

However, sparkle aside, he has a nasty cold sore on his lower lip and "you should see my arms. They're all bumps and blotches." It's the stress, he says, of Popstars: the Rivals. "Doing the show every Saturday night, I don't think people realise how difficult it is. We've recorded 54 tracks in five weeks. These kids are making 10 singles a week." Pete has got his boy band (sorry, "vocal harmony group", as he prefers to call them) now. They're called One True Voice and Pete's written their first track, "Rock Around the Old Curiosity Shop". Only joshing! It's "After You've Gone I'll Still Be Loving You". Does songwriting come easily to you? "No. You have to drag the idea from the bottom of your stomach." He's said that the band will be at No 1 over Christmas. What if they're not? What if the girls beat the boys?

"They won't," he says.

They might, I say.

"Won't."

Might.

"WON'T!"

Pete, do you ever doubt yourself? "No." What frightens you? "Nothing." Not the dentist, then? "Nope." Spiders in the bath? "Nope." Being poor? "Nope. I'd just start again." Growing old alone? "No. I like being on my own." Failure? "No." Have you had failures? "Too many." Like? "Oh, so many." Like? "Well, nothing really. Although if I'd have had a better lawyer earlier I would have made more money. But when you do something wrongly [sic], you put it right. The public are very forgiving if you are honest."

I wonder if he feels responsibility for his "artists". All those Sonias and Sinittas and Sams who, after their 15 minutes, get thrown back into the swamp. Look at Hear'Say, even, who themselves might have been better named Here'Today (Gone'Tomorrow). He says that the trouble with Hear'Say is that they were rubbish. "Hear'Say were not musically based. What Simon [Cowell] and I did on Pop Idol changed the concept. Pop Idol came about because we'd watched Popstars and knew how crap it was. It wasn't about music. It was television. It was television people making a programme about music and getting the music wrong."

So Will Young will endure, then? "He is struggling now. He sang the wrong song. It's about songs. You sing the song people wanna buy, and they love you." What determines whether someone is in it for the long run or not? I mean, why Kylie and not Jason? "Attitude. It's the ability to listen, to know when to listen and when not to listen. That's the skill. What I'll never understand... I've been a professional in the record business for 36 years. There have been some lean years, but for the past 20 years the industry has been superb to me. What I don't understand is, no artist says to me, 'How have you done it for 36 years? How come you've lasted so long at the top?'"

OK, Pete, how have you? "I always give everyone the same lecture: keep your feet on the ground, listen and work hard." Jason didn't listen, then? "He thought he knew all the answers. One hit and he thought his IQ had shot up 4,000 per cent. So many times an artist who has had a No 1 tells the story of how they got that No 1 and forgets to mention all the people that did it for them."

I guess if you think of Pete as essentially a brilliantly skilled puppeteer, then such behaviour amounts to not so much biting the hand that feeds you as biting the hand that actually operates you. And that's not nice. It may even be especially affrontative.

How, though, has Pete – who's been responsible for more than 200 hits over the years – stayed at the top for so long? It's something that quite perplexes me until we get on to one of his favourite hobbies, fishing. (His other is steam trains, of which he owns several.) I ask if he's one of those fishermen who throws the catch back. He says he is. I say I've never understood that. I say, isn't it like going shopping, finding exactly what you want, and then not buying it?

"To me fishing is about the prowess of being able to catch a fish," he says. "It's about taking on nature, it's about being able to out-fool a fish, which is a wily animal at the best of times. It's not as people think. It takes skill. Your fly or maggot has to be there naturally. Yeah, you can chuck a worm in and catch a fish, but that's luck. It's about going out to catch the fish you want with the right bait."

I say this sounds like a good metaphor for pop-producing success – that is, knowing what bait to put down when. He says I may have a point here, but then adds peculiarly: "People say that once you've caught a fish it won't get caught again. It's not true. I've caught the same fish three times on the trot." I'm not sure what he means by this. That once a nine-year-old schoolgirl has bought one Westlife CD, she's good for another two?

I wonder about this illiteracy thing. How could someone so smart go so long without reading and writing? He says he just never learnt at school. "There was no interest for me at all. I just found it was dreary, boring. It was also the early Fifties and we still had war shortages. We had no paper to write on, no ink. We had a teacher called Mrs Beasley and we used to have to write in the air. How she could tell if it was a P or an F? No way. It was impossible."

His parents – Stella and John, an aircraft mechanic – were perfectly literate. Weren't they worried? "They didn't worry, probably because of the music. I was into it from an early age, and happy doing what I was doing." How did you get by, until you were 38? "I never hid it. I had an arrangement with my bank manager where he would write out the cheque and I would sign it. I never had to worry about it." He finally learnt to read one holiday. His girlfriend insisted. It was the only way she could shut him up.

He says there was some virtue in not being literate. He doesn't know if he'd have become familiar with Wagner if he'd been able to read. Wagner? Indeed, it turns out he's as potty for Wagner as he is for Dickens. "As a young boy I bought an album because I thought the sleeve was great. It was the Matterhorn with clouds and it was in one of those bargain boxes in a record shop. I didn't know what it was because I couldn't read the writing on the front, but I took it home and put it on and within 10 seconds it was, like, 'Christ, what the hell is this?' Within three minutes I'd replayed the start 10 times." It was Tannhäuser.

Pete compares himself with Wagner, yes. "In my own way I can be him. I can create music with passion. I can't create Lohengrin. It ain't possible. But I can still write what I think is passionate music and get singers to sing them in passionate ways." What would Wagner think of Pete Waterman, I wonder. "He'd bloody sue me! I've nicked all his tunes!" cries Pete. I'm not sure, frankly, that I can spot the Wagnerian influence in Pete's back catalogue but, as I said previously, I've no idea what he's working on now. "Tristan Shout"?

He has certainly been more successful as pop supremo than family man. He has been divorced three times and has two sons (now grown up) and two daughters (still little). Is he a good father? "Yes, I am, although not in the traditional way. My kids love me and that's genuine. I know that. All my children understand what I do and they love what I do, but am I there for them every time? No, I'm not. But they know that. They know their dad can't do every school play, but when I do, they know how big a deal it is." Is he unsuited to marriage? "I don't think I've met the right partner. I think you need to marry your best mate because your best mate accepts your warts." And cold sores? "Ha! Quite often, it's the warts people want to change, and you can't change me."

I think his biggest wart, so to speak, might be his almost 24/7 work ethic. He can get by on two hours of sleep a night, he says. Currently, there is Popstars: the Rivals and One True Voice, some kind of plan to be Father Christmas in Stoke-on-Trent in one of his steam engines, and a Christmas Songs of Praise special – a sort of Choir Idol. What keeps you going, Pete? "I bloody love it!" It seems everyone is a little cynical about Pete, apart from Pete himself, which somehow redeems him. And, after all, isn't it better for pre-teens to be spending their money on Steps and Westlife rather than, say, crack and ringtones? I hope he doesn't find this affrontative as well. I'm looking forward to "Ticket to Ride (Of the Valkyries)", by the way.

Pete Waterman presents a special edition of 'Songs of Praise' from Coventry on BBC1 on 15 December