Reproduced from SUNDAY EXPRESS Classic July 2, 1995

There are moments in every successful executive's life when doubts creep in about the meaning and worth of it all. When the company car, the expense account and the cottage in the country fail to provide that elusive feeling of happiness and fulfilment. For most, though, the moment passes and they continue to climb the greasy pole - eyes fixed grimly on the prize, the power, the prestige and the profits.

Pete Waterman, hustling his way up in the music business during the l97Os and nursing personal passions for Tamla Motown and railway trains, did the opposite. He decided to give up all the perks, turn his back on an industry he felt was corrupt, and go to work down a coal mine. he felt the need to "purge his soul."

The purging worked a treat. Now, 2O years later, Waterman is a pop music tycoon controlling some 2O companies and is listed among the 5OO richest people in Britain. His record production company, Stock Aitken Waterman, has created some of Britain's biggest-selling hits and brought chart success to Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan and Rick Astley.

Together with Mike Stock and Matt Aitken, Waterman's record as a hitmaker has been phenomenal. In one five year period, over lOO of the records that they produced made the U.K. charts - over half of them reaching the Top Ten. They have written and produced numerous No l hits. But Pete Waterman the pop mogul is also chief executive of Waterman Railways and the proud new owner of what, before privatisation, used to be British Rail's Special Train Service.

It was on the coalface that Waterman found the strength to change his life. He describes it rather as if it were a religious experience. "I hated the music world as it was in the Seventies - all lies and deceit - and I couldn't stand the business ethics: it was always money first, music second.

"I wanted to do the most physically demanding and degrading job I could and I needed to go through this pain business. I felt I wanted to purge my soul and do some back-breaking work.

"I needed a better grasp on life. I didn't feel my life was complete, and I went back to Coventry where I was brought up and found a job as a coal-miner. My mother was heartbroken and my friends thought I was on drugs. I remember calling in to see my mother most days covered from head to foot in grime and black dust. I nearly lost my foot when I got gangrene.

"Then I got a Coal Board job as a concreter, making tons of concrete every day and wheeling it up the slopes. My weight dropped from 18 stone to 1O stone. But I wasn't depressed. I'd done what I needed to."

After a year of hard labour, Pete Waterman's purging was complete. When he bumped into an old colleague, he was happy to accept the offer of a job in the south of France, where he met John Travolta's manager. He became an assistant to the star during Saturday Night Fever and Grease. Soon afterwards he set up a production company and began writing his name in pop history.

As he says "Working as a coal miner made me realise that if I felt strongly enough about what I believed in, I would have to do it myself. I am the world's worst employee."

At the age of 48 he is estimated to be worth œ4O-6O million and says candidly that after the first million the rest meant nothing to him. "I could lose the lot tomorrow and then start again," he grins cheerfully in his cramped south London office where gold discs and railway memorabilia compete for space on the walls.

His love of trains began earlier than his passion for music. A railway line ran close to the row of Coventry council houses where he grew up, and Pete was a dedicated trainspotter from the age of four. He says he didn't go to school until he was almost eight, and as a result never learned to read or write - a situation he claims was rectified only 1O years ago.

"I was going on holiday with a girlfriend who wanted to lie on the beach and sunbathe instead of talking to me. She said I would have to read a book so I had to teach myself, and the first book I read was Das Boot - all about U-boats in the war. I still can't do joined-up writing.

"I was born in l947 and the classes had 62 kids in them. There was no room and when I got there I just wasn't interested. I was the kid who hung a pair of smelly kippers from the light bulb above the teacher's head or put a cat inside a girl's desk. I was a bit of a nutcase.

"At home, though, I had a strict upbringing. My father was an aircraft fitter and we were a very religious family. I had to go to church four times every Sunday, and I was never the sort who hung around the bike sheds smoking. But I was a livewire and very streetwise. When I was about l2 I got done for stolen property. I had spent my pocket money in the playground on some bits from the railway - shed plates and work plates from engines scrapped by British Rail. I had no idea they'd been nicked.

"The policeman came round to our house and realised I genuinely didn't know what was going on, so instead of probation, he suggested that I spend Saturday mornings making tea for the railway workers. I was over the moon. It was no sort of punishment to me."

Waterman idolised the men who worked on the railway and his enthusiasm led to a job offer. He left school at 14 and revelled in the regimented discipline of the work. His most vivid memory is of how people quaked with fear when the works manager or the foreman solemnly put on his bowler hat and summoned some miscreant into the office for a dressing-down. It left him with an abiding belief that people not only need discipline but thrive on the security it provides.

The memories of those early years have given Waterman a weakness for nostalgia, and it is this and his cracking energy which have driven him to set up services that recreate the glamour of rail travel in the 195Os.

Waterman Railways already provides a variety of special charter tours, rail cruises in Scotland and heritage days out in the Welsh Marches, the Cotswolds and Cumbria. It also owns the world's best-known locomotive, the Flying Scotsman. There has been controversy about Waterman increasing prices on existing services, but he blames that on other parts of the network which, he says, have increased their charges to him.

This month the company begins a thrice-weekly steam train service from Bristol to Paignton in refurbished l95Os coaches. But Waterman's pride and joy is his VIP service called Premier Days Out. Pullman-style saloon coaches take passengers on trips to Sandringham, Chatsworth and other beautiful locations in grand style with full English breakfast and silver-service four-course dinner.

Waterman is a loyal rail traveller himself. Having bought a helicopter to commute between his Cheshire farm and London business, he decided he much preferred using the train.

"To me the Fifties was the golden age of British Rail," he explains. "All that quality and classiness and snobbery - I just loved it. As a little lad from a council house I can remember those grand trains gliding by and seeing people eating on them. Eating on a train makes me feel posh. It's the only form of transport where you can sit in luxury, eat the finest food and watch the world go by."

Watching the world go by is not something Waterman has ever done much of. He regularly works a 20-hour day and his first two marriages were the casualties of this addiction to work. Private life aside, his early achievements were impressive for an illiterate school-leaver. He left the railways in a burst of romantic disgust when diesel took over from steam. ("I was a Luddite then," he says) and went to work in the aircraft industry with his father. Before he first dipped a toe in the music business he got an engineering job with GEC in Coventry and, aged only l9, became the youngest-ever senior shop steward.

"When you can't read or write, you learn very quickly how to cheat and cover up. When I was at GEC I had a better grasp of how to get things done than many other people. You had to be quick on your feet and you had to be a good orator. You needed to be several steps ahead because you couldn't afford to be found out."

Waterman says that he values education but does not think it essential for success. His eldest son Paul is doing well in the music business with no help from his dad. "He's done it on his own. I got the biggest thrill when he appeared with his band Loveland on Top of the Pops."

His two small daughters by his third wife Debbie - a former Benny Hill angel - show more academic promise than he did but they will have to persuade him to back them in whatever they want to do."I certainly don't believe in paying for a private education. If they really want to go to college or university, I'll give them the means to do it.

"Enthusiasm is the great thing. I"m 48 but I feel as if I'm l2 years old, and I'll always stay l2. I want to be doing what I'm doing now in 2O years' time.

"I've never met a kid with more enthusiasm than me," Waterman grins. "They like a challenge and so do I.

"Kids want to ride their bikes faster than anyone else, they want to do things better and for longer. And so do I. It's exciting. And that," he concludes "is what life is all about."

For more information on Waterman Railway Tours, tel: 543 4l9472.