MY HAVEN – PETE WATERMAN

The Stock Aitken Waterman hitmaker, 68, in the living room of his flat near London Bridge

1

UP IN LIGHTS

My family home’s in Cheshire but this flat in a Victorian warehouse has been my London base since 1986 when SAW took off. When I moved in I found this pair of matching Odeon cinema lights dating back 70 years – the sort that used to pop up with the Wurlitzer organ in days gone by. I’ve always associated the beautiful Art Deco cinemas I used to go to as a kid with glamour and ‘making it’ in life. Of course, back then I never thought I would make it, but when I did I just had to have these lights.

2

SONGS OF PRAISE

Along with my songwriting partners Mike Stock and Matt Aitken, I’m the only person to win three Ivor Novello Songwriter of the Year awards on the trot. We notched up over 100 Top 40 hits in the 80s and early 90s for singers like Kylie, Rick Astley and Bananarama. But the awards were really a begrudging recognition of our success – they had to give them to us because we’d changed the rules of the game, we’d shown that the song was more important than the singer.

3

MY MATE KYLIE

When Kylie Minogue, who was known for playing Charlene in Neighbours, topped the charts with I Should Be So Lucky in 1988 we got so much grief. The big record companies all turned down the chance to sign her, saying, ‘You can’t make a pop star out of a TV star’, and the music press predicted she’d be a one-hit wonder. But we proved them wrong when she became one of the biggest pop stars in the world. We’ve just reissued these old records of hers and Kylie and I are still close.

4

CHOO-CHOO!

I’ve been mad about trains since I was a kid and I’ve been collecting memorabilia like this nameplate of the Robin Hood, a Saint Class locomotive built in 1905 and scrapped in 1932, for nearly 60 years. To mark the 50th anniversary of my collection in 2008, I brought out the book on the table, A Train Is For Life, full of pictures of my model engines and locomotives. It’s sold 65,000 copies, which is staggering and reflects the affection people still have for vintage trains.

5

SWEET DREAMS

This mid-Victorian sweet bowl is a lovely piece of railway history which I picked up for next to nothing in the 60s. In the 1850s taking the train was like travelling on a luxury liner today – it was for really posh people. Everyone was beautifully dressed and the big railway hotels would lay out bowls like this filled with sugared almonds and bonbons for the passengers. It’s extraordinary to think the famous railway engineer Robert Stephenson himself could have eaten sweets from this bowl.

6

AHOY THERE

Like a lot of British people I love boats too – perhaps because we’re an island nation. I’m fascinated by models of all sorts, and promised myself that if I ever made a few quid I’d get a boat in a glass case. So when this period scale model of a 1916 Royal Navy P-type patrol vessel came up for auction in 1986 I had to buy it, not least because it’s an amazing piece of history. It’s been a feature of this room ever since. Funnily enough, I’ve never, ever wanted to own a real boat.