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.