Sir Terence Conran

Speaker 20:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety six, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:28

My castaway this week is a designer and entrepreneur. His skill as a businessman is founded on his skill as a craftsman, as well as his abiding belief that people deserve quality in abundance in their everyday lives. He first came to fame with the Habitat store, which introduced British shoppers to the chicken brick and the duvet. His retailing empire grew into a multi-million pound conglomerate called Storehouse, which included mother care and British home stores. But he was to leave that business and habitat behind him. Nevertheless, his flair for design and his eye for what the rest of us want has kept him in shops and brought him back into restaurants. He now owns seven and is currently designing another seventeen. With three ex wives and five children, he's said to be a better friend than a husband or father, he's ridden the storms to a point where he's achieved personal equanimity. I have the ideal life, he says. Practically everything I do, I really enjoy. He is Sir Terence Conran. And and is that in the main work, Terence, practically everything you do?

Sir Terence Conran1:29

Yes, it is. I don't play golf. I love drawing, writing.

Sir Terence Conran1:35

thinking, They are my hobbies.

Presenter1:37

You are driven by them, your son, Jasper said.

Sir Terence Conran1:39

Oh, drivenness is I don't uh agree at all. I'm not driven. Uh I just enjoy doing it and get a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction from it.

Presenter1:48

But the work you describe is design, not business. That's the emphasis, isn't it, of what you enjoy doing. Design.

Sir Terence Conran1:54

Yes, it's designing, I suppose, to create something new, a new project to me is a really thrilling thing.

Presenter2:02

Is it do you still get a buzz from it when somebody asks you to design something?

Sir Terence Conran2:02

Uh

Sir Terence Conran2:03

Oh gosh, yes.

Sir Terence Conran2:05

Absolutely. I mean, I suppose it's to do with the fact that when I began my life, uh nobody asked me to do anything and I had to So you still feel flattered? And so I f still feel flattered and I can't I can never say no.

Presenter2:12

So you still feel flattered.

Sir Terence Conran2:18

And so

Presenter2:18

And do you still get that buzz when you're designing a restaurant, even when you've got seventeen, as you have at the moment, on the stocks to design?

Sir Terence Conran2:25

I sometimes get

Sir Terence Conran2:27

slightly sweaty hands about uh the amount that we've got uh going on at the moment. I mean, I should emphasize that they're not there not seventeen restaurants for us to run. I think nine of them uh are projects that we're going to run in the future and the other eight are for other people around the world.

Presenter2:46

How important, though, is money to you in all of this? You've made a lot, you've lost a lot, you've made a lot. Again, you're now said to be uh Britain's wealthiest restaurateur, whatever that means. I suppose it means you've got the most seats in your restaurants. Um but how much is it all about money?

Sir Terence Conran3:00

Um none of it at all is about money. I have never ever been interested in money for its own sake in my life. I'm interested in doing things, and to do things, of course, you have to

Sir Terence Conran3:13

Have money and make money. So it's means to an end.

Presenter3:15

But is it also about

Presenter3:19

Being successful is it about the success of Terence Conrad?

Sir Terence Conran3:24

It's about the success of um what I'm involved in rather than I think the personal success. Uh

Presenter3:32

That's what I what I mean by that is your your your critics have said that

Sir Terence Conran3:32

I what I mean by that is you're

Presenter3:35

You know, you want to dominate, you want to impose your taste, which has proved enormously successful, but you want to impose that on the public. That's what you enjoy.

Sir Terence Conran3:44

impose is a word that I don't think I can live with, but I want to uh show people things that they may not have seen before. I mean, after all, people can only buy what they're offered, and what I want to do is offer things, you know.

Sir Terence Conran3:59

uh as honest and genuine a way as I can manage.

Presenter4:01

Offer a design for living, a design for eating.

Sir Terence Conran4:05

Offer things that people didn't know that they might want.

Presenter4:11

Tell me about your first record.

Sir Terence Conran4:12

Ah, my first record is from a film that I adore called Some Like It Hot, and it's that wonderful picture of Marilyn Munro in the railway carriage with Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis in drags supporting her, singing to her ukulele.

Speaker 44:30

I got a fever and inflammation, that's what I got You turned the heat on me, some like it hot Look what you started, a conflagration, baby, that's what Don't let the flame go out, some like it hot

Presenter4:54

Like it hot.

Presenter4:57

Marilyn Monroe, and some like it hot. Of everything you've done, Terence Conran, I suspect its habitat that will go down in in history as as the great revolution of the nineteen sixties that changed all our lives, brought about by you the wok, striped aprons, wooden pepper mills, and, as I mentioned in the introduction, the duvet and the chicken brig.

Presenter5:16

Um you don't own it any more. How sad does that make you?

Sir Terence Conran5:19

Not at all. It's owned by Ikea and Ingba Kamprad, who built Ikea, talks to me quite a lot.

Presenter5:27

And of course the interesting thing is that Ikea lives and breathes by the flat pack, which I think I'm writing saying was your invention, wasn't it?

Sir Terence Conran5:34

Well, certainly it's something that we started to produce in the early 60s when I was a furniture manufacturer. Whether it was the something that was absolutely original to me, but I saw the advantage of furniture that was packed flat, easy to take away, change in society, women working, what time could a couple go out and purchase furniture together, only at the weekends, and they weren't at home during the week to receive a furniture delivery.

Presenter6:02

But describe to me that where the concept of habitat came from. I mean, what made you think that we wanted a revolution in our lifestyle, that the time was right?

Sir Terence Conran6:12

Well, it came in two directions. First of all, I mentioned I was a furniture manufacturer and I produced a range of domestic furniture and we sold this range to retailers around the UK. And when I went round and looked at our furniture in these shops, it was invisible. I mean, it was simply subsumed by a mass of sort of other styles. No retailer had any philosophy at all. And I thought, well, it's never going to succeed under these circumstances. Equally, on the other hand, I'd seen friends of mine like Mary Kwan, Poland, Tarfin, Ozzy Clark, the early days of Bieber, frustrated designers putting their ideas directly in front of the public in the way they wanted to put them, because they couldn't get through the brown buyers. And I thought, well, I should be doing the same sort of thing for home furnishing.

Presenter7:06

So there was in in your approach an element of that Tesco pileum high sellum cheap. Was it look here is a mass of stuff, you can have it now?

Sir Terence Conran7:14

It wasn't just sort of gross pile it high. It was just having a lot of things, a stocky feel in the shops, not things that were pussily displayed.

Presenter7:24

You created this shop in the Fulham Road, which was desperately unfashionable at the time, and lo and behold they came, the great and the good, as well as the ordinary. Is it true that Kingsley Amis courted Elizabeth Jane Howard in the basement?

Sir Terence Conran7:35

So I'm told, yes.

Presenter7:37

And the Beatles came.

Sir Terence Conran7:38

And the Beatles came to the city.

Presenter7:41

But did you make a lot of money very quickly?

Sir Terence Conran7:44

No, we made a little bit of money, but I think that everybody felt, and certainly I did, that we were on to something new that was going to be successful. Everybody said, oh, of course it'll never work anywhere else other than swinging Chelsea. And I thought, well, that's rubbish. You know, it'll go in Manchester, it'll go in Birmingham, it'll go in Glasgow. And indeed it did.

Presenter8:06

Tell me about your second record.

Sir Terence Conran8:07

Ah now this is

Sir Terence Conran8:09

A record for contemplation. It's absolutely wonderful for when I want to sit down, draw, think and be creative. Uh Pasha Bell's Canon in D.

Presenter9:21

Part of Pachelbell's Canon in D major played by the English concert conducted by Trevor Pinnock.

Presenter9:27

In fact, Terence Connan, you opened your first restaurant, I think, ten or eleven years before you opened Habitat. Um you opened the soup kitchen in nineteen fifty three. Is it true that all these tramps turned up on the first night thinking it was a hand out?

Sir Terence Conran9:40

Absolutely. It was actually the first lunchtime. We opened at lunch.

Sir Terence Conran9:45

In they all came because of course it was near Trafalgar Square and they thought, oh a very smart um soup kitchen. Indeed it was. So they sat down and they ate their soup and we said gentlemen this time it's free, this is our opening party and we were very lucky that a journalist from the evening news came by at that moment and she thought it was such a wonderful story that we got a good write-up.

Presenter10:07

But again, describe the concept to me, if you will. I mean, what was the soup? Who made it?

Sir Terence Conran10:12

Debutants

Sir Terence Conran10:13

A friend and I had this idea of a cafe for impoverished sort of students like ourselves. And I knew nothing, neither of us knew anything about cooking. And I had a girlfriend in Paris at the time, so I went and stayed with her and worked as a washer up in and eventually a vegetable boy in a French restaurant to learn something about it. And came back with the idea that soup was the answer because you didn't need a chef. You know, I had this huge stockpot with a Bunsen burner on it bubbling away, made very good stock.

Presenter10:46

And all his Deb stirring it up.

Sir Terence Conran10:47

And you know, we employed these very nice girls who were extremely pleasant and very pretty. And I suppose the thing that made it successful was the second espresso coffee machine in London. Espresso coffee suddenly sort of took people's imagination and a real cup of coffee. And I suppose for the fifties it was what marijuana became for the sixties.

Presenter11:12

And then you moved to the King's Road and opened uh another restaurant'cause you left.

Sir Terence Conran11:15

Yeah.

Presenter11:15

Yes. Was the King's Road fashionable already then? This would have been 55?

Sir Terence Conran11:19

It was there were Stirrings then and um as I say Mary Quant you know, established herself there and her husband Alexander opened a restaurant underneath her shop.

Presenter11:21

Mm.

Presenter11:29

But you were very much in the vanguard of of of

Sir Terence Conran11:32

Oh, very much. I mean, we were all totally impoverished. Everybody who talks about the six fifties and sixties and, you know, what a thrilling time. We were really broke. I mean, I remember going into Miriam Alexander's flat, and you couldn't open the door because there was a huge pile of writs behind the door. I mean, they were, you know, everybody was just getting by.

Presenter11:52

So these days you own seven restaurants, as I said. One of them, Mezzo, seats seven hundred, said to be the biggest in Europe. What are the the the basic guiding principles? I mean, it still must be good food, unpretentious but good.

Sir Terence Conran12:03

Unpotential

Sir Terence Conran12:05

Good food is the I mean, why do you go to a restaurant? Go for food.

Presenter12:08

Well you go for ambience as well.

Sir Terence Conran12:09

Yes, well I was going to say, then the service I think, and and then the ambiance. And if you get all three things right, then you get an opportunity to get that sort of essential buzz of a a happy, contented, energetic restaurant.

Presenter12:25

But pretentiousness is not allowed. I mean, I suspect you're the sort of person who absolutely hates waiting for the flunky to come and pour the wine, you know, and you're not allowed to touch it in the bucket.

Sir Terence Conran12:32

Yeah.

Sir Terence Conran12:33

Oh, I think it makes me go mad with frustration. And I hate the sort of discreet charm of a lady chapel that many three-star restaurants think that I like energy. I like the waiters rushing through with long white aprons and trays above their heads. I like to see the food being cooked. And this is why many of our restaurants have got an open kitchen where you can actually see the energy in the kitchen. I like the whole theatrical performance of it.

Presenter13:02

Record number three.

Sir Terence Conran13:03

Record number three is Leg Miserary, and it's appropriate as it should appear here because the beginning of a a meal in a good restaurant might be a dry martini, and I'm unlikely to get one of those on my desert island. So I've got this bit of music which is twice as good as a dry martini.

Presenter14:17

Part of Gregorio Allegri's Miserere sung by the choir of King's College, Cambridge, the solo treble Roy Goodman, and they were conducted by Sir David Wilcox.

Presenter14:27

Going back to your beginnings, Terence Conran, were you aware of of style as a boy? Did you have an eye at a very young age, do you think?

Presenter14:36

Well

Sir Terence Conran14:37

I honestly don't know. My mother certainly did, and she was very much a sort of guiding light in my life and my sister's life.

Sir Terence Conran14:45

I remember once sitting down with my sister in India and we were turning over four hundred carpets.

Sir Terence Conran14:52

And we chose the same 27, so I thought this is extraordinary that um we both have this identical eye.

Presenter15:00

Hmm.

Sir Terence Conran15:00

And I suppose I must believe in genes.

Presenter15:03

And you excelled in art at school, I think, and you collected things. What did you collect?

Sir Terence Conran15:08

I started off by collecting wildflowers, and then I went on to butterflies and particularly moths, hawk moths, that became my passion.

Sir Terence Conran15:19

and Beatles.

Presenter15:20

But you also made things. You you you had a workshop and and and did carpentry.

Sir Terence Conran15:25

Yes, I loved making things and made wooden things, I made uh metal things, I managed to get a a um three and a half inch Miford lathe by selling a model of um a boat that I'd made to a local publican and he exchanged it for the lathe. And later I became absolutely passionate about pottery and built a wood-fired kiln in the garden.

Presenter15:47

And does all of that talent indicate that you weren't particularly academically bright?

Sir Terence Conran15:53

No, I wasn't uh an academic. I mean, I went to a pre prep school for Eton, and my mother very intelligently saw that Eton would be exactly the wrong sort of school for me, and I went to Branston, which was absolutely the right sort of school for me.

Presenter16:07

Which you left at sixteen with three school certs and went to art school. But the big turning point, I think, came when you were eighteen and you went out to work. What did you do?

Sir Terence Conran16:18

I got

Sir Terence Conran16:19

Dropped into a most extraordinary job that paid me four pounds ten shillings a week, which was something called a Rayon Design Centre. It'd been set up by the round industry in this country to improve design standards. I was given the job of editing a magazine, being the art director of it, putting on exhibitions. I mean all the things that I was totally unqualified to do.

Presenter16:40

But you also design, you design materials and things by that stage.

Sir Terence Conran16:43

Oh, I was di I'd been trained as a textile designer, but I equally had had this workshop with Eduardo Palazzo, where I started, because I'd had all this craft training when I was at Brance and knew how to weld and make wooden things, I was making furniture mainly for myself, but also for friends.

Presenter17:02

But out of all of that designing experience came the the the three-legged conical basket chair and matching flowerpot, which I think a lot of people remember.

Sir Terence Conran17:09

Yeah.

Presenter17:11

Well I thought it was a half-pot in a kinda pointed thing.

Sir Terence Conran17:12

If you've got a good idea, and you know, you've got a cone and a tripod, you know, see how many different ways you can use it.

Presenter17:19

And it got pictured for house and garden, and then the story goes that Picasso bought one of these chairs. Is that right?

Sir Terence Conran17:25

And not the cone one. He bought another one with sort of two large balls that you put your hands on and a s a seat made out of rope uh which was incredibly thrilling. I mean to me, you know, to have Picasso.

Sir Terence Conran17:38

Buy a chair or fewer. I mean, it was better than a housekeeping seal of approval.

Presenter17:43

And you'd have been, what, then, about twenty one, twenty two?

Sir Terence Conran17:46

Yes, I guess about that. Yeah.

Presenter17:47

And did you ever hear from him? I mean, did he actually like it? Did he sit in it? Do we know?

Sir Terence Conran17:51

Oh yes, uh in fact, uh he bought it because it reminded him of one of his paintings, I'm told. He liked it because, you know, it was his aesthetic.

Presenter18:02

Next piece of music.

Sir Terence Conran18:04

Next bit of music.

Sir Terence Conran18:06

is uh Django Reinhardt and uh Nuage, which is Hot Club of France, and this I chose because it reminded me of my time in Paris when I used to go to a wonderful little club and listen to him playing.

Presenter19:22

Django, Reinhardt and Nuage. Let's leap through the years, Terence, because as everyone knows, Habitat grew and grew and then came the Conran shop, its upmarket sister which evolved in in the seventies and then you merged with Mothercare in the early eighties. You acquired Richard Shops and then Heels and then in nineteen eighty six you merged with British Home Stores and the whole conglomerate was called Storehouse which had a turnover of I think in excess of a billion pounds and employed thirty three thousand people.

Sir Terence Conran19:43

And

Presenter19:50

twelfth largest retailer in the country. What what was the game plan for you? What were you trying to do in amassing all these companies?

Sir Terence Conran19:58

Well, all the time they were companies that had problems. Mothercare had a merchandise problem, very well-run company, very good properties, but its merchandise was really horrible. And Selim Zilke, who'd started it, said, I think you should run it because you understand merchandise. And we had a terrific time redesigning the range and made things really good looking and hugely successful. Same with Richards, it was absolutely collapsed, chain of 200 women's fashion stores, really terrible.

Sir Terence Conran20:33

And we bought them and revived them.

Presenter20:36

And what did you want to do with British Home Stores?

Sir Terence Conran20:38

They were a successful-ish range of stores, but I mean they were going nowhere. They had no philosophy. They were losing groundmarks and Spencer's all the time. And what I wanted to do was to make it something where the products were simply designed, cheerful, well-priced, and we had all the talent and ability in our design side to do this.

Presenter21:03

The story goes that that you introduced a pair of knickers at some board meeting and sort of waved them in the air and said how disgusting they were and that you didn't want to sell them in your shops. Is that right?

Sir Terence Conran21:13

Well, uh obviously in

Sir Terence Conran21:15

Project like British Home Stores, you have there's a huge re-education job to do, and so I'd very frequently take the worst examples of merchandise that I thought you know were completely against the philosophy that we'd established and say how could we possibly sell these you know appalling tarts knickers because it got the message across. I mean it offended a lot of buyers and I certainly didn't make friends at that time amongst many of the staff at BHS. But of course one of the problems was that it was a merger rather than a takeover and so you had to cajole people and persuade them and it was pretty exhausting and very political.

Presenter21:53

And in the end it didn't work for you. You were overcome by the politics, I think, and you were eased out, really, weren't you?

Sir Terence Conran21:57

You are e

Sir Terence Conran21:59

No, I wasn't. No, I eased myself out because I felt that I had set the company on a course and I wasn't doing the sort of things that I like doing.

Presenter22:10

But your critics say that you have this mania for detail, and you care about the knickers and the individual bits and pieces that are being sold, but you also have this this desire to

Sir Terence Conran22:14

You care about

Presenter22:20

To instruct people as to how they should live, and you can't do both. And they've got a point there.

Sir Terence Conran22:26

I don't think you know, you keep on using these words like instruct. I don't. I offer people something, put it in front of them and show them this as an alternative. You could buy this rather than that.

Presenter22:39

Your third wife, Caroline, said you were incredibly depressed when the storehouse experience came to an end.

Presenter22:47

It changed your whole outlook on life, is she right?

Sir Terence Conran22:50

It did depress me, certainly. And it also coincided, of course, with the recession and problems in the Butler's Wharf development. It was a very, very bad time indeed in England for many people.

Presenter23:06

And the most miserable time of your life, would you say, looking back?

Sir Terence Conran23:09

I think probably, yes.

Presenter23:13

Code number five.

Sir Terence Conran23:14

Record number five is here to cheer me up like anything, which is Handel's music for the Royal Fireworks. I'm passionate about fireworks and certainly I don't intend to have a funeral or anything like that. I'm going to leave a very considerable amount of money in my will to have a fantastic firework display and a feast for my friends.

Presenter24:38

Part of the overture to Handel's music for the Royal Fireworks, played by the English Baroque soloists, conducted by John Elliott Gardner. Apart from spawning all these businesses, Terence Conran, your name has become almost dynastic. Your son Jasper, obviously, is a very successful fashion designer. You groan.

Sir Terence Conran24:53

This is very

Sir Terence Conran24:57

I grown here.

Presenter24:58

Why don't you like being head of a dinner stick?

Sir Terence Conran25:00

Mm.

Presenter25:00

Why not?

Sir Terence Conran25:02

Well, I don't think in that sort of way. You know, I mean, I really am much more simplistic th than that. You know, I don't have empires in mind or dynasties in mind.

Presenter25:12

But if you name shops after yourself, you know, the Conran shop, I mean, obviously the name is very much.

Sir Terence Conran25:16

It was only meant to be one small shop. That was the trouble.

Presenter25:20

How many all in a?

Sir Terence Conran25:21

Uh there are four at the moment.

Presenter25:23

But tell me about your family, because uh obviously we have to mention Shirley Conran, your second wife, who of course wrote Superwoman and then Lace among other novels, and your third wife, Caroline Conran, well known food writer. They've all um

Presenter25:38

complained about you, I suppose, some with affection and others without. Um you do sound as if you've been, you know, a a a pretty poor husband and perhaps a worse father. Do you think there's some truth in that?

Sir Terence Conran25:49

Probably, yes. So I'm told from time to time. I love them all and we all talk together and we're very friendly together, but they've all divorced me and therefore, you know, I must be unsatisfactory in all sorts of different ways.

Presenter26:07

Why do you think you were?

Sir Terence Conran26:09

I supp I suppose partially because of the work thing, that um my hobby that, you know, that I'm so devoted to what I'm doing that I do not give enough time to being a good husband.

Presenter26:25

Or father, neglect is the word that's cropped up with J Jasper and

Sir Terence Conran26:28

Mm-hmm.

Presenter26:30

I think your sister Priscilla said you're a pretty appalling father.

Sir Terence Conran26:34

I don't think any of them would say that I was a terrible father to them.

Sir Terence Conran26:39

They would just say maybe we would have liked to have seen more of you than we did.

Presenter26:44

But these days you're you're great friends, it seems. These days you're you're a much better father than you were when they were young.

Sir Terence Conran26:51

Yes, well, I have perhaps m more time now to be a father. I mean, I really was.

Sir Terence Conran26:56

working to pay the gas bills in those days and and the sort of things that I were doing, you know, didn't automatically pay the gas bills.

Presenter27:05

But do you think looking back across it, um uh the the second two marriages in particular and and and the children do you think you you could have played it differently?

Sir Terence Conran27:13

Oh yes, and I certainly have uh regrets about that. But, you know, you can't sitting on your desert island, you can think about it, but you can't do much about it. I mean, it's happened, so all I can do is do the best that I can at the moment.

Presenter27:28

Record number six.

Sir Terence Conran27:29

Record number six.

Sir Terence Conran27:31

is Mad About the Boy, um Noel Card's song sung here by Gertrude Lawrence, and um is actually about my children. It's um meant to be a compliment to them that I am mad about them all.

Sir Terence Conran27:48

Four boys, one girl and five grandchildren.

Speaker 427:53

Mad about the boy I know it's stupid to be mad about the boy I'm so ashamed of it, but must admit the sleepless nights I've had about the boy

Speaker 428:10

On the silver screen, he melts my foolish heart in every single scene. Although I'm quite aware that here a narrow train

Presenter28:21

Gertrude Lawrence and mad about the boy. Um you live in London these days, Turns Connan, without a wife, in a loft near Tower Bridge. Can you describe it to me?

Sir Terence Conran28:32

Well, it's um a very modern loft. Uh it's a building designed by Michael Hopkins and it has the huge advantage of being extremely spacious with very little in it. Uh like the thing I did in my very first house, I tore out all the walls and made a living room, a dining room and a kitchen all in one space. I'd sleep in the corner as well um if I could.

Presenter28:57

And these days you work with people you like, people who do believe in your philosophy. That's what you want.

Sir Terence Conran29:03

It's a very, very, very happy time in my life because I work only with people that I really like and who certainly appear, unless they're terribly good liars, quite to like me. And so there are no politics in it. There are no shareholders to worry about. Certainly there isn't the city there. And we're doing things, all of us I think, that we're really proud of.

Presenter29:28

Tell me about being knighted, as you were, by misses Thatter in the early eighties. How much of a shock was it to you? I think a a a lifelong non Tory voter. That's right, isn't it?

Speaker 429:39

Absolutely then.

Presenter29:39

How much of a a shock was it to realize that you were the embodiment of everything that that she stood for, really, enterprise and market force forces and giving people choices?

Sir Terence Conran29:50

It was a considerable shock and certainly my first reaction was not to accept it, but Caroline said that being a lady would get her to the front of the queue in the local grocery store, so she thought that I probably ought to accept it. And interestingly, when I went and talked to the designers in the business, who I thought would, you know, think it was the most pseudo-corner thing to do.

Sir Terence Conran30:13

They said no, you should accept it because it is symbolic of design being important.

Presenter30:19

even at the risk of being thought, as Sir Margaret Thatcher would think of it, as being one of us.

Sir Terence Conran30:24

Well, give Margaret Thatcher her due, which not many people do these days, and I'm the last person to, usually. She understood the importance of design, and I think saw in what I was doing, and certainly in establishing the Design Museum, that it was something that was being done for the good of the country. And, you know, she was always supportive about that sort of thing. She gave us a couple of dinner parties at Downing Street to try and launch the Design Museum and get funds for it.

Presenter30:54

Seventh piece of music.

Sir Terence Conran30:57

Ah, now here you are. This is a a bit of music for being on a desert island. And you know, when your spirits get low, you can listen to

Sir Terence Conran31:07

Desmond Decker, and you can get it if you really want it.

Speaker 431:12

You can get it if you really want.

Speaker 431:16

You can get it if you really want.

Speaker 431:20

You can get it if you really want But you must try, try and try

Speaker 431:29

You succeeded.

Presenter31:37

Desmond Decker, and you can get it if you really want it. What next, Terence? Um you're opening a restaurant in Parish?

Sir Terence Conran31:44

Well, we hope to, yes.

Presenter31:45

And shops where in in Japan?

Sir Terence Conran31:48

Yes, we have one in Tokyo at the moment and then we have one in a rather unlikely place opening this autumn called Fukuoka and then in Hamburg as well and with great excitement going back to Manhattan again and doing a shop and restaurant in Manhattan.

Presenter32:05

So you're you're building another empire, and this time it's an international one?

Sir Terence Conran32:10

Oh, it was always international. I was um always believed in the common market and we had a discussion, I remember at Habitat Time, should we open a shop in Glasgow? and I said, Well, why shouldn't we open in Paris? It's about the same distance as Glasgow and I think we might do better in Paris than Glasgow. Actually we opened in both.

Presenter32:27

And what will your um

Presenter32:30

It's a little bit premature, but what will your epitaph be, do you think? Well, let's say when you've disappeared to this desert island, you're never to return unless you're an extremely good swimmer. What what do you want people to say about you? He he gave us a sense of style, or he rid us of the three piece suite.

Sir Terence Conran32:44

Oh gosh. Maybe that he demonstrated that were things that were available that we didn't know about.

Sir Terence Conran32:54

in food, in furniture, in design.

Sir Terence Conran32:58

Uh you know, I don't intend to uh have a gravestone.

Presenter33:02

But, um, if you did as my producer suggested, perhaps you should say apré moi le duvet.

Sir Terence Conran33:08

Oh well, perhaps it certainly improved the sex life of people in this country enormously. And think of the

Sir Terence Conran33:14

Millions of hours of bedmaking that the that it's saved people.

Presenter33:19

Last record.

Sir Terence Conran33:21

Uh the last record is uh part one of Keith Jarrett's wonderful Cologne concert, and I choose this again because I can sit down and work and draw, and it inspires me.

Presenter34:35

Part of Keith Jarrett's Cologne concert. Now, if you could only take one of those eight records, Terence.

Sir Terence Conran34:41

I'd probably take that one because it is so fantastic and energetic, and I think it reflects my style.

Presenter34:52

And your book? You've got the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare there.

Sir Terence Conran34:57

Well, I had a great argument between bile bodies, which makes me laugh like anything, and um HG Wells's History of the World and decided on that because I realized I knew so little about the history of the world and you know here would be an opportunity

Sir Terence Conran35:12

Um

Presenter35:13

To be sensible.

Sir Terence Conran35:14

To be sensible, young.

Presenter35:16

And your luxury.

Sir Terence Conran35:18

Well, this was a terrible problem again, because I'm a devoted cigar smoker, so I did think of all the private humidors in Dunhills. But then I thought probably let's be sensible again and have an endless supply of A four sheets of white paper and an endless supply of four B pencils.

Presenter35:37

Terence Conrad, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Sir Terence Conran35:41

A pleasure.

Speaker 235:49

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.