Mark Constantine: Homeless at 16 to Founding LUSH

0:02This is a Global Player original podcast.

0:11Hello and welcome to Full Disclosure, a podcast project designed to let me spend an hour, much more time than I would be allowed to spend with interesting people on the radio. Although, Mark Constantine, legend of Lush, you are actually a bit of an old hand at the radio. You were on LBC for quite a long time in my early days. Yeah, it was very, very nice to come back today. Good. Yeah. Because you're interested in the news is, well, no doubt that's something that we'll move on to. You're quite a hard man to pin down in terms of there's not an awful lot of information about you. Oh, good. Is that deliberate?

0:48Not particularly deliberate. I mean, there is a lot to say about me. Yes. um i'm quite in i'm quite a i like to work yeah okay because i presume that you get way more interview requests than you give interviews yes judging and which is why we're particularly happy oh no i i've i'm delighted to be here um i should give a quick mention to my radio producer eleanor as well who only about once a year says do you know you really should get on full disclosure and as soon as she said your name we all went oh gosh yes of course because you'd been on the radio with us relatively recently about something that we will come to but um but i mean that means that we will i won't be when i ask you questions about your childhood and biographical detail apart from a couple of rather huge um moments and and things i won't be reading from notes and just queuing you up to tell me stuff that i already know because i don't really know anything so so where were where were you born i was born in sutton in surrey um my dad was a metropolitan and policeman um my mum was the secretary um and then um my dad left when i was two and my mum returned to her mother in weymouth um where i was brought up so you won't remember anything from the first two years i don't know next to nothing no nothing at all really and you got back to weymouth so that your grandparents could play more of a role grandmother granddad had died when he was in his 50s um my my grandmother was lovely my now she was really lovely and everyone thought even i don't get on terribly well on my mom and she's still alive um but she uh she would always speak well of her mother okay so what what are the early memories um what are the sort of the weymouth years um yes which were which are the early memories i want to share is the uh well i don't make me get the thumbscrews out so early in the interview mark let's start with primary school shall we um yeah i i enjoyed that although in a in a reunion years later um a lady called elspeth cox who i remember from then said um oh i'm so glad things worked out well for you mark because you were such a sad boy at school i missed my dad i think i didn't know him but i knew my mum missed him and and i was with i was brought up so it was my mum my nan and my aunt would be there a lot and all of them um because of the loss of their father i think and because of my grandfather and coming out of the second world war loss was a big thing and i think um how can i put that um abandonment issues were probably there yeah and and presumably in sort of but in the mid 50s now, mid to late 50s, there weren't that many kids in class whose dad wasn't around.

3:38Well, that didn't dawn on me. But what did dawn on me was I didn't really know men very well. So my father's name was John, and there was quite a special moment when I did a perfume that I would have liked him to have smelt of. And it was made up of things like the coffee, the dentist's breath, the hands of a teacher, the smell of pencils, you know, just a series of things. I didn't do it on purpose. I accidentally stumbled into it and suddenly realized. And it was a perfume that I think people, that if you, it was something to where you got close to someone. It was the smell of a jacket. It wasn't something very overt.

4:26um and one of the the fellow founders of lush rowena said um so something intimate mark something close and um and comforting everything your father wasn't oh wow but yeah and and the wonderful thing well perhaps we'll get to more stories about my dad later we may but before we do let's jump years forward and just talk a little bit about how you what's the word what word do you use compose a perfume i mean what's the process um well it there's 101 different ways of making a what's yours um i tend to go from a piece of music so i probably start with a piece of music um let's take massive attack um protection or something like that so that that's all bass notes with tiny little marvelous sort of illuminated almost flowers growing out of the darkness so so i want something very dark and resinous and and then perhaps with orange blossom and and things like that just peeking out of it or well it's it's always like that i mean it could be it could be um it's a mixture of things for example there's a very popular perfume in in lush called karma yes and what karma was in 1973 i i was living in london and um and to be honest drug culture was dreadful it was just people were slipping off chairs everywhere yeah and i lived just around the corner from kensington high street and at that time cheap um incense materials from india you know they were everywhere and so there was this really really strong smell of that um and then there were there and so i was trying to create that damp bedrooms a little bit of damp bedroom a little bit of this a little bit of that so you so i built that as mine in a way my 1973 perfume and then i happened to have a couple of the the um i don't know why they were there they were shop fitters who were quite old hippies and they had a van with a this is only well it's it's 25 years ago but they had a van with a flower on the side right and it was getting a ticket and i heard one of them go bad karma man you're a slight and you think i haven't heard that for a long time and then I thought well I'm going to call it karma but I also in amongst that was Radiohead's Street Spirit so because that's all all the notes are of a sort of intertwining middle thing and I wanted to make this very creamy smell to it so that so that so different things they're a bit of a memory a bit of a piece of work a bit of a what did he just said is there a a form of neurodiversity here if you're associated i have synesthesia i don't know that's the phrase that's the i thought synesthesia was something else was colors and sounds well no it can be anything yeah i i have i thought i was in a big group i told you i knew nothing about you didn't i was in a big group of 50 people and i tried to describe the way i smell something which is So, for example, tea and coffee is circular, chocolate is square.

7:34As things go up one side and come across, I can smell something that's incomplete. Right. You know, I know that you always like, and I can say that so and so, they agree with me, but they don't necessarily. I thought everyone. Yes. When you've got an issue, you think everyone's got it because nobody else had it. Only my son and it's genetic. Is that right? You say issue. Other people might say superpower. um well a lot of people find it really disturbing because it you know they'll have to stop the car to be sick or things like that i don't get it like that i i think um yeah i i find so what it is for me is a method of expression yes it's um it's a creative process well yes it's quite interesting the customers that you end up with for it because i'm not very good in the winter and I tend to do a lot of perfumery in February and March desperately waiting for spring and summer and I can't I can't tell you how pleased I am the snow drops right and therefore I tend to notice that customers that are really really keen on the perfume are similar similar times that's incredible yeah well it's a lovely way to communicate yes and it is a form of communication yes it's much better than words some people don't understand that about so well what's so good about it is it um so you smell with a lobe of your brain so um you remember all this with um when we went through um covid people couldn't smell anything lost their senses well because and it shrunk the brain right so that that was part of what was going on there most people did get their sense of smell back um but you you don't hear with a path of your brain you hear through a series of channels and an interface you don't see you go through a series of channels and interface um so for me communicating through perfumery can be very visceral very i can grab people's by the heart and because it it catches them out they're prepared for a poem they're prepared for a song lyric but uh you know a smell that really gets in you know my therapist was talking to me about this literally yesterday in the context of abandonment in the context of being adopted which i've always persuaded myself i was very relaxed and and unaffected by but at some point and on the 27th or 28th day of my life i was taken away from my biological mother and given to someone else and she said just think of the smell yeah just think of what the smell i'd never really caught it until yesterday have you ever interviewed lem sessy i have yes yeah and he yes of course and he talks about the adoption side of things well he wasn't incredible they didn't even get permission for him to be adopted that's right and uh no i'm amazed you didn't think it was a very big event well i hadn't clocked it mark that's all you know and um and speaking of clocking things and indeed rewinding your particular clock when did you first notice this ability or this phenomenon then when i made that when i made dear john then so not as a child you didn't you just thought everybody else had a similar reaction to the relationship between the senses between sight and smell and sound and yeah didn't know that you were different well i i think i sort of got the hang i was a bit different no but but in that very specific context no that was the way you process that was then my son was 18 my eldest son why did elspeth cox think you were sad i don't know it's interesting isn't it i i don't know i i i don't know but i was shocked when she said it but you didn't you didn't necessarily agree you didn't do you when you look back at six-year-old mark is he sad well this is really we go back to the grandmother and we go back to the mum the mum had been my my mother had had polio when she was seven right and had been in an isolation hospital her father died when she was about nine and she was sort of very conscious of it and he had spoiled her rotten suddenly it was stopped and then her husband left her at 22 you've got my nan whose husband died in his 50s um and and the whole general feeling at that time you know i mean abandonment issues were the order of the day so i suspect they wouldn't have given it a name back then would they really well no no it wouldn't have been something that was even recognized there's a lot about both you and i that we have had help i hope so i hope this is good things oh i definitely feel mine's a good thing same same so you're talking about a family of females defined in some part by by loss and and regret and abandonment yes and that's the nest you're in yes so it's bound to impact yes whether you notice it well then my mum married the lodger right um and we left my nan and she died oh lord and uh and i picked up a sort of a sense of responsibility from that at the age of 12 and unfortunately eric was a bit on the violent side towards both of you or um me more i could understand it with me okay but anyway there was violence in the household and uh and so as you know by the time i was 16 coming on 17 i'd left home i was thrown out of home really um until we get to that and this seems like a slightly odd question to ask in the context of what you just said but what do you look back on elspeth notwithstanding as moments of real happiness in your childhood

13:16perhaps we'll come back to that when I've given it more thought you can't think of anything Christmas was always nice and they were so kind my nan was fabulous but there was a lot of I mean when I speak to my therapist your nan's got a lot to answer for good better best never let them rest till my good is better and my better best um you know pride goes before a fall the number of times people ask me aren't you proud with what you achieved absolutely not i'm petrified of pride programmed not to be proud um i don't like it it's i don't i don't like it well it prevents you from moving forward sometimes perhaps it's resting pride you think yeah well i certainly yes no you certainly don't do that well i'm an overachiever aren't i yes dreadful i actually you've called it the entrepreneur's wound haven't you but that's got more to do with the absence of your dad i think than with anything that your grandma well that's what's that's what was always thought i remember reading about it first of all a lady in the telegraph who'd interviewed many business characters um had said look this is my summary of everyone i've met um and she then described the entrepreneur's wound and then i think um and i can't bring his name to mind straight away but the chap that um was in charge of marks and spencer's Stuart Rose?

14:34Stuart Rose. Did a stunning interview on BBC about the entrepreneur's wound. And he had the most tragic circumstances. And so I realized, I started to pay attention and listen to what these people were saying and realized that it was probably true of me too. Did you do, did you, I mean, were you a good student at primary school? Interested in anything? I got through to grammar school. So I think everyone was pretty shocked. Really? Yeah. But was there pressure at home to do well in the 11 plus? No. Pressure at home to go out and sing in the choir on a Sunday. Okay. Was it a religious household then?

15:10No. Not at all? Peace and quiet. They cared about choir and they wanted you out of the house? No, they cared me out, yes. Okay. Well, did you enjoy anything? Were there subjects that you liked? Did you demonstrate an affinity for anything? Well, I'm sorry to make it sound as if I didn't enjoy anything. No, well, I don't. But it's bringing it to mind, isn't it? Yes, of course it is. So you can bring other senses to mind. So easily. Yeah, well, I'm thinking it's... The smells. It's almost as if I need to interview you on a different dimension, don't I? Not just using words to conjure up moments.

15:44Well, they're so useless, aren't they, words? Well, you say that. They serve me quite well. Well, they do and they don't, don't they? I mean, this is why you have to return to the same subject repeatedly. Yeah, you're right. Because communication is so lacking. There's a line in Keats, which you've just made me think of. which actually possibly does prove some of the power of words. He talks about yearning in his letters, not in a poem, for a life of sensation rather than of thought. Yes, beautiful. And that's what you live, in a way. Well, I was thinking, too, that where I do agree with words, there's a lovely poem in that particular book about a woman who has been to see the specialist and heard nothing but dreadful words about her condition and how she wants to put those words away somewhere.

16:30can she can she make them lighter somehow can she make them more joyful so i think i think i think words are a big deal i mean i i knew one person you spent ages working on a word um just one word to to improve communication so uh but they're not but they don't come tripping out of your brain when i say to you what were you good at at school or what did you enjoy or what were your happy moments it's not that there aren't any it's just that you they don't yeah you're wired in a way that makes it difficult to reach for that, open that drawer. It normally takes me about... I don't want to say it takes me a day to answer a question.

17:03That's the worst thing you can say to an interviewer. Awfully sorry. Lock the doors. Lock the doors. I like giving things thought. Yes, of course. And therefore, I don't really like hurried things. I'm not much of a gunslinger. No, clearly. And people ask you for decisions when you're a boss. They want decisions now, preferably. Yes. and um and i'll i well i'm what i'm most well known for is endless stories while i take them around the houses and i'm thinking well well we're going around the houses because i don't know what you're probably also telling them something through the story that that is happening on a different level yeah on a more well i am i'm hoping to anyway of course of course most of the time i think they think i'm a rambling old fool i'm sure they don't um the book you refer to for people listening and not watching is is the poetry business school which is a fairly self-explanatory volume yeah put together with a couple of friends a couple of colleagues that was exactly it yeah i mean it's just it's um i've always wanted to do it because i've always used so much poetry if we're talking about the uselessness of words then you have to have craftsmen or crafts women who are fine-tuning that for you so that you can fish it out and use it and that's the point isn't it that's So that's the issue.

18:20How do you get your communication to a standard? Which is why I much prefer to use perfumery or something else. I'm just wondering what an interview would be like if we were concentrating exclusively on the sense of smell. It would be a fascinating exercise, wouldn't it? Yes. In you creating something that conjures up an answer to something that I've just asked you. Well, I can explain that a little. I'm sure you can. Would you like? Yes, I would. Yeah. So we have a treatment in the spa called synesthesia. and what we did to do that so simon my son was working at that it doesn't work with me at the moment but that he was at the time and we had a um a therapist who sat there and said a word to us and we had to go and choose an oil that meant that word so she would say focus without fear and then we would have to go and find the thing and then that turned into this treatment that slowly it was modified into this treatment and um which which is the most popular treatment we do but that so when you you come in you get to choose certain bottles that say that kind of thing rather like alice and wonderland yeah what i love about the way you explain this stuff mark is that you just you strip it bare of any suspicions whatsoever of wooness or or new agey nonsense Oh, I'm so disappointed.

19:38No, no. Let me clarify. You make it sound like the most natural and sensible thing in the world. Well, of course it is. Well, it is to you. And it is to me as I listen to you. But if I was listening to someone else describe some of these things, I'm not sure that they would be communicating it anywhere near as clearly as you are. Well, that's the issue, isn't it? Yes, it is. I mean, that's why it's so lovely to think about the quality of words or the quality of smells or the quality of touch. There are so many interesting things, aren't there?

20:13So back to school. I'm back in school. Yes, thank you. Pay attention. You're a deep thinker, obviously, and a deep feeler. Was there any evidence of that? Would any teacher, looking back on their interactions with you, think that there were signs then of what you would become no why not i don't know there's a marvelous picture of me with my nan standing upright like a little soldier in a suit with shorts um which i think sums me up very well and so i i was extremely keen to look after her and and to conform with her yes just her wishes to keep her happy to be grandma's little soldier It wasn't to keep her happy.

20:58What then? Love. Oh, really? Just loved her a lot. And therefore wanted to do whatever made her... Happy. And warm? I mean, she was warm towards you anyway? Oh, lots of cuddles all the time. So we're in this period now. If I'd met you 13, 14 years old, things at home aren't great with your mother's new partner, your nan. She died when I was 12. Yes, so that's a huge breach. gaping hole yeah and uh and uh i think i i that sense of responsibility for caring for her and the love for her yeah carried on into you know into my life and probably stayed with me all my life yes you've just taken the impulse to care into different areas yeah she she died of a heart attack right how old was she she was 72 or something and she and at the age of 12 this icicle entered my heart yeah and I believed I was going to die of heart attack at any time and it stayed with me most of my life did you tell anyone yes in the end but but not when you well I had panic attacks I used to get a lot of panic attacks i mean at this age it was a from really well i i no i from the age of 21 okay when i had so i think anyone who's been through adversity yes you don't tend to break down during adversity no but once i married my wife mo and um and we settled down then i was ill because you relaxed and everything that had been well and i could deal with it i suppose then okay All of those things.

22:46But some of them I never really dealt with. The body keeps the score. Very much. Really, really so much. Yeah. And then that's come out of my work because, again, when we do, we've tried all sorts in having a spa of deep tissue massage, seeing if we can link where the tension is to something connected with the person so that you're releasing it. Many people cry when they have a massage. it's quite normal and that when you're thinking the body keeps the score what how do you release that and what when you do release what happens gosh um yes i know it's been a bit of a worry if you're going to allow me loose on you for an hour no it really isn't i don't think i need to i don't think i need to ask you any questions i'd be happy just to sit back and let you go wherever you want to go but i want to introduce a modicum of structure to the conversation so So I have an image of you when you were 13 or 14.

23:43You were a bit lost, I think, after Nan died. Yeah. And home is an unhappy place, essentially. Yeah, it's really unhappy. If I'd met you then and said, what do you want to be when you grow up? I wanted desperately to be a makeup artist. And I've had a really, really fascinating thing happen to me in the last couple of years. So I wanted to be a makeup artist, and the only way to be a makeup artist was either was to work for the BBC and you had to work for the BBC and you would be trained but you had to be a woman, number one, which was a slight disadvantage. I did get an interview without them realising I was a man and then they realised and wrote to me and told me not to come.

24:24So I desperately wanted to be a make-up artist because I was doing make-up for a lot of the local drams in Weymouth. And that was really I loved doing that. And the interesting thing was, so did the youth employment officer who he was keen on that so we would do it together but he always told me that you're never going to get a job in in this month because only women get jobs in it so at that time and then um and so i tried and tried so i did a hairdressers apprenticeship because that's another way in right to get that so i fulfilled that apprenticeship although well we can talk more about what happened during that but then i came up to london and i and i worked for elizabeth arden in bond street right and um and what was really lovely about that was that um i there were quite it was a spectacular thing to suddenly come into from weymouth it was all dowager duchesses and and you know i got to shampoo jackie onassis and um meet so many fascinating people and have conversations with them because that's the nice thing if you're washing someone's hair or It's a captive audience They are a little bit I must admit she was a bit of a cipher There were far more interesting people than her But I mean David Bowie would come in to have his makeup done with Mark Boland.

25:50I have to say they were all completely bombed out of their heads I don't think there was, you know, I'd love to think I had lovely stories I could deliver but all I can deliver is they popped into the room i think they took a few tablets and later on they came out um so that yeah so that was an extremely interesting time but what i wanted to refer to was there was a head stylist there called kerry and he um he i was really impressed with him he's only a few years older than me um and he was very kind unbelievably kind and he gave me his cast off clothes that doesn't sound kind but it is because everyone wore things from browns and i couldn't afford things from browns and he could um and i can remember him having his first uh vote cover and all of these other things and then he went on and he had my life he had the life i had the aspiration for so he went on to become nicole kidman's hairdresser um he did all these absolutely fabulous things he worked with stanley kubrick on eyes wide shut for 18 months he did this he did that he calls stanley kubrick stanley you know as if i i'd know him and he and recently we met again and we became friends but he couldn't remember me oh really because i was the boy because you were tiny i was the boy and he was the star of course um and there'd been other boys coming through the salon no well what was so interesting about it is everything about his life was fabulous and was what I had aspired to.

27:22But when I heard him describe it, I didn't want it. I thought I made the right choice. I went the right way. Where did that ambition come from in the first place? I don't know. I was obsessed with makeup aged 14. Really? Yeah, I don't know. You say it so matter-of-factly. It's quite an odd thing for a... No, no, no. Tell me about it.

27:43And the only way you could indulge... I've told people I really love woke, okay? Yes, I know. I like every element of that because I always was it. Yeah. And the rest of the world wasn't. Of course. And, yes, I think my friend Jeff said I'm the least violent man he's ever met. You know, for me, I want respect for people. I want kindness. I want joy. I don't want people getting their heads kicked in on the beach on a Saturday because all the Monson Rockers are fighting and all the things I saw and what was the attraction then we're not going to unpick the ambition but you wanted to make people more beautiful you wanted to make people feel better about themselves I don't know we could go quite deep there can't we yeah obviously I if I'd spent the whole of my childhood a bit sad perhaps I wanted to cheer everything up yes i don't know i liked i i got yes i it gave me a frisson of excitement to to to make someone look different or make myself look different um yes there's some yearning there isn't there and of course it becomes a career not long after the period that you've just or it becomes a company not long after but um but we need to examine this this horrible bit when you're 16 years old and you're thrown out of home i like i like that we're going to go deep in here with the horrible bit much it's not much else i can say about it i know and you've been um to be honest it was it wasn't as horrible as being at home wow that's so obvious when you say it but of course as someone who's not been through anything similar i read that you were living in a tent in the woods i never was in a tent was that is that what the mythologies i've never made a bivouac in my life so what were you in when i had i had a poncho right and a sleeping bag yeah they they will suffice under a tree under a tree in a woods yeah but it wasn't it wasn't that all the way through okay so there's a bit of sofa surfing i could uh there was one friend i rode a bike everywhere um so i would go and sleep in his conservatory his dad didn't spot me other people would take me in or would give me something you know to eat that doesn't that sounds so pathetic and i don't mean it that way when they would ask me for dinner and then i would cycle off god knows where afterwards and people were aware i think but but it's all underpinned by that thing you just said it changes the entire nature of of of what you're describing however bad it looks from the outside it was better than what you were running away from or what you were and i'd already met mo okay yeah which is says everything yeah so i mean she i always tell her she built me up I felt her hands on my heart.

30:25Take a moment to compose my emotions now. I wasn't expecting that. Well, that's the truth. It's a beautiful truth. Yeah. Yeah. We're still together now. And how lovely is that? So that is the trajectory then. I think your friend Jeff's family stepped in a little bit more than the other. Oh, so much. I can't tell you. And such kindness. I learnt such kindness and such warmth. I learnt to trust people and trust that all would work out. Was there ever any anger here? No. Even when, because Jeff. Well, I don't, what purpose would that serve? Well, I don't know, but it's a fairly popular emotion. Well, I was a bit stroppy.

31:15Okay. I'm still a bit stroppy, aren't I? It's different, isn't it? I don't like unfairness. No. But you didn't have any... There was no anger born of personal bitterness. Anger at the world, anger at your dad, anger at your mum. I'm sitting on my hands now. I have no idea, probably. If I'm sitting on my hands, it probably means something. That's what my therapist says anyway. I see you're sitting on your hands, Mark. What smell is that? Anger? Well, sitting on your hand. What smell is it?

31:52Narrowly. It's very comforting. Is it? Yeah, isn't it nice? Try it. Because it is... Have a little go. It's quite nice. It is? You're no longer expressing yourself. You're just keeping something to yourself. I feel like I'm furling up like a flower. Well, no, you're also shrinking. I do a lot of that. Yeah, I do. That's what I mean. Like a flower closing. Yeah. Yeah. and so it's invariably when the therapist is getting bloody close and then she says are you sitting on your hands and you are how does a 20 golf gadget end up being used as a bomb detector in war zones worldwide i'm alice levine and this is explosive lies the podcast exposing a scam that fooled governments and security services across the globe and made one con man a multi-millionaire open our free global player app and search explosive lies to start listening today let me get the chronology correct jeff osman's family step in they did they were wonderful i can't tell you how wonderful they were so she worked in a factory of evenings he was working for the electricity board in the day they were just so hard working they had next to nothing themselves and they were willing to share that with me and my most precious thing i have um which jeff gave me and he was very naughty because it makes you cry on christmas day was the the the in the center of the table was this biscuit brow or dead dead fly biscuits in it yeah yeah caribaldi and he he gave when they had died he gave me that and that everyone in the house knows i will go and get the biscuit barrel but it is so precious to me but it is you know it's that classic thing what would you take i don't know i mean obviously there are other things probably more important i take out of the house but that would be the thing i would miss the most and one what what i mean he also of course put together the or led the search for your dad didn't he later is that correct have i got that the right yes absolutely but we're going right the way to age 60 there yeah no so so we're back to elizabeth arden then yes so what happens to take you out of elizabeth arden away from the desire to be the next kerry and instead to to cosmetics to go your first big um i tried for a job in john lewis which is always quite vivid in my my imagination in their salon um and um the whole day interview and they made me pee on a stick and all sorts of stuff or for drugs drug tests or i think it was i i don't know okay but i did know that i didn't really want to work for someone where i had to pee on a stick to work there so um i then found a job in knightsbridge where the guys were just lovely i mean the man that employed me colin was just a delight and it was quick and it was straightforward and there they decided i would make a good trichologist okay which was very much the fashion at the time so there were every salon you went to in central london it was all based on one particular stylist called leonard but it was the same in sussoon it was the same all of these salons they had trichologists who would look at your hair beforehand look at the hair health and do that and and i'm because i'm a nerd i'd already i i was never going to be a hairdresser i was you know i mean i cut my my son's hair i only asked him yesterday if he'd like me to cut it again no so um basically i i was really unsuitable for the path i was on because i wasn't going to get to be a makeup artist and i think it was richard conway there he realized and suggested that i did i studied trichology which was a further study and being a nerd that fitted in quite nicely so the science of hair really yeah the study of hair hair scalp and all aspects of it um and so i i was working then for them and i started to study trichology and then um and you learn organic chemistry is part of that and you learn how to make shampoos and so on so then i started to that that worked for me yeah i guess and then what happened was i was in the herb society and a um a fabulous viking of a man called malcolm stewart dr malcolm stewart got me to write a book a booklet a time booklet on herbal hair coloring because at the time hair dyes and cancer was a big issue right and um it's still a big issue today but but he wanted a book written on alternatives and so i wrote this and he edited it pretty well and that was my first go at something and and is there a feeling here of the world opening up in front of you a feeling of this is what i'm on this planet to do yet or am i over romanticizing things i don't know i have to come back tomorrow and tell you sorry i can't help it i don't know i fully understand yeah i really do but but i mean you had more of a sense of purpose now than you'd had before perhaps i needed to make a living yeah that was it really needed to a living well i i'm i'm obvious i look at photos of myself in that period i was so driven yes i i you know i just you didn't just want to make a living you wanted to make a mark i don't know that i wanted to make a mark i think i but i certainly didn't want to be home you know i mean like i don't i don't go camping all right it's too close yes you want to get as far away as possible from the poncho yeah well but you know you you learn a lot of um of self-alliance don't you if you've got absolutely nothing yes of course you do i if i had to put money on it a fabulous business partner early days called liz bennett um well i say early days i work she and i worked together every month of her life except for one month unfortunately she died fairly young and she was nurture and i was nature i really didn't really believe in nurture and i so i got all the benefit from her because she nurtured me and i just believed in nature so i just bowled along and this is cosmetics to go this is well this was uh constant on a way it was the beginning this is where we supplied the body shop and and that was a hugely successful business sorry i've I've got myself mixed up here because that is the plaque in the book that I saw, isn't it?

38:20Constantine and Weir. Yes. And Liz was the Weir. Yes. And just a little aside, a nice little thing. I have a recurring dream about her. Do you? And we're in a lush event and she stood at the end of the bar. And she says to me, I don't think anyone would notice me here, do you, Mark? We both know she's dead. and i just go no i think it's fine and i was in a but a meet a meeting two days ago with the buyers all the buyers it was like i don't know there's 70 people in the room there was a little um cardboard cutout of liz over there and i don't think people realize how why so the recurring dream what's that about she put a lot of that care in and it's still there that's why nobody will notice me here mark no of course they won't listen they won't notice all the work you put in everything you did that they now enjoy through your wish to nurture it's still all there so although she's started it makes you think about legacy you know what is legacy and where does it work and where doesn't it work yeah what's your legacy going to be i don't know i've got a badge I've got a badge that says, I am a massive egotistical knobhead.

39:38I might borrow that, Mark.

39:43I think we're safe. I think you're safe. So Constantine and Weir becomes quite quickly quite successful? Well, this is predominantly because of Anita and Gordon Roddick's success. Yes. because um i you know i anita had one shop going on to two when i sent her some stuff yeah she liked the stuff and she bought it from me i mean you sent it on spec i i'd seen a little article in honey magazine about her yeah and i sent it on the spec and then i went over to see her and she placed this order for a thousand i had no money right i only had the money for the train journey i think there more or less and um and she placed this huge order for over a thousand pounds with the staff so i then went back home and and i was just had my little box bedroom yeah and i made i made the stuff in there i managed to persuade the suppliers to wait you know because they gave me credit sure i then asked her for payment on delivery and made all the stuff and rushed it over there paid off the suppliers and started work on the next consignment yeah well i didn't think there would be a next consignment i thought that would be it why well because i I think I thought I was a lucky little person.

40:50But they liked the gear. They sold it. And they sold more and they sold more and they sold more. And then everything grew from there. This must have been a magical moment. You're back in pride again. Okay. No, I'm not. And you're sitting on your hands again. Horrageous behavior. But it must have been gratifying.

41:15um you ever work for someone really powerful and really charismatic uh it's so blinded by by the personalities okay i'm just pleased it's almost like the therapist again now well i'm just pleased to please her someone actually said to me um well this must work well for you mark because anita likes to take and you like to give oh gosh that's your nan again yeah isn't it yeah i love powerful women i mean i just absolutely and i much prefer to to work with women if i'm honest yes um yeah so so the company goes from strength to strength culminating in in a in a i mean when you sold that company i didn't sell the company i sold the rights to the products to the body shop what's the difference um just for an idiot i mean i don't well because then we tried in the same company with the same people to do the mail order company cosmetics to go got it and we weren't experienced enough to pull it off which was very ahead of its time in many ways it was very ahead of its time yes i think to lose a pound on every order was was quite um advanced Bold.

42:24Very bold. But obviously then I saw all of the, you know, people like, you know, Amazon, everyone losing money for hundreds of years. Of course. So, yeah. You'd have had the ability to hang in there indefinitely. Could have turned around. But who cares? Who wants to hang in there indefinitely? Bingo. Because now we come to Lush. Tell me about the moment of inception, when the concept was born, when you first thought. Oh, people imagine it's something fabulous. but of course it wasn't something fabulous it was it was a group of us not really i mean i was unemployable and i was ashamed of what had happened to you know because you had a failure on your cv yeah so i didn't like that but wasn't exactly on my cv was it and i mean you know i already had the badge yeah um it just proved it um come on well no it's why not let the massive success overshadow the following failure?

43:19Because that's the way it works. Is it? Doesn't it? I just, we had a little bit of a tougher Christmas this year than we normally have. Not too bad. I'm still working with the same people that I've worked with for 40 years and two of them really felt all the shadow and the shudder of 30 plus years ago. Come back and shake them. Yeah. It's interesting. I see but that's a part of the entrepreneurial makeup probably yes that relationship between yes because they never none of us are really I don't want to say we're never satisfied no but you're not so tell me about tell me about the idea there you are a bunch of unemployables loafing around um well the truth was that we people were very kind right we were but so i still work in the the lab that i worked in when i was 22 so it's in above the shop in 29 high street i work with the same people that were the first crew that we all all assembled for 40 plus years they're called the founders within the business yeah and and no one really people were offered odd jobs one guy was offered a job paul is one of the founders he was offered a job in the hospital he was he's techie so he took the he came said to us all look i'm sorry i'd love to stay with you but i've got to go and do a proper job he went to do a proper job for a week and then he came back and he was really angry i was able to work anywhere what has happened to me why you know and of course he goes there and they want him to pretend to do this and they want they want him to you know to bullshit away of course he can't he has to pack it in and come back and work with us for nothing he didn't talk to any of us for about four weeks just because do you know i mean he was so angry that you've ruined me well yeah well because because working in the truth yeah and not having to yeah you know yeah and and and and as the idea took form the truth and the principles are as important as the product the principle well the principles inform the product yeah um they come before i mean well if we go back to school yeah there are certain things you're taught at school which don't happen in business yeah so i i must have had something of a reasonable school education because i liked what we learned at school not to copy not to this not to that i couldn't quite work out why none of that transferred into the business world that you're quite an idealist in some ways I don't see myself as an idealist I think that you know that stupid you know I think I can I think okay yeah it's that I have a great belief you know if we're working together I just be saying well I think you can do it right actually if if you really want to or you could do this other thing which is a bit shabby and not so nice so why not aim for the well the point is you're only aiming for what you were taught to do at school anyway you're not aiming for some huge target most of the time good business is not but i'm hearing your grand's mantra again being the best what was it good better best never let them rest till my good is better at my better best i am aren't i yes of course you are yes and so how quickly did lush emerge how quickly did lush gather well we were called the cosmetic house at first yeah and um And then we did a competition.

46:58Because we'd had a mail order company before, we got permission from the receivers to have the list. And we took 1 ,000 of the best customers off the list. We asked them what they thought we should be called. And a lady in Scotland who still writes to me occasionally said she thought it should be Lush Garden. And we didn't really like gardens so much, but we really liked Lush. So that was it. That's what we became. and um yeah so it was through a competition with the customers and how quickly did lush become lush in the sense of the company that we know today not necessarily in scale but in terms of the off the offer to use a retail term yeah um we had a after about two years um we got some backers and we got a shop in the king's road um what year was this oh i don't know i'm hopeless at years 30 30 years ago yeah give or take two years yeah i was living nearby i remember this show did you come yes i did come to the shop what did you think i was living in elm park gardens just off fulham road yeah so i would just walk down and what did you think of the shop well i i do you know what my first memory of lush is which a million people must have told you this so i wanted to eat the product ah when i walked you could you could have done some of it yeah but i you know wouldn't have been necessarily no i mean it was very much that way the smells were so for me yeah so sort of flavorful yes and the thing is you know people talk about do we pump the smell out and all the rest of this rubbish but the truth is because we didn't want to over package so i suppose the environmental principles we'd always had were really able to just run amok so we weren't going to package the this and we weren't going to package that and of course you don't package it and it's smelly yeah the whole bloody place reeks um so that you know that's but that was true from day one of the first of course it was yeah yeah no i remember and when we when we opened that store i it was still close to the collapse and suddenly i had this i mean honestly the the fear the fear was so bad in me that rowena who i talked about earlier wouldn't let me go to shop openings for years afterwards because i spoiled them by being so tense and yeah panicky yeah pacing up and down yeah a bad bad karma yeah yeah i just got bad vibes i couldn't yeah i just couldn't relax enough to enjoy them because what happened in that particular shop was i thought we'd laid out things like bath bombs like oranges and fresh face masks like no one had ever seen anything like this no and then i thought you did you why did you do that why didn't you do something more conventional the public will never understand and then they came in and they didn't go for this sort of the stupid stuff that i popped in the middle thinking they wouldn't understand they understood all of it they were just fabulous immediately yeah and then we had people like you know well jasper conrad coming in and and all sorts of i mean we used to get a thousand inquiries a month for people to do business with us in that king's road shop you couldn't stand there it's insane it was insane but that first time i have to you know if i'm going to be honest i went out of the back and i had a good cry yeah because you can't be that crap and that good within spitting distance of each other you see what i mean it's not right yeah on my hands again no well i can see why because i mean probably the amount as a consequence of cosmetics to go the amount that you had psychologically riding on lush was it was immeasurable i've never been more strained than i was when i was doing that we you know we were doing new concepts all the time there was the catalog to get out the post office would go on strike someone else someone else you know and i'm not you know when you're down on your luck there's a lot of people like to come in and give you a kicking yeah not not um not one that's deserved sure one that you weren't expecting yeah no it's a weird thing though isn't it it's a weird human kind of condition part of the human condition yeah but the opposite of that would be for me the fact that the people who love you and loved you um knew you very well and that brings us to jeff's decision the phrase you've used in the past is we would all like to sort out our nutty friend wouldn't we and jeff determined quite correctly that maybe knowing a little bit about my family background this is on your father's side yeah would help you so so tell me about that well i think i was coming up from i think he was sick of it i think i was coming up to my 60th birthday Just for people who are not following as closely as they should be, this is Geoff whose family took you in when you were 16.

51:55Yes, and who we've been friends since Cub Scouts. Clearly, yes. Oh, how lovely. And if you ever really want to be slightly frightened of your own biography, you want to get your best friend to write it. Your best mate to write it. There's no no-go areas there, is there? And so that, so I think he, in a way, he sort of wanted to find my dad, but it wasn't quite like that. So what happened was I had looked for my dad. And as I learned, he had looked for me. But he assumed that I would take my new stepfather's name. But as you would gather, I didn't want to do that. And his name was Rogers. So he was looking for Mark Rogers everywhere.

52:36Of course, I'm Mark Constantine. And he had two daughters. And my mum had another daughter. so laura who was just the most wonderful person in the world um probably alongside my other two sisters but um and and so they yeah so i basically um went to dinner with jeff and he said well i haven't got your dad sitting out the back but i have been through your your your tree and what he discovered if i cut a long story short he discovered an aunt um called auntie june who was still living in my grandparents my paternal grandparents house and she had been adopted so they she sort of missed out of the general thing right and so yes she remembered john well and suspected so he then visited her went through my nan's last effects in my grandmother not my nan last effects in the attic and he found an airline letter that had Pelandaba written on it and it just so happened he knew where it was and it's in South Africa it was a nuclear establishment and so he then contacted this establishment and asked if they had a pensioner and they did and my sister worked in that department and so then he started talking to her and I talked to my dad and I'd been told by a friend who had been conceived on a beach with his mum and an Italian visitor he had seen his dad and he said if you get if you can see your dad you go immediately you don't mess about you don't consider so within I think five days five of us me my wife and my three children we all went and saw and we all went to my father in South Africa where he was living with my sister, Jo.

54:39And my sisters, I can't tell you how gracious and kind they were. They were just fabulous. And what was amazing, so if you think of me and an animal rights activist in part and a bird watcher on the other side, one was a bird watcher, one was on animal rights. I mean, far more animal rights than I am. Not, you know, not flim flammy. She's come here now and she works with me. But I mean, you know, yeah, she closes greyhound tracks down and God knows what, none of which have I ever managed to achieve. So that was weird because when you first, you think someone's setting me up here. Well, this is strange.

55:14And there was nothing from my father there. So it's very difficult to work out some kind of genetics or behaviour. You don't need to work it out. Well, I was curious. Because you want to understand the chemical formulas, don't you? And you want to understand the science of it. I want to, yeah. But you can't. Yeah, so that was... um and if i mean i think i know the answer to this it's going to be the same answer you've given me three or four times did it change anything inside you everything oh i didn't think you were going to say that it lit a fire where there was an empty heart tell me more well he just wanted to apologize all the time and all i wanted to say was all's well that ends well um i was so pleased to see him he was a decrepit old man yes um and he died shortly afterwards but oh yeah lovely and of course now i've learned my mum was quite a challenge sure i realize now having been with my sisters for the last decade that that was quite a challenge and you realize that had I been brought up by those two, I'd have been completely bloody cuckoo.

56:23As it is, things had worked out in my favour. What do you think, if I asked Mo what difference it made to you, what do you think she would say?

56:36If there's one thing I'm not going to do, it's speak for Mo on here. Oh no, fair enough. I thought she might have told you. I am going to be in such trouble. I thought you might have been able to say, Well, I don't have to imagine because she's told me what difference is. She never told me, no.

56:57It's hard to explain the effect Mo has on me. You don't have to explain. People can see it. Yeah, sorry. When you talk about it. Can't they? Not even sitting on my hat. No, it's the opposite of sitting on your hat. Yeah. Whatever that is. Yes, I mean, we've had a lovely life together, the two of us.