When I left the set designing business after Live Aid, I got together with a guy called Kevin Wall, who had just started Radio Vision – this was in the very early days of music videos and his company gave them away to TV to promote records.
I joined him, working from rock promoter Harvey Goldsmith’s office in Oxford Street, and we built a company that actually dealt in the rights to rock music shows. What was interesting about it was that I was there at the very birth of a completely new business. I’d always been in the creative industries before, and here was something that was just about business – I learnt about international law, contracts and all of that.
After two years, I realised I was quite unhappy and decided I wanted to get divorced and go and live in Chamonix in the French Alps. So I had a year off. I indulged my love of extreme sports, but became conscious money was running out. I was going to start an indoor rock climbing business, and when that fell through, I wasn’t sure what to do.
I was looking at lots of businesses at the time and was in a Japanese restaurant in Hanover Square with a guy called Mr Uehara, who was the producer of Japan’s equivalent of Top of the Pops. “What you should do Simon,” he said, “is open a conveyor belt sushi bar with girls in black PVC miniskirts.” Those were his actual words. I went away, researched it and opened YO! Sushi two years later.
I’m very proud of those two years of my life before YO! Sushi. When I look back on it, I was living on absolutely nothing and working the whole time. But I was very happy in a sense that I was on a mission; I was going to war. I was determined to do this, whatever it took. It wasn’t because I was suddenly planning to get rich, it was simply that I wanted to see this thing open. And I had a vision of it in my mind that I thought was mind-blowingly good. I just wanted to show the doubters and invite them to come and have a look once I’d opened it. I believed that people would walk in and be amazed.
Having been a rock and roller, designing stage sets for Rod Stewart, the Moody Blues and Jethro Tull, and being around all of these big bands, I remember being on the plane travelling to Japan for the first time. I was going to the automated food machinery exhibition, and it suddenly dawned on me that I was as excited about going to that event
as I had ever been about doing all of those big shows.
People used to ask: “Don’t you miss show business?” I’d always reply: “I’m still in it.”