RICK STEIN has been spilling his culinary secrets on TV for years – but he never set out to be a chef, his first love was music.

He only opened his now famous seafood restaurant in Padstow because his nightclub got closed by police after one too many fights in the bar between drunken fishermen.

Stein’s clubbing career had started when he was in his final year at Oxford University.

“I was quite taken with the number of mobile discos there were around so I built one,” he recalls. “I suppose I was trying to be a bit sort of hippy-ish and slightly druggy. It now sounds a bit pathetic but I called it the Purple Tiger and I started doing parties in Oxford.

“Then I brought it to Cornwall and it was enormously successful, so when I finally came across this club – which was later to become the first restaurant – in Padstow we took it over intending to make it a really nice peaceful club, but it wasn’t to be.

“The only customers we could really get on a regular basis were fishermen and they used to fight quite a lot and eventually sadly we got our licence taken away because of all the trouble being caused.”

It was a blessing in disguise, though, and the trawlermen turned out to be helpful too.

Stein explains: “Basically I opened the restaurant because the club was closed down, and a lot of the fishermen that had caused trouble in the club ended up selling me fish!

“So it was sort of good in as much as I got to know so many people in Padstow that they looked after me with fish.”

The TV chef is currently on tour promoting his latest book, a memoir called Under a Mackerel Sky, and he reveals that his switch from chef to TV celebrity also came about by accident rather than design.

“I sort of started writing recipes really as far back as the early ’80s for a magazine called Woman’s Realm and on the back of the publicity for that I just came to the attention of a director who was working with a chap called Keith Floyd and he just started to have a go with me and Keith, filming in the restaurant,” he says.

“I remember I cooked a dish of roast sea bass with a sorrel sauce and there was a trawler outside and he said “Let’s put it on the back of the trawler”. I was having such fun and the whole thing was like ‘Life on TV? Yes I like this!’ “I’ve put a photo in the book and captioned it ‘Me and Keith sailing away to a new life on the TV’.”

Stein does admit that, although he started with ambitions of being a DJ, food did play an important part in his life growing up on a farm in the Cotswolds.

“The thing I remember most about the farm was how good the food was,” he recalls. “My parents were fairly gregarious and there were always a lot of artists, composers and authors there for lunch. My father used to say everything we’re eating for lunch came from the farm.

“I used to roam the fields in those days and I can remember at about eight or nine tinkering with the old tractors and undoing bolts and things with my friend Les.

“I look back with great nostalgia for those times in Oxfordshire, in the Cotswolds.”

In the years since then he has taken TV viewers on culinary odysseys around the world from France and Spain to the Far East and India – but he keeps his feet firmly on the ground and says he owes a huge part of his success to his old dog, Chalky, who featured in his early TV programmes. “Chalky was such a character,” he laughs.

“Basically we cast him wherever we could. David the director was very clever, his skill was to allow viewers to see a bit of Chalky bit not quite enough.

“Someone said to me only yesterday that I was OK but it was really Chalky he wanted to see.”

An evening With Rick Stein at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford, on Monday (September 30) will see the TV chef telling more of the stories from his early life and secrets from his TV success.