HOWZAT

It’s an oddly incomplete analysis. Peter Palumbo might have been an aesthete, but he too was a businessman, famously offending his polo-playing chum Prince Charles with his plans in 1994 to redevelop the Mappin & Webb building to become 1 Poultry in the City of London. Similarly, his son has an obvious passion for the arts, from classical music to design, and of course literature. “Any creative or writing ability I’ve got from my father, because he has superb style, beautiful handwriting and a wonderful way of constructing words,” he concedes. “In no shape or form is my purpose to criticise my father.”

The split is said to have occurred one Christmas Day when Palumbo was annoyed his father had slighted one of his sisters. It was a “petty family argument” is all he will say of it. “I’m determined not to give clichéd answers to this. It’s awful to air family stuff in the papers.”

It seems that, initially, the parting of the ways didn’t unduly bother James. He was making money, establishing himself, adopting the work ethic of his grandfather, Rudolph Palumbo – who as the son of an immigrant Italian built a property empire, including the 1 Poultry site, from a building next door to a coffee shop in the City of London.

But when I ask Palumbo if he thinks his father is proud of him now, there is a silence that lasts a minute, maybe two, maybe longer. He answers with a couple of false starts. “You know, I haven’t seen my father for 25 years…” he falters. “You could ask that of my old schoolteacher whom I also haven’t seen. I just… I’ve got no idea what he’s thinking… I just don’t know.”

I ask him if he would seek a rapprochement, and the answer is quicker, and initially more superficial. He would, he says, like to know what his half-brothers and sisters, whom he’s never met, look like (he has one half-brother and two half-sisters aged, he thinks, between 17 and 21). “A family tea would be fascinating,” he says, with deliberate understatement. Then, after a silence, he gets more reflective and more definitive. “The answer is yes,” he says. “It would be great. Life’s too short. Any answer other than yes is going to be ridiculous.”

Palumbo is close to his two sisters, one older, one younger, yet there is a formality in the way he discusses the family. There is still tremendous reverence and affection for grandfather Rudolph, but even of him, he says at one point, “He wasn’t the sort of grandfather who bounced you up and down on his knee.”

What Palumbo certainly isn’t is diffident. He was already forging a business career in his gap year at the age of 18, when he and his schoolfriend Humphrey Waterhouse established the tongue-in-cheek Etonian Butler Service in Los Angeles, providing domestic services to Hollywood celebrities. The business attracted the attention of the US immigration authorities, and Palumbo hired a “cantankerous, very difficult, not very popular lawyer, Randolph Fields” to defend them. On the basis that the American legal system allows you to argue the “moon is made of cheese”, the 18-year-olds were successfully defended. Again cheekily, they sold the film rights of the enterprise twice – to Tri-Star and then Paramount Pictures – before returning to the UK.

Palumbo went to university, therefore, with a hefty wedge in his pocket (“I think about $100,000”) and a classic Porsche Speedster he had shipped back to run around in. He studied history at Worcester College, but rather than using the cash to augment a rattling good social life, he worked with Fields on the creation of British Atlantic Airways, which became Virgin Atlantic.

After graduating, Palumbo joined Merrill Lynch and two years later moved to Morgan Grenfell. He had a reputation of working well with the Chinese, especially with Kwek Leng Beng, chairman of the Hong Leong Group, becoming director of his European hotels business. Still in his twenties, Palumbo was invited to become managing director of Morgan Grenfell Laurie, but chose to follow his mentor George Magan to Hambro Magan.

The venture we all know about, though, is the Ministry of Sound, a nightclub based on New York’s Paradise Garage, which Palumbo launched with Waterhouse and a DJ, Justin Berkmann, in 1991.

Riding astride the dance music boom in the Nineties, he has grown the Ministry of Sound into what is now the largest independent record company in the world. Rebranded the MSHK Group to reflect the purchase of music brands Hed Kandi, Global Underground and Euphoria, it turned over £80 million last year, and now employs 500 people worldwide. Getting there, though, involved running the club as a proper business venture with proper executive positions in place (“Eighty per cent of the staff will be at their desks by eight,” says Palumbo). He has just agreed a deal with Sir Philip Green for Miss Selfridge to sell a Hed Kandi clothing line.

“When the club opened it was the first all-night licence in the UK, it was in deepest darkest South London, it had no drinks licence and it opened at midnight. All the criteria for failure,” recalls Palumbo. “But it was a tearaway success because people thought, Christ, we’ve never seen this before.”

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