Wetherspoon boss Sir Tim Martin on pub industry, a wild night out with Elvis and his favourite pint

I visited Sweden a few times and quite a lot of towns there don't have any pubs, and I think you see how important pubs are when there aren't any. So it's a social melting pot. I think people go mad staring at their own four walls and want to get out. And a pub is historically the way people in the country have met each other outside their own tight-knit social circle. So a very important function. We got someone working for us in our pub in Clacton-on-Sea who is 88 or 89. And I was talking to her when she was working and a customer came up and said, 'When are you going to retire, Pat?' And she said, 'What? And stay home and stare at the four walls.' But there's a bit of that in all of us. You know, you get fed up with staring at the four walls. That's where the pub is important. We're social animals.

If I'm having a pint in the evening, it would be a pint of Abbot Ale or two. And if I'm in pubs during the day, I'm sad to say these days if I'm working, I'd have a Pepsi Max or a coffee and a bite to eat. For breakfast, I'd have a small breakfast, the breakfast of the gods. For lunch, I would have a southern fried chicken wrap with a salad. And in the evening I'd be tempted to go for fish and chips if I'm allowed, if not, steak and kidney pie, which is less calorific.

I suppose I'm not a big internet sort of guy, but I can understand buying a drink for someone sitting next to you. I'm not so sure about someone who's a couple hundred miles away, but as they say in France, chacun à son goût, everyone to their own taste.

I think in design we've tried to build pubs with individuality and from a design point of view something that links to the area and something that links to the building historically makes a good carpet if you can fit it into the pattern.

My old man worked for Guinness for 31 years and they paid for my education. So I have to be nice. But we were okay and we had a couple of temporary shortfalls, but nothing much. I don't think it was regional, but it might have been. And I think it was companies whose Guinness was delivered through wholesalers, and so there may have been some wholesalers who ran out quicker than others.

Ours is more direct negotiation. Yeah.

I think every few years there is a product becomes very fashionable. So before Guinness, it was gin. Gin came from being a modest seller to becoming the number one spirit, overtaking vodka. And a few years before that, it was Smirnoff Ice. And a few years before that, there was Magners Cider over ice. Who could have predicted that? So, there seems to be things which catch on and that's where Guinness is at the moment. Guinness will be working hard to try and sustain it forever. But there's always been a trendy product that people attach to. It's not just bell-bottom trousers or dyed blonde hair or whatever the hell the latest fashion is. It also applies to beer and drinks.

I have sympathy with Generation Z because what's happened is the tax system has been stacked in favor of supermarkets and against pubs and restaurants. And that's pushed up the price of beer in pubs and allowed supermarkets to sell it very cheaply. And so the result of that is Generation Z who are starting out on their career often find pubs prohibitively expensive. So I think that tax is the reason I'm skeptical about the idea that Generation Z is a new type of humanity which is obstreperous well behaved and all the rest of it. I think humanity stays the same and Generation Z are just like they'd be horrified just like me.

We've occasionally had something like that in the past, but I've been slightly skeptical about it myself as well, but we're open to suggestions. Yeah, maybe a Weather, the world's grooviest pub company, Weathersbury.

We've always said, and it's a slightly corny motto we have, it's a people thing. So we've got an average of 10 people per pub who've worked in the pub for over five years and we got a few people per pub who've worked over 10 years. So I think where you get a long-serving pub team that builds a relationship with the community, that's when they work best. It's a people thing. That's our motto.

I think pubs are very important informal therapists. We're social animals. We need human contact and if you stay at home and become isolated, it's not very good for your mental health. So I think exercise is good, specifically walking. You don't need to go to a gym. It's important to remain active. Work is good. I think we're built to work and people who work are happier. And I'm five years beyond retirement age and Emma said to me, one of your colleagues, that I look very happy and the other thing is the pub. The pub is the hub. I think the King said, my missus would say, and the missus, but that's more debatable.

The issue and the dangers facing pubs are not hyped up. They're real. And I was gobsmacked myself to read a city analyst from Morgan Stanley, a major American bank, say that pubs have lost 53% of their beer sales since the year 2000 to supermarkets. So no trade, no business can lose that much volume without it causing a crisis. So it's definitely real and not hyped up. Some companies still do well. Wetherspoon's is still doing well. But overall for the industry and the restaurant industry, it's been very tough. As with anything that's large and complex, like the pub industry, there are different parts to it. What parts of the industry do you see as working well? And what parts do you think could do with maybe having a closer eye on them? I think it's very difficult to dissect. I think it works well with very strong management teams and individual premises rather than a particular type. For some reason, the late night market seems to have struggled more than the common garden pub which doesn't have entertainment. But I'm not too sure why that is. I think there's room for pubs. They've become relatively more expensive and that's the issue.