HE is known for his sleight of hand, but Derren Brown admits that he used his skills to shoplift as a teenager.
He said he would regularly steal gadgets and music, and revealed that he nearly got caught.
“It’s so awful – I’m laughing about it only out of embarrassment,” the illusionist confessed to host Lauren Laverne on desert Island discs. “It is so shameful.”
Derren, 48, added: “I remember looking around my bedroom once as a teenager and every single thing I had stolen.
“I stopped because I set off the alarms sneaking out of the music department of Harrods with a Luther Vandross cassette in my pocket.
“I could see two store detectives walking towards me, so I did this whole display of, ‘Oh, how did that get there, how embarrassing?’ and put it back.
"I have not stolen since. I think the sneaking, the challenge... it was just joyful, but terrible. I’m not remotely condoning it.”
Derren, who once famously played Russian Roulette on live TV and correctly predicted the lottery numbers, admitted his parents did not know about his stealing, adding: “They do now!”
He described how “odd” he was as a student at Bristol University, admitting to sitting in a cave next to a bonfire reading works by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
He also told how he put liquid latex on his eye one morning. “It looked like I had hurt my eye,” he said. “Went down to breakfast and I loved the attention.
"When friends asked ‘What did you do to your eye?’ I made something up. I was telling people who cared that this was a real thing. It was so odd when I look back.
“Once I started performing, it took care of all that. I could take all that pathetic, insecure mess and just funnel it all into the kind of valid arena of performing. It helped a lot.”
Derren’s castaway music includes Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Dinner at Eight by Rufus Wainwright and Ben Folds’ The Luckiest. He chose the works of Carl Jung as his book and a Leica camera as his luxury item.
Desert Island Discs is on BBC Radio 4 tomorrow at 11.15am.
