I started off with a paper round when we were just about old enough to drive. I couldn't drive myself, so someone else would have to drive me and I'd drop off the papers.

My dad wanted to prepare me for leaving school, so he encouraged me to get a summer job. I ended up working at a factory plant in Luton, putting fertiliser in boxes. All I had to do was prepare the boxes at the end of the factory chain – there was a woman of some experience who would pass me the box and I just had to finish it off. It could have been worse.

The son of a friend of my dad's also worked there, and he would sometimes come home and throw up from working with the fertiliser all day – this stuff got all over you and in your lungs.

It was pretty nasty. Funnily enough, it never happened to me and I never got sick. Maybe I was made of sterner stuff. At that time I'd already made my mind up about the music, though I didn't really know how to be a musician or even how to go about it, so I carried on working.

I became a qualified machinist at Vauxhall. For some reason it's been erroneously reported that I used to screw on hubcaps, but that's not true. You can't screw on a hubcap, anyway, so I have no idea where that came from.

After I got famous, I had a couple of friends over from Vauxhall and we talked about the work we used to do, and how much the factory had changed. When I worked there, you'd see these big sheets of steel that people would work on themselves, but now it's all a bit like The Terminator film – robots everywhere instead of people. It's great that things are easier to manufacture, but there's far fewer people employed.

I think it's really good to get early work experience. I'm not sure if it will happen with my children, but for many young people it's character-building and sets them up for what comes later.

One of the main reasons people get bullied, in any walk of life, is because they are different. So I think that to throw kids in at the deep end when they are young is a good thing. It gets them used to other people and some of the things they will face. It takes them out of their comfort zone.

I'm not sure that my early work taught me anything that I still use today, but it's all part of your character. I'm still working hard.

I'm recording with Arthur Baker and will soon be touring as Paul Young again. I'm also working on a recipe book, so there's not much time left at the end of the day.

• Paul Young is the face of soft-furnishing specialist Bath, Bed and Home.