The return of Stock Aitken and Waterman at a Hyde Park festival this July will, for some, confirm that Britain is living in an Eighties timewarp, reliving all the worst aspects of the decade: recession, riots, Reynolds Girls. Yet if Tom Jones can be given a second chance — and a third, and a fourth — then Pete Waterman is surely due a reappraisal. The man who wrote an autobiography called I Wish I Was Me is no dull backroom boy.
Cocking a snook at the industry, Stock Aitken and Waterman — SAW for short — wrote and produced hits for Kylie, Rick Astley, Bananarama and a dozen others, and became entirely autonomous when they started their independent label, PWL, in 1988. In fact, everything about SAW and PWL looks intriguing on paper: their DIY attitude, their anti-major label stance, their ability to write incredibly catchy tunes and score hits with ordinary kids without the need of a drawn-out TV talent contest. So why aren’t they national treasures?
Waterman cut his teeth as a DJ in the North, starting at the Leeds Locarno with Jimmy Savile in 1965, then working on the Mecca club circuit for 15 years — he knew how to pack a dancefloor, and he always loved soul music. You can hear this if you dig beneath the classic tinny SAW keyboard on a record such as Kylie’s Hand On Your Heart — you can hear the emotional tug. It’s not Aretha Franklin, but it’s classic pop, direct and teenage. With Brother Beyond’s The Harder I Try (a No 2 hit in 1988) Waterman took a hitless boy band and made them the Temptations for four minutes, hook was piled upon hook, and the budget even stretched to a real string section.
Waterman stood by his Woolworth production values, watched the hits roll off the conveyor belt, and refused to upgrade. He saw sampling as “wholesale theft”, and when the underground went overground with the dance music explosion of the early Nineties, the classic SAW sound finally began to sound thin and dated.
But looking back, it’s hard not to admire their track record. Stock Aitken and Waterman had first impinged on the public consciousness when Dead Or Alive’s You Spin Me Round (Like a Record) gave them their first chart topper in early 1985. It had glam’s sense of camp and an irresistible four-to-the-floor thud that was the sound of London’s gay scene. With the piratical Pete Burns dressed to impress and fronting the record, the three backroom boys had the means to begin an incredible run of success.
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In the high Eighties, when everything from Phil Collins’s drum kit to Duran Duran’s videos looked and sounded expensive and vast, Stock Aitken and Waterman were the jokers in the pack. While Tears For Fears told the press how they spent weeks agonising over a drum fill, SAW had backing tracks reduced to two or three push-buttons. Off-the-shelf hits, largely identical, were their speciality. SAW made music for the masses and, though Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan were soap stars, there was very little difference between the people singing the records and the people buying them. Mel and Kim clearly bought their clothes at Topshop, the Reynolds Girls looked like they’d be behind the counter. This very lack of glamour is partly what made SAW’s catalogue so successful and so hated. SAW should care. Between them, Kylie, Jason, Dead Or Alive, Rick Astley, Sonia, Sinitta, and Bananarama scored a dozen UK number ones, and a brace in the States. The SAW sound was ubiquitous in 1984-89.
The problem was, and remains, the SAW production — the songs sounded as if they were recorded on keyboards that came out of a Christmas cracker. Everything was cheap and cheerful; SAW revelled in their ability to write and produce a massive hit with minimal effort. Kylie Minogue has recalled: “Stock Aitken and Waterman and the Hit Factory weren’t so far removed from my role in Neighbours: learn your lines, red light on, perform lines, no time for questions, promote the product et voilà!”
Hipsters hated them — for their ubiquity, for their success, and for their attitude to art and commerce. “I’ve been very poor,” Waterman once said. “I’ve cleaned toilets for Mecca Bingo, I’ve slept on Euston station, and I never want to be like that again. I don’t want to go down in history as a great songwriter because I died penniless.”
Though Waterman would love to be thought of as a British answer to Berry Gordy, the Motown boss, SAW’s real precedents were Tin Pan Alley teams of writers working in Denmark Street in the Sixties and Seventies. These teams included Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway (I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing, Something’s Gotten Hold of My Heart) and Tony Macaulay and John MacLeod (Build Me Up Buttercup, Don’t Give Up On Us). Their “lightweight” hits have often outlasted heavier opposition.
Mitch Murray and Peter Callander wrote The Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde, a No 1 for Georgie Fame in 1968, and “an example of musical opportunism”, as Murray said on the Freaky Trigger blog, responding to a largely negative analysis of the song. “Much of pop music is always opportunistic. Hit songwriters like to have hits, but I am very proud of the song and believe it had value. I was in the business of writing hit songs and I can’t apologise for that.”
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He shouldn’t need to. Throwaway pop and serious-minded rock will always have more in common than NME or Mojo would like to admit. Note how Oasis took a chunk of the New Seekers’ I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing for their single Shakermaker.
When their well of hits ran dry, Waterman didn’t keep still for long — he went solo and licensed 2 Unlimited’s Get Ready For This from a Dutch label to a new offshoot called PWL Continental. He was sharp enough to know that the record would work better without a Euro rap, released it virtually as an instrumental and had a No 2 hit; a year later he cut up the same group’s No Limit, making the most of the throwaway line “Techno! Techno! Techno! Techno!”, and created an anthem. Pete Waterman, no question, knows how pop works.
“Music isn’t art,” he told Sky magazine at the team’s commercial peak in 1989, “it’s for enjoyment, and anyone who says it’s art is in the wrong business. Music has always been written for a purpose, be it a wedding, a funeral or a birth, and people have always been paid for it. Mozart, Beethoven and Handel all got paid.”
Waterman has now largely retired to enjoy the very English hobby of steam trains. Not content with a train set, he bought an entire line north of Manchester. Whether there’s an eight-page retrospective in Mojo this summer doesn’t bother him. He set out to write hit tunes, songs that people still sing in karaoke. They will outlive him. And happily, unlike Van Gogh, he got to be rich and famous before he died.
Tickets for Hit Factory Live at Hyde Park, London, on July 11, go on sale on Friday at 9am from livenation.co.uk