SKY MAGAZINE, 1/89, CHRISTMAS 1988

THE PRODUCTION LINE

Down a scruffy cul-de-sac in the strictly unfashionable area behind Borough tube station, there is a logjam of parked up motors blocking the last 100 yards. The cheapest is a £8,500 XR2, the most expensive a Ferrari, with a host of BMWs and the like crowded between them.

The cars are dirty and stacked up like common or garden commuter crates - their owners too busy making pop records to clean them.

Inside the building PWL's three studios are open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year with 25 engineers working around the clock in two shifts. Over the last four years PWL (the letters stand for Pete Waterman Ltd) or the Stock Aitken Waterman production team, have produced 60 hits.

Walk into the lobby and the evidence is there. Gold and silver discs hang wall to wall around the hall. There's a classic red (genuine) McLaren racing car, living proof of Pete Waterman's passion for cars and on the wall up the stairs hangs old railway memorabilia, living proof of his passion for the age of steam.

Managing director David Howells is a man who holds the company together. Slight and unassuming, like Waterman, he goes back in the business a long time - around 20 years. He and the rest of the staff - engineers, promotions people, accountants - share an almost obsessive loyalty to the company and its overriding aim to produce consistent pop singles.

"You won't find any rock here," says Howells. "We're in the entertainment business. I often think that Stock Aitken Waterman reflect the up side of life. We're not in the hairy rock 'n' roll marketplace. We work with really nice people. Kylie is a genuine, ordinary, down to earth person. Rick is incredibly nice. They're not Sigue Sigue Sputnik." Ironically Sigue Sigue Sputnik have pitched in with SAW for a one-off single.

PWL is like a British Motown. Inside a building not much bigger than a suburban house are crammed three studios - the centrepiece is Stock Aitken Waterman's own, the finest non-acoustic studio in Britain. Because SAW's recordings go straight in the digital equipment, the normally ugly padding and soundboxes on the walls have been replaced with an over the top rococo-style room arches, plants and a tiled floor.

Two other studios work 24 hours a day also. Cleaners rush in between 10 and 11 in the morning before the engineers arrive to work until 11 at night. Then the night shift takes over. Upstairs is a table tennis room, a relaxing area where artists can discuss their projects uninterrupted, with a huge missile suspended from the ceiling (Waterman's interested in weaponry, too). At the core of all this is Howell's office and the accounting, promotions and administration desks.

From Mike Stock to rooky would-be singers Naz and Kakko Suzuki doing their office apprenticeship, there's an atmosphere of unbridled, almost unhealthy, boisterous enthusiasm for everything Stock Aitken Waterman. It's this bubbling workhouse of predominantly teenagers and people in their early 20s, guided by the equally old hats like Howells and Waterman (aged 47 and 41 respectively) that, they say, is the key to their huge success.

"We believe in young talent," says Howells. "The reason this place works is because we're music enthusiasts and enjoy being around music and musicians. Either you're in the plastic business or you're into music.

"A side to the company that often goes unnoticed is that our interest in life is developing careers. We run two schemes here. One is a trainee engineer scheme where we take kids off the street and train them.

"We also have artists work in the company for about a year. Rick worked as a teaboy/tape operator as a way of learning the business. One of the things that concerned us is that artists get thrown into the business with their first successful record with very little training on the industry and how people behave."

Howells cites Kylie Minogue as an example, when an actress's training gives her the ability to take on interviews and photo-sessions. "Kylie knows who she is, she's a professional," he says. "An acting training gives you training in that."

But isn't this just a way of getting cheap labour?

"Mostly they become fascinated by the mechanics of the business," replies Howells. "When someone in the company says we want you to do this, they will understand why. Rather than, "The record company" being written above them in 10 foot high letters, it will be home."

The biggest criticism of Stock Aitken Waterman, of course, is that they dominate artists, swamping them with their own bumptious electro-pop. But with hundreds of thousands of singles sales across the world, the PWL music club laugh at the accusations of production arrogance.

We work with voices and what the boys are good at is tailoring songs for voices," says Howells. "They will write a song like I Should Be So Lucky and Kylie will come along and sing it. You don't turn down a song like that. You say 'Excuse Me, where do I stand'.

"You can't force people to sing something. But one of the reasons the artists rarely turn down songs is because they're so good."

Those songs have led PWL to be the 10th most successful singles company in Britain - not bad comparing their size to the giants like CBS, EMI and WEA. Stock Aitken Waterman are Britain's number one singles and albums producers and between July and September '88 PWL had nine Top 30 hits out of nine releases.

Fiercely independent, the whole company is passionate about the power of the single while the mainstream record companies are writing it off as dead - concentrating instead on LPs and CDs. Howells adds that while PWL philosophy is based around making money on fun singles that people want to buy, the major companies sell them as lost leaders for LPs, spending fortunes on promoting them to get a chart profile.

"The Top 10 is the most visible thing in the world," he says. "If you put an album on television at seven o'clock, would you watch it?

"The excitement of the single and the speed that it moves is what gets you into an artists career. I would claim that we're in the biggest singles boom we've seen. But a lot of sales, of course, are on compilation albums."

As David Howells talks, Pete Waterman is jetting across Australia and Japan spreading the PWL philosophy and setting them up for world dominance.

"Credibility is a word that's never used here at PWL," says Howells. "Because credibility to us is a number one record."