Reproduced from IKN issues 8 & 9

PW: 1971, about 1971, because I couldn't get the kind of records I wanted to play in discotheques. It was a different situation from now; you didn't have shops selling imports. There was a shop in South Molton Street, called Harlequin Records; there was the Disquery in Birmingham and there were a couple of shops in Manchester - that's how rare it was. The idea started there but, at that time, there was about as much chance of achieving it as there was of becoming a space astronaut, but the ambition was there. I may have designed may own label logo and written a few letters, but it wasn't serious at that stage.

TP: What did you hope to achieve by setting up PWL, and did you have any definite ideas about the musical direction you wanted to go in?

PW: You've got to understand that I've always been a renegade, I've never liked working for anybody else. I find that I don't suffer fools lightly. (Phone rings, then after pause ... )

GG: What sort of direction did you think you might have. I mean, did you always want to do up-to-the minute dance music of the time!

PW: I was always into Motown, that was my background. So, you know, I started with The Beatles and Motown was always a strong influence. (Speaks to secretary about phone call).

PW: So you know I had this view, and then I worked for record companies. You've also got to remember, it's very difficult to understand, but such a lot has changed in twenty-five years of being in the business. It sounds ridiculous, but people in the business didn't come from outside London. Now there's loads of us in the industry who aren't from London. In those days there weren't. Certainly, Coventry in 1967 or '68 you've actually got about as much chance of joining the record industry as you have of being Paul McCartney. It's something you don't actually take very seriously. So you do things in a different style. I worked at lots of clubs for Mecca, I worked with Jimmy Saville and learned my trade. I learned ballroom management, but from a DJs point of view. I never, ever wanted to be a ballroom manager. It was something that never interested me and that made me a little different from everybody else who worked for Mecca. All those guys only treated being a DJ as a stepping-stone to becoming a manager of the ballroom, which was their big thing. For me that was of no interest at all.

TP: You were coming From a different angle!

PW: Yes. So I used that to build up a great reputation, and then as I said, a lot of the stuff I was playing you couldn't buy, so we opened a little record store and we sold records, becoming massively known by all the reps because, by this time, we had just started to get the first real promotion line. We're talking '73 or '70, it's when the record companies just started real promotion. You've just got Radio One, and you've got local radio starting. So we became a massive fish in a very small pond because I was playing records that nobody had ever heard and the reps would bring copies of records to me to listen to and see what I thought and bribe me with a decent meal which I wouldn't get in those days. But generally they'd bring you a bunch of records and say what do you think of these?. You'd listen to them and say "They're crap, they're no good and so on. We came up with a few gimmicks for them, we did a bit of artwork for them, we did some promotion tours with titles. Nobody did this sort of thing.

GG: It was totally original!

PW: Well nobody did it. Nobody had done a promotional tour before and I went out with Charlie Gillick of Radio Low-down, the man who founded Dire Straits. He was the man who actually got me into the business because I did this tour for him and he was quite amazed. He and Richard Branson had never seen it before. So they gave me a little label and although it never came to anything, it was enough to get me interested. Then you take one step, it snowballed and in '73 or '72 I picked a record when I was on holiday in Jamaica. Anyway, it snowballed and snowballed until I got a job as a part-time promotion guy for Magnet Records. That was in '73 and I hated it. I hated every single minute of it. But I wanted to be a radio DJ and taking promotion copies into radio stations I knew I was there on the spot when they needed somebody. They all knew I was a DJ and I didn't care about what I was receiving. If they had a DJ who didn't turn up and I was there, then maybe that's my break.

TP: Getting your foot in the door?

PW: Yeah. So in '75 or '74, I accepted a job with Magnet Full-time.

GG: Was that doing the same thing?

PW: No, A&R. Assistant A&R. Within two months I'd got the number two record next to Tammy Wynette's 'Stand By Your Man' and it started to work really. (Phone rings, PW answers, and after short phone conversation ... )

PW: It started to work and I found I had this record number two and I'd just signed this girl called Donna Summer and a rock and roll guy called Chris Rea. It was going great but I hated every minute of it, because I was signing these people and I could see their talent but nobody else could. I found that people talked about me but didn't talk about the music. We find that a lot!

PW: I thought "This is ridiculous, I'd joined the bloody music industry to make music"! So I packed it in and went down the pit. I thought I'd rather be a real miner. I was down the pit for about ten minutes, I'd say, before they realised what a big, strapping lad I was and they worked out that I'd be good for making concrete. So they sent me to the top to make the concrete for the bottom, and while I was making concrete, I was listening to the American Top Ten, or Top Five, which they used to do on a Wednesday on Radio One. Chris Rea was at number two in America, and I thought' I can't believe it, I'm here working in a coalmine, he's the guy I signed and now he's a big rock star - what is going on here?" . The company had my money that I'd worked for so I decided to march into London with my banner, I've been ripped off". In the end, with two great mates of the time who were very supportive of me, I signed a band called The Specials. I actually managed The Specials, and with Jerry came up with the logos, the whole concept. I could not give The Specials away, seriously. I produced 'Jaywalking', 'Ghost Town', 'Too Much Too Young' and another one of their classic songs. I was playing them to everybody and they just said "What is this!". I was still working for the coalmine and after Christmas there was the Medem, the music festival. My best friend at the time was Pete Collins, who offered me a place at his hotel at forty quid for the week. It was ridiculous, but I didn't have forty quid so I scraped together about 25 pounds for a week in France. Now, there were still about eight francs to the pound at that time ...

GG: It always is, isn't it?!

PW: Yeah! So, you know, there wasn't a lot of money floating around here, this was tight. I was playing people The Specials, and bits and pieces, and in 1974 I met a guy called Eddie O'Loughley. He had a label called Midland International with a guy called Bob Reno, who bad been the president of Buddah Records in the late Sixties. I'd given them a band called Silver Convention, who'd sold fourteen million copies in America, and they were the start of disco.

PW: I saw Eddie at this Medem, and he said "Hey, whatcha doing? Now I'd got up to eighteen-and-a-half stone, and when I'd gone for the coal board, I was down to eleven stone, so it was a very different me that went. And, obviously, in that early period everyone had the long hair and I'd got short hair. In conversation with Eddie, he asked me what I was doing, and I said I wanted to get back into the music industry. He said "What do you mean, you're looking to get back in the music industry? You are in the music industry!". I said I'm working down the pit. (After very brief phone call ... )

PW: So he actually thought I was in the industry and said "Look, I've got this guy called John Travolta. Do you want to work with him? He's got this film career with Robert Stigwood, and he's going to make three movies, Saturday Night Fever, Grease and another one". He showed me this TV series called Welcome Back Cotter, which is where John Travolta had come from, like a more hip version of the Fonz. One television station had Henry Winkler as the Fonz and one had John Travolta. I got involved with the pictures.

GG: On what level?

PW: I was involved in the music. Unfortunately, or fortunately, whatever history proves - at the time it was very unfortunate, I couldn't get a deal at all for The Specials. I gave them back their contract and their demos and they went on and I went on. We had Saturday Night Fever and Grease, which I did all the music for.

GG: Is that the biggest selling soundtrack of all time?

PW: I don't know!

GG: It must be close.

PW: Well, I was working for myself, not anybody else, on those movies. It wasn't really what I wanted to do, but it made me a very good livelihood. Notwithstanding livelihood, I bare to say, I was very "cheap" - that's the way I'd always worked. I came back, and started our production company, called "Loose End Productions", with Peter Collins. I can't remember what the first record we ever did was now, but it went on to be a hit. Then we did things like Tracey Ullman, the Belle Stars, and all of that lot. Again, it was hugely successful, and, again, I hated every minute of it. Not that I hated every minute of it for any other reason than I was producing records for other people, for the artists they'd found, in the way they wanted them to be. That wasn't fulfilling for me. We only ever made three records for ourselves. We made 'Pretend' by Alvin Stardust - because it's one of my favourite songs. I'd known Alvin all my life and he's a gentleman. I did 'This Old House' for Shakin' Stevens, but he would do 'Pretend', so I thought, "Well, I'll give it to Alvin Stardust".

PW: There was that, then Tracey Ullman's big hit, 'They Don't Know About Us'. Kirsty MacColl and I are great friends, Kirsty had written that track for herself, she'd demo'ed it and I took it to Tracey. Tracey, Pete Collins and Kirsty worked on that, so it was very personal to me. It really was my favourite sort of record, a "girl group" sort of record. That was the first time I think I'd ever really made a record that I wanted to make for me. It was a 1960s pastiche record, very much what I wanted to do - fitted the era beautifully and was one of the first records that I can actually say worked. Kirsty wrote this little song which I still think is one of the classic records with her about this guy down the chip shop who thinks he's Elvis. I put the money up for that and we produced it - a lot of great fun. It got Kirsty started, really brought her out. I think she met her husband, Stephen, because of it. So that was great, but it was, fragmentary. It wasn't permanent. My partner was making so much money but income tax was still 18 shillings in the pound so we decided to go to California because a lot of bands were becoming tax exiles. Its great, California, if you work for two days, maybe you can push it to three. But three months - thankyou very much - you've gone nuts.

PW: Dance records and black music have been my life since the '55 / '56. I suddenly heard the SOS band doing 'Just Be Good To Me' and I just said, "Hang on, why am I messing about - this is what I want to do. I don't want to do anything else. I wanna make black dance records". I rang Steve Wonder's station, which is where I heard the record. I got the number of the record company and "Lo and behold" it's one of my old mates - Dick Shorey. I ring him up "Hello Dick, I just heard this record of yours and it's a monster". He says "It's your mates Jam and Lewis - give them a ring". I ring them and they say "What are you doing now with your life!" You know, you just think "Hang on, this is what I want to do". Doesn't matter, I'll go bankrupt - I don't care about money. It's not important. I came back and I knew a mate whose father owned a Greek restaurant who had a gay record shop above it. We were very much a gay label, we made gay records.

GG : What label was that?

PW: It was called Proto. It was a Greek label. We had nothing. We made a record and we had to go out and sell it quick to pay for the next record. I'd come back from California and I went to live with the guys. I had a bedroom at the top of this bloody house. None of us could afford to eat. I'd introduced Dave Robinson, who was the head of Stick, who had just become managing director of Island, to Trevor Horn. He had got this record by Frankie Goes To Hollywood, which I got involved with the remixing and marketing because I new that Hi-NRG or as it was Boys-town dance market then really well. So I did all the clubs and a lot of promotion and I looked at it and I went in with a guy Nick East, and we reworked a track they had out called 'Searching' by Hazell Dean. It just didn't work so I edited it around chopped it around, put some little bits and pieces on all for 60 pounds and suddenly it was selling 20,000 a week. Boom. Suddenly we've got a top 20 pop record on Top Of The Pops and we're all going "eh?".

PW: By this time I'd just met Mike and Matt and a guy called Pete Ware who was their original keyboard player. When you meet somebody ...

PW: I have to say everything that Mike Stock does is absolutely brilliant.

PW: It was badly produced, but everything about it was perfect. It was perfectly badly produced only because they hadn't got the knowledge that I had. Everything they'd done was right, they'd just used all the wrong reasons for doing it. So, I could instantly see what they were trying to do, but knew they hadn't done it the right way. So we formed a partnership and the first record we did was 'The Upstroke' and I sold it to RCA. It got to number 81, but to us it was a number one record. It did well in the dance charts. John Peel played it off the air. Probably the only time he's ever played a Stock / Aitken / Waterman record in his life, other than Kylie Minogue. It's a claim that we can say that everyone forgets that SAW were actually broken by John Peel! That's how underground we were.

PW: The thing about those records were they were very fresh, and I had very strong views on where we going, what we could use, what we couldn't use, what I would allow, what I didn't allow. I knew that probably if I sort of "wham" Mike and Matt up they might actually achieve far more than they believed they could. I had far more belief in their talent than they did. I knew that I couldn't let them rest, I had to keep pushing them. In that first two years they probably learned what most people take seven years to learn. But that's Mike Stock. He has this huge ability to suck in stuff like a big sponge. Use the information and recycle it himself. So for the first 12 months we were actually quite successful. You must remember in that 12 months we made 'Spin Me Round' (by Dead Or Alive) although it was actually in the charts For 17 weeks. It was actually made in the October. To say that we were broke by that Christmas was a simplification of the truth. But we didn't care because all three of us (Pete Ware had left) didn't ever question what we were doing. We never had an argument. What I said went. What I always did was move the goal posts one stage further so Matt and Mike found it harder and harder to reach them. There was tremendous clashes of personality between us and Dead Or Alive - that was a massive clash, but it worked.

PW: I knew and I very much resented one of the facts that happened to us with Dead Or Alive. I think it's always stuck at the back of my throat. To me it's a golden rule. Give the public what they want, not what you want. What you want is unimportant. Everybody says "Yeah, but.." I say "Sorry, I can prove it to you". I am the king of this. I can actually show you a number one record - lost, followed by a number one record a year later because somebody wanted to make the same record. 'Spin Me Round' was number one all over the world, everywhere. It changed the face of pop music, no question. We took technology further than Trevor Horn did. People look at that as the first techno record. We followed it by a ballad. Everybody went "In too deep" but we were bored with it, bored with the hand claps and the cow bells. We'd been doing it for two years and were gay'ed out! We were offered a Michael Jackson record and we jumped at the bloody chance instead of doing part 2. If you look, exactly a year later Bananarama came and said "We want 'Venus' to sound like 'Spin Me Round'", so in four hours we did and it was huge all over the world - but it was exactly the same! But that was only because we were bored with it. We treated 'Venus' with the same arrogant disdain.

PW: I remember saying "Here's 20 pounds, go down the pub. Get yourselves a drink, by the time you're back we'll hare it". We whacked it down - a few cow bells, a few hand claps, whoosh, done. Took about two hours. It was fodder to us. But it was fodder people liked. Everybody else loved it. They'd never got too much of it because we'd forgotten that we'd had maybe fifteen hits on the underground gay scene but the proper discotheques had only got 'Spin Me Round'. They'd never got 'Girl Talk' and 'Agents Aren't Aeroplanes' and all that Divine stuff. It hadn't gone mainstream. Between 'Spin Me Round' and 'Venus' there'd been nothing for the average DJ. So that's the lesson. I say "Sorry, can't go like that - public won't like it".

TP: A case of the customer is always right!

PW: Yeah. You hare to be prepared, as the owner of a record label to say "No, I'm not going to do that". The public have been very good to you. They've just given you a number one record so you owe it to them to give them another record they like. I don't want to lie to the public, or cheat the public. I can honestly say that I don't regret any of the records I've put out. I'm not going to say that every record I've put out was the greatest record in history, but I'd stand by even the bad ones and say "If you want to judge me on that record, judge me - I stand by that record". Don't make excuses, make hits.

GG: So when did you first hear of Kylie!

PW: We had an engineer ...