Reproduced from Manchester Evening News 21 June, 1996

Put Pete Waterman in that mould and then be shocked when this 49-year-old resident of Warrington, sitting in the basement of his Manchester recording complex puffing on a cigar, muses: "It's an interesting time for me. I keep bumping into people who are coming to me with influences I started in the 1970s or even before that."

Watenrian's eighties episodes are just the tip of the iceberg. His career in the business of music actually began in the fifties. So will the real Pete Waterman please step forward? "I started getting my feet on the ground when I was about 13 or 14," he says. "At the end of the fifties I was one of the first people actually to take records and play them in the ballrooms. In those days, there were really only two DJs playing the circuit, me and Jimmy Saville."

Armed with a collection of black American music he had begged and borrowed from American GIs serving close to his home city of Coventry, Waterman began his DJ career playing sets between the bands gigging at his local dance hall.

"I'm talking about Cliff Richard, Little Richard, Gene Vincent, people like that.

"The first gig the Beatles ever did after changing their name from John Lennon and the Silver Beatles to the Beatles was at that club.

"John Lennon freaked out at the records I was playing, songs like You Really Got a Hold on Me, by The Miracles, and Mr Moonlight, by Dr Feelgood and the Interns".

By 1970, Pete Waterman had quit his day job, earning his crust instead from DJing. The next 25 years were nothing if not diverse.

In the early seventies, Waterman got into Glitter rock - "I put flares on, died my hair green, blue, and red, and started wearing 3ft platform shoes" - and produced his first hit record a few years later.

He recalls: 'I'd made a reggae record with Lee Peny that we put out here in May, 1975 (Hurt So Good, by Susan Cadogan) and suddenly everything I was touching was turning to gold."

Then Waterman made an unprecedented move.

He abandoned his record company, Magnet (to whom he signed Chris Rea), and went to work in a coalpit in Coventry. Why?

"Because I couldn't take all that corporate stuff"

Not that it took him long to return.

"There was a pub next door to where I worked," he recalls.

"A group called The Automatics were rehearsing there, and they were doing what I can only describe as punk reggae."

Rebuffed by the record companies he approached about signing this band, Waterman spent his savings, ™800, on recording their songs.

"I put them in the studio and we made Too Much, Too Young, and two other No 1 records all in one session.

"We decided to form a label, Two Tone, and changed the name of the band from the Automatics to the Specials."

After Two Tone, Waterman went to America to work with John Travolta on Grease and Saturday Night Fever.

"Travolta bought me my first Jaguar as a present. It was a great time," he recalls.

At the close of the seventies, he returned to the the UK, setting up a production company that developed Tracey Ullman, The Belle Stars, Musical Youth and Nik Kershaw.

IN the middle of the eighties, Waterman received a "cab from two young kids called Mike Stock and Matt Aitken. They came in the office and played me a song called The Upstroke (by Agents Aren't Aeroplane) and I said, 'Guys, I can make you millionaires'."

Following those Stock, Aitken and Waterman heydays, Waterman's profile lowered.

Wallowing in corporate success, he became, by his own admission, "a cabbage," a situation he's hoping to reverse by tapping into Manchester's musical resources.

Five years ago, he purchased The Church at 380 Deansgate, Manchester, a building he is developing into the biggest commercial studio outside London.

"I just feel there's a huge amount of talent in Manchester and I want to hear it, I want to be part of it," he says.

Waterman wants Manchester to play a part in his renaissance, he wants to be the Hitman again.

His companies still produce hits - Set Me Free by N-Trance made him a mint - but he wants to be back at the production helm again.

"I just felt late last year that it was time to hang up my corporate hat," he says, "put my working clothes back on, pick up my miner's hat, and get down the pit."

Most recently he was "in the pit" with the Manchester United team. Producing a record that has now sold close to half-a-million copies was the prelude to Waterman's desire to produce Eric Cantona.

Despite reports to the contrary, a recording contract between Eric and Pete has yet to be signed, but Cantona's recording career is something Waterman is taking very seriously.

"I want to challenge the whole belief of what Eric Cantona is," he says.

"Why should Eric Cantona not be the next U2? Why should Eric Cantona not be a French version of Ice T? There is no reason, no reason at all. If that is what Eric wants, then we can achieve that."

Although Waterman has no idea what style of music Cantona would adopt, it will undoubtedly be commercial, but it won't be a novelty.

"I think we're going to have to experiment," he says about the musical direction that will be taken.

"That's part of the intrigue. I wouldn't make a novelty record, though. Cantona's either serious about it or he isn't. I believe he's serious about it, and if that is the case, there is no reason why he can't be a recording star."

Despite his wealth and profile, Pete Waterman has not adopted the pretensions he sees at odds with his working-class roots.

"If somebody is trying to be clever, call themselves a clever name, and do something for art's sake, that's not for us," asserts a man not afraid to call a spade a spade.

He sums up his rationale to life: "I'm not going to do a modern art exhibition and put a pig in a barrel of brine and say this is clever, not for us chaps. Come in here with a Renoir and you'll get a million pounds, come in here with a piece of rubbish and you'll get kicked out."