Reproduced from Sunday Times 29 November, 1998

Over the past 18 months, the British music industry has been wringing its hands over job losses, record company closures, a shortage of new talent and a Britpop hangover that has left it with acts such as Blur and Pulp who still have huge record deals despite selling fewer records. The major labels' constant complaints and paranoia could not be in starker contrast to 1998's new, fresh, inevitably disparaged and underrated musical force - pure pop music.

The year's successes in the singles charts include Cher's million-selling Believe, Billie's Because We Want to and B*witched's trainer-bra pop - like Billie they have had two successive number ones, including C'est la vie, which has sold more than 850,000 copies in this country. New R&B/pop acts such as the sisters Cleopatra have also broken through, along with boy bands ranging from the soulful Another Level to the faux-streetwise 5ive, who have reached the Top 10 with their first four singles.

Pop music's vitality initially rejuvenated and is now feeding off music programmes on TV. Shows such as The O Zone, The Pepsi Chart Show, Live and Kicking and the Box satellite station have become brighter, younger and more popular. This music has also found support at Radio 1, which has effectively swung away from its self-imposed definition as a cutting-edge music station of two years ago to turn self-consciously populist. The station's controller, Andy Parfitt, now talks of "putting the listeners at the centre of everything" and describes Radio 1 as a "celebration of the young experience in the UK". According to Parfitt, the station's message is "We are young" and the station has clearly stated it is aiming for a profile of 15-to 24-year-olds, leaving older listeners to be mopped up by an increasingly rock-influenced Radio 2.

As part of this new populism, the unthinkable has happened. Pete Waterman, the man whose songs and productions with Mike Stock and Matt Aitken launched a string of usually short-lived pop careers in the mid-to-late-1980s (remember Sinitta, Rick Astley, Dead Or Alive, or what Jason Donovan used to look like?), is back and very much in business. His latest proj-ect, Steps, which he accurately describes as "Abba on speed", have sold more than 400,000 copies of their debut album, Step One, on the back of the hit singles, 5,6,7,8 (more than 300,000 copies sold, despite reaching only No 14), Last Thing on My Mind (an old Bananarama flop, written by Stock and Waterman, now peaked at No 6), One for Sorrow (No 2) and Heartbeat/Tragedy (No 2).

Echoing the days of Stock Aitken Waterman, he has formed a new songwriting and production team with a couple of 22-year-old ex-jazz funk musicians, Topham and Twigg, to write the hits for Steps and a growing roster of other young acts, who already include another Top 20 success, Tina Cousins. Meanwhile, Zomba, the indie label Waterman is working with as A&R, writer and producer, enjoyed four Top 20 pop hits in mid-November, namely Cousins, Steps, the Tamperer and Sham Rock.

"It has been the year of pop music," enthuses the fiftysomething Waterman from inside his Pete Waterman Ltd bunker, an anonymous looking warehouse in a southeast London sidestreet, where his studio and offices have been located since January 1985.

"We couldn't have had success with Steps three years ago, but acts such as Blur and Oasis, who have been the pop music of recent years, can't perform it any more because they don't want to. The marketplace says, 'Great, Noel, give us another Wonderwall,' but of course that's the last thing Oasis want to do. These bands are supposed to be an alternative to the kind of music I provide, because pop music is the natural order of things in the marketplace. At the end of the day, Oasis and their like are not going to make disposable pop records every few weeks until they burn out. But that's what we do. We create a buzz on the playground, and four weeks later we're on to the next thing."

Waterman loves the marketplace. This is the man who used to arrive at gay clubs with a dictaphone to tape sections of the latest dance anthems so that he could feed fresh ideas into the SAW production team. His approach to songwriting is also based on being a music fan first, so that for the past 30 years he's bought and blagged records - as a compere for Fleetwood Mac in the 1960s, a Mecca DJ in the 1970s, record company A&R man, producer and writer. He's become a relevant figure again because the marketplace is undoubtedly flexing its muscle and offering fantastic opportunities to labels such as Zomba.

The pop fan is bored with techno and house music, two musical forms that have all but disappeared from this year's Top 10. "Market forces have changed everything," shouts Waterman in a thick Coventry accent at a volume only absolutely necessary in a club. "Dance music has changed over the past 12 months because of the licensing laws. You look at Manchester, which was the club city. Now the club scene has gone. There isn't one because the bars are open until two or three o'clock in the morning, and these bars are playing dance mixes of pop singers like Natalie Imbruglia. They have to play poppy stuff because people drift from one bar to another. So DJs are having to respond to the average punter more than they have done for years."

Radio 1's "We are young" re-definition was recently described by one of the industry's most famous record-pluggers, Scott Piering, as a "a near U-turn" from the so-called "cutting-edge" new-music policy of the station's former controller, Matthew Bannister. Waterman is blue-faced in agreement: "Of course they're now having to play pop music, because they've lost their audience. You can't preach at people, because what happens? ... You lose listeners!" he yells triumphantly, referring to the 6m listeners Radio 1 lost in the months following its radical changes in 1993.

However, the man whose other recent Top 3 single was Move Move Move (The Red Tribe) for Manchester United Football Club ("That got the creative juices flowing again," he says without irony), believes that Radio 1's U-turn has been "forced on them and they wished they didn't have to do it. Unfortunately, they still have presenters on there who aren't comfortable with the new playlist because they see it as personal insult to their DJ image. One of them played my Steps record the other day and then smashed up the record. I'm sorry, don't play it, or don't say anything. It's an insult to people who like the single."

Not surprisingly, Waterman is a big fan of the old Radio 1, the "poptastic" days of Simon Bates and the "hairy cornflake", Dave Lee Travis. "It was simple. You knew when to tune in for the music you liked. Pop in the day, more specialist stuff in the evening. Now Radio 1 plays pop music, but it's more concerned with its demographics and youth policies than whether the records are good pop records or not."

While Waterman's populist views would have been completely ignored only a year ago, in 1998 the fag ends of trip-hop, dance, laddism and Britpop culture have left a bad taste of cultural depression, apathy and mediocrity. Black Grape's Shaun Ryder has substituted wit for a column in the Sport; Tricky is now so paranoid he attacked a journalist at this year's Glastonbury; tabloids have turned Liam Gallagher into rock music's very own Paul Gascoigne; and the former Stone Roses singer, Ian Brown, is in Strangeways Prison following aggressive conduct on an aeroplane.

So, for the moment, it is refreshing that Waterman's comeback act, Steps, are not only an antidote to such apocalyptic navel-gazing but they're also threatening to follow the Spice Girls into the international markets, achieving sales for British pop that the likes of Manic Street Preachers or Pulp or Blur have never come close to achieving.

"British music will be bigger internationally than it has been in years," says Waterman, full of patriotic vim. "Our time has come again. While we've been concentrating on our indie bands, the Scandinavians such as Aqua and Ace of Base have softened up the world markets. Now the British are back and we have a chance to show just how much money there is in pop music."