Reproduced from Music Week 16 December 1995

Five years after scoring their 13th number one with Kylie Minogue's Tears On My Pillow, the pair's fortunes were going through a relatively barren spell. "We thought we'd be on 13 forever," says Aitken. "But now we're aiming for 27 - that's George Martin and Norrie Paramor's records."

The turnaround can be attributed to, most notably, their collaboration with two of pop's most unlikely stars, TV's Robson Green and Jerome Flynn. After meeting the pair a year ago, Stock and Aitken have produced two singles for the actors, which have, to date sold 3m copies in the UK alone.

Sandwiched between these two was the US success of Total Eclipse Of The Heart by Nicki French on Stock's own Love This Records label - a single which led a new British assault on the American charts by reaching number two in June.

"It's been a memorable year for a lot of reasons," says Stock, 44. "And it's been very exciting as well as being a really steep learning curve for me, running my own label for the first time. But it has gone really quickly."

The duo are understandably buoyant. In the studio at Stock's £4m Love This Records' complex in London's Southwark, they swamp quips like a night-club comedy double act; Aitken, 39 cracks jokes constantly and professes to a soft spot for Led Zeppelin, while Stock, the 100% owner of Love This, is the willing straight man with a car transistor tuned, most regularly, to Melody Radio.

While being no great fans of Britpop - "I feel I've heard it all before," says Stock - they are enormously proud of their own achievements. "I am 40 next year and Mike is 45," says Aitken. "And we can still get excited when we hear a really great pop record or a brilliant drum beat. There are a lot of people of our age that don't."

The observation that, for all their commercial success, they have never been critically acclaimed, brings a wounded response. "We don't make records because we like them," says Stock. "We make them because the public likes them.

That includes going with the right arrangement and right style for each particular record, says Aitken. "When it came to doing I Believe, Robson Green wanted to do the Elvis Presley arrangement, but it was not right. It's also the worst played version I've ever heard."

They key, says Stock, is hitting the right market; a seemingly instinctive skill given his admission that he has never seen a single TV episode of Neighbours or Soldier Soldier.

Even when a club promotions executive played the pair a cheaply produced dance version of Total Eclipse Of The Heart, there was a simple question to answer before a re-recording should go ahead with Nicki French. Aitken says, "We asked him, 'What makes this a big record?' and he said 'It's a great tune and people can dance to it'. That's all you need to know."

Simon Cowell, the RCA A&R consultant who teamed them up with Robson & Jerome, certainly believes the pair have golden ears for a pop opportunity. "They were my first choice to do the record," he says. "They understand the market that we are trying to sell towards. A lot of people are snobs when it comes to this kind of music, but Mike and Matt know what it's all about."

The years they spent in the Seventies and early Eighties as session musicians, honing their guitar, keyboard and arrangement skills have also paid off. "They are brilliant musicians," says Cowell. "And a lot of young producers aren't like that."

But then, Stock and Aitken are resolutely old-school. Besides their 13 number ones, they have been involved in writing and producing 72 Top 40 records (including 31 top fives) and solely producing another 42 (18 top fives) in a career spanning three decades.

As far as producing and writing is concerned, things only came together when they met Pete Waterman in 1984. Stock remembers the precise day - "It was on January 15, 1984," - and within a month they were in the studio recording their first hit, Divine's You Think You're A Man.

It launched an extraordinarily successful period which, from the outside, appeared to be a dream three-way partnership. Sadly - as has happened to many such partnerships in the past - it fell apart, with the pair arguing that they deserve the lion's share of the credit for its phenomenal success.

To the surprise of many in the business, the pair are insistent that the PWL founder took a unbalanced share of the limelight.

Where we do give Waterman credit is in handling the business side of their work. "We know this industry is made up from a mixture of talent and business," says Stock. "The business side of it is what Pete looked after. This world is full of unfinished masterpieces which have never been heard and we know that."

"The problem was that once we were up and running, Pete was always the one involved with the outside world," says Aitken. "We knew Pete was a good frontman for us. But while we were spending 60 hours a week in the studio, people were seeing Peter everywhere and believed we were just the backroom boys."

"I remember him saying once, "I am Walt Disney and they are my animators'," adds Stock. "And that just wasn't true."

That aside, Stock now reserves his greatest bitterness for another arena. For all Robson & Jerome's current success, his biggest gripe right now is the on-going row with CIN and the BPI over the singles chart.

The row started during the summer when controversy hit Love This Records' For All We Know by Nicki French over a barcode problem on a rogue 12-inch, which resulted in the single stalling at 42 in the chart. Five months later, SIN withdrew Love This Records' Tatjana single Santa Maria from the chart after Millward Brown data showed unusual sales patterns and indicated that a buying-in team was being used on the record.

Stock's immediate reaction was to issue a denial of any involvement and offer a reward of £10,000 to anyone who could identify the buying-in team responsible. And he remains defiant in his denial of any involvement.

"It's just not true," he says. "I didn't do anything. There isn't any proof because I didn't do anything." A resolution to the issue is expected before Christmas.

Certainly, Stock will be aiming to clear the issue up as soon as possible as he is already anticipating that next year will be a big one.

"My aim next year is to really establish Love This Records," he says. Already, he and Aitken are working with actor John Alford, of TV's London's Burning, on a recording of the Jerome Kern standard Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, a number one for The Platters in 1959.

Naturally, both Stock and Aitken have their fingers firmly crossed that it lives up to their Robson & Jerome success. Record retailers across the country will certainly concur with that.