SMASH HITS, 12-25 DEC 1990

Are Stock Aitken Waterman Down The Dumper?!?

Interview: MIKE SOUTAR

We are inside the "nerve centre" of the Hit Factory - the Stock Aitken Waterman empire in South London - two narrow three-storey buildings where the most successful producers in pop have written, played on, produced and mixed hundreds of hits over the past few years. As well as being a studio complex, it's where PWL (Pete Waterman Ltd), the record company which Kylie and Jason (amongst others) are signed to, is based.

Anyone who's ever been inside the Hit Factory will tell you it's not as swanky as you'd expect. All through the building there are model steam trains and pictures of old locomotives (railway's are Pete Waterman's second obsession after pop), but most of the available space is taken up with boxes of tapes and records, magazines and bits and bobs of recording gear.

Even today, when there are no artists in to record anything, all it's little offices and narrow corridors are buzzing with activity. And Pete Waterman (43) and his colleagues Mike Stock (39) and Matt Aitken (34) are assembled in a room next to the main studio called the Waiting Room (where singers sit before they go in to record their vocals) to do their first interview with Smash Hits for three years ...

Stock Aitken Waterman have been here since 1986, although they've been together as a songwriting/producing team since 1984 when they were the toast of the Hi-NRG disco scene producing the likes of Hazell Dean, Divine and Dead Or Alive.

Since then, of course, they've invented several huge pop names, resurrected a few flagging careers and they've made a number of highly successful charity records. In all they've chalked up well over 100 hit records (a fact commemorated in their recent compilation LP "Stock Aitken Waterman - A Ton of Hits" which, in actual fact, boasts 81 S/A/W - produced singles). They are, in short, an absolute phenomenon if ever there was.

So what happened this year? Critics have been rather keen to point out that, actually, 1990 hasn't been such a fruitful 12 months for them. For the first time, it seems, they've had a lot of flops: Kakko, a Japanese girl they produced, failed miserably to get into the charts. Lonnie Gordon, after a Top Three hit with "Happenin' All Over Again", neglected in fact to "happen" at all again with her second single "Beyond Your Wildest Dreams". Big Fun had a flop single which stopped short of the "fun" 40. Sonia left them. Bananarama left them to work with a trendy producer bloke called Youth. All the new acts they'd tried to make famous with the Hitman Roadshows (people like Johnnie O, Shooting Party and The Marines) didn't cut the mustard in the charts. (... but SAW never made any records with these three acts!-Jeremy) And to top it all, their most successful act, Kylie, decided to go off and record four songs for her album with other producers.

And then, in the middle of October, for the first time in three years, there was a two week spell in which none of the Top 75 records were S/A/W produced - although they claimed at the time that they actually had two trendy dance records in the Top 75 under false names (they decline to say which ones, however). Everyone who had ever disliked them happily trumpeted that this was the end of Pete Waterman and his crew. they were, it was reported, down the dumper at last ...

So what on earth happened?

Pete: "With the Yell! single, their record company went bankrupt the day the record came out, so there were no copies in the shops. I also think in hindsight that the band did so much damage to themselves last year in interviews and television that I don't know whether they could have made it. They were a problem."

What about Kakko?

Pete: "Kakko stiffed. Absolutely stiffed. We got it totally wrong. We misjudged it. It was our fault. She couldn't sing the song we gave her."

And Lonnie Gordon's second record?

Pete: "Well that got caught between two stools. We made a record which is out now which should have been out last April. The Lonnie Gordon record was a great song, she sang it well, but it was a ballad and ballads just don't do well that time of year."

Have you split up with Sonia? Is it true you won't be working with her again?

Pete: "Yes. We haven't fallen out but her views - or her advisers' views - and ours don't meet. I don't care what people say, but we're not in this for the money. We aim at having hit records because that's what we love to do and having hit records with Sonia was difficult at the best of times because of what Sonia is. And what she is is a very bright bubbly little character from Liverpool who is very easy to take the mickey out of."

So how did you come to the decision to part company with her?

Pete: "Because it got the point where she was losing this company a lot of money. It was costing us a lot of money to keep Sonia going. And when Sonia came and asked for a rather large amount of money to buy a house for her parents and I got the accountants to actually look at the accounts, this company was in a hole a long way. So we had to say "Sonia, we love you but you'll have to go elsewhere for this money because we'll pay you what is in the pipeline, but if we start making another album with you we're going to be over 200,000 pounds in debt and we can't do that.""

What about Big Fun? Will you work with them again?

Mike: "According to the latest gossip, they've dumped us."

Pete: "According to the latest gossip I've got, their record company has just dumped them."

Mike: "The thing about Big Fun was we were only going to make one record with them. They needed a hit and so we did "Blame It On The Boogie" and it was a hit and they said "Oh can we have a follow-up please?" so you feel obliged to."

Were you happy about the fact that Kylie went off to work with other producers as well as you?

Pete: "Kylie came to me personally and said she wanted to write songs and she wanted to write with Matt and Mike and I said "That's not possible" because we work as a unit, the three of us and whenever we've tried to write with other people it hasn't worked. So I said to Kylie, "We can't do that, you'll have to do it with someone else". We had total knowledge of the whole thing and didn't have a problem with it."

Mike: "The thing is, having had such a massive success Kylie is hardly likely to want to retain just one aspect of the recording process - just coming in and singing - it's probable that she'll want to do it all very soon and we won't be involved anymore."

Pete: "And also she's got a boyfriend in the industry who's probably spurring her on. So I think it's something we expect to happen. I don't know what the future is for Kylie. She's doing her own thing."

Mike: "It's fair to say, though, that this isn't the sort of direction in which we'd want to take her."

What do you think the next step for Jason is?

Mike: "He's in the same sort of boat as Kylie. He perceives himself in an entirely different way from the way we do. Jason I think is more into rock 'n' roll. He's Australian, he likes INXS and Midnight Oil. He'd really like to stand up there with a guitar, greasy hair, jeans ... we only ever saw him as a nicely dressed, clean-cut pop star who happened to come from Australia."

So you think it annoys him that Craig McLachlan has a band and he doesn't?

Pete: "Yeah, definitely. I think that's exactly it. He'd love that."

What Pete Waterman says, and he has a point here, is that having a go at S/A/W for having a few flop records is rather like saying Liverpool football club are down the pan because they've not won every single game they've played this season. "They're the best team there is!" he splutters. "They're eight points ahead of the rest! The only news story is when they don't win! It's like us when we have a flop."

But at least you're fantastically rich, eh?

Pete: "Nobody gets fantastically rich off pop records. That's a myth. We're on a 4% royalty for every record sold what we produce, split up that's 1 and 1/3 % each off the profit of every record."

But don't you charge pop artistes a handsome price for producing their records and making them famous?

Matt: "We could say to someone, "OK, we'll do your record for 50,000 pounds" and that way we would be very rich in a very short time. But we actually only ever charge 500 pounds for every single we produce."

But what Stock Aitken Waterman are clearly bothered about is having hits. It's what they bring the conversation back to all the time - getting to the "bullseye", as Pete Waterman calls having a Number One hit. For most of next year, they say, they'll be working with entirely new acts who no one has heard of yet. There's a band called Delage, apparently, and another one called Boy Crazy, but they will not be drawn further than to say that the records they have planned are "totally different to anything we've done before".

"We're going to start again," says Pete Waterman finally. "This year we've has lots of people who we've worked with for a while but now they're no longer with us. 1991 is going to be much more challenging but we're still excited, we still want to make hit records. I shouldn't start saying we're down the pan yet if I was you ..."