SMASH HITS / 30 DECEMBER 1987

"NEVER GONNA GIVE YOU UP?
That took us about 3 1/2 minutes"

Doesn't it just make you sick?

"We've taken pop music back to the people who buy pop records, not the journalists that preach to people," says Pete Waterman passionately. "Have you read what that guy in the Housemartins said? He says that the public that buy records are a bunch of wimps. He says he hates them." To Pete Waterman that's the typical attitude of most people who make records.

"That to me," he continues getting quite worked up, "has just summed up five years of British pop music! I'd like to take that, blow it up and show it to the whole industry and say 'here is what is wrong with the British pop industry. You've had people writing songs who don't give a shit about the people that buy them and you've allowed that to happen. You should all be hung, drawn and quartered'.

"The industry that we all love - pop music, which we all grew up on - has been hoisted by its own petard by people being too clever, university students who want to write glowing political songs about how depressing it is the North of England. Well, I live in the North of England and it ain't very depressing for me. The pubs are full at night, the clubs are full at weekends, they're all having a good time. When I read what the Housemartins said I thought 'at last! They've admitted it! The game is over!'"

Stock Aitken & Waterman, Pete reckons, are far more honest. They don't make records to show people how clever they are or to make a political point; they make records - quite simply - for people to enjoy.

"If Stock Aitken Waterman do anything we make music for people," he continues, "for people to buy. What a big crime that is! We entertain people. We write songs about life as we see it and as the kids see it."

That sort of directness, he says, isn't popular in the record industry (they always use words like industry - "we look at it like a job," says Mike). In fact even now, after all their success, they claim to be totally ignored by all the main record companies.

"No one rings us up," says Mike. I can guarantee you we have no work from a major record company in our book," says Pete. This lack of recognition clearly irks them a little, though they have a theory for why it's happened ...

"We're renegades!" shouts Pete, getting animated once more. "We break the rules. All The Smiths and those guys think they're left field - well, we're so far left we make them look central.

"They don't like honesty, you see. We're honest about what we do. Record companies can't stand that. Whenever anyone points a finger at them and says 'you're in a business that makes a lot of money' they go 'no no no no NO NO NO!!!! We're not. We're in this for art! That's rubbish. We don't bullshit people about this job."

The whole idea of how they could make hit records started back in January 1984. For the previous 15 years Pete Waterman had been a DJ for the club and ballroom company Mecca, spent some time as a marketing and A&R person in record companies and had worked with a producer called Pete Collins (Nik Kershaw, Loose Ends etc.) whom he'd left after they'd both moved to California and he'd found that "the sun really got to me brain." So he came back with one idea - "that the market I really loved and had loved since the age of 15 was the dance market."

As chance would have it, later that month he met up with Matt and Mike. Matt had previously played guitar on ocean liners, while Mike had played in swank hotel "function" band called Mirage, appeared on Thank Your Lucky Stars as a band called Dodge ("we came last - the winner was Jimmy Cricket").

Pete was especially impressed by a song they'd written called "The Upstroke". I said to the lads, 'Cor, if we all work together we can by very rich'."

"Pete actually said," corrects Mike, "'Stick with me boys, and I'll show you how to make a hit record'. Which we thought was completely arrogant because we'd been trying for years."

The problem, they realised, was that they'd been "too clever". (They'd also done a few things that were simply very dodgy. They once did a song called "Put The Clocks Back" to coincide with the clocks being put back and, even after Stock Aitken Waterman were formed, they wrote the Cyprus entry for the Eurovision Song Concert - it came 18th.). "The Upstroke" did better. It was released as "a female version of the Frankies" and got to the bottom of the charts.

The next step was Divine, a very portly bloke dressed up as a woman. That was when Matt and Mike really began getting the hang of this pop lark.

"Pete played it to me in the Jag, a demo of 'You Think You're A Man'" remembers Mike. "It was everything a well-tempered musician who'd been practising for twenty years like me thought was naff. It was simple to the point of puerile".

And - as they are fond of saying - they realised that it would probably sell by the shedful. "Our first Top 20 hit."

Next came Dead or Alive - "they said they wanted to sound like Divine" - and - hey presto! - they'd had their first number one with "You Spin Me Round". But even then the phone stayed dead. By this time Pete Waterman had built PWL studios (where they now work) and he was massively in debt to the bank. Things were looking very ropey indeed.

Meanwhile they'd written a song called "Say I'm Your Number One" which they were sure was "an absolute smash" but couldn't find anyone to record it. Bucks Fizz turned it down and Dee C. Lee turned up for a meeting on the wrong day: "she's that organised that she came on Tuesday instead of Wednesday and went off in a huff when we weren't here." Finally Pete started a record company with a friend of his called Nick East, they found Princess and recorded the song themselves. By this stage the bank was "freaking out".

"So I played the record to my bank manager," laughs Pete, "at the Allied Irish Bank in Coventry. He loved it, thought it was wonderful. He said 'I'll extend your credit for six weeks'. In six weeks it had gone top ten, we'd started paying back and I gave him a gold disc and everything. He was the happiest man in the world."

Since then things have gone like a dream. They say they "don't know any more" how many records the three of them have been directly involved in that have gone into the charts. "About 65, I think," says Pete, adding, "I know how many haven't been hits (i.e. in the Top 75) - four, Austin Howard. The last Hazell Dean. Edwin Starr. The Dolly Dots."

"Strangely enough," says Mike, "we still only feel we're getting somewhere."

"We still don't feel we've made it," says Pete. "We don't actually believe we've done anything. If you want to be cynical we've only broken three artists - Rick Astley, Mel And Kim and Bananarama - that we can guarantee having hits with. All the others - Sinitta and everybody - are only as good as their next record."

And their ambition?

"Ten records in the top ten," considers Mike. "We're aiming for things as crazy as that."

So how, you might wonder, do they come up with hit after hit? When they describe it, it all seems depressingly simply. First they think of what they call The Plot. This is quite often Pete's role. The Plot, for instance, for "GTO" is about "a girl whose boyfriend is more interested in his car than her". Likewise they decide the musical style, for which they've got their own eccentric vocabulary. ("Say I'm Your Number One", for instance, is "a slow floater", "Never Gonna Give You Up" is a "120 beats-per-minute galloping jitterer")

And to finish the song off?

"Suppose Sinitta was due in at half past one," explains Mike. "At about now (just after 12) we'd say 'we better get in there' and we'd write the song and do it in 20 minutes roughly."

Sometimes quicker" "'Never Gonna Give You Up' was the ultimate," says Pete. "It took three and a half minutes. I walked in here, said 'I've got this great idea', went down to the basement, got the guys to write a little keyboard pattern and that was it."

Gulp.

Usually most of the musical work is done by Matt and Mike - Pete can't really play anything and, more amazingly, he happily admits that he's only recently learnt to read. "I'm a very poor reader - I've only learnt to read at all in the last five years so I find it a real struggle reading newspapers."

What Pete does, apart from help think up "plots" and lyrics is to spot the hits and market them. "I come in at the end to look at the picture and see if we've got one we can auction." Sometimes, to the others' annoyance, he can spot "valuable pictures" very early on, like Bananarama's "Love In The First Degree".

"He walked in and said," remembers Mike, "'there you go, that'll do me. Write me another six of them, blah-di blah' - all his usual bravado - 'gold discs right away, here's another Ferrari!'"

The one time that that's gone wrong, they say, is with Rick Astley.

"Pete got too close," says Mike, "and he wasn't able to listen like an ordinary person with Woolworth's ears."

Consequently they recorded "Never Gonna Give You Up" last December and promptly forgot all about it because none of them realised it was much cop. It was only when someone else working in the studio got it out and started playing it last summer that they realised "we might have something there" - "something" being, of course, the year's best selling single.

It'd be easy to think from what the three of them say that they're very clinical about all this - talking about "jobs" and "the industry", writing songs in five minutes, calling an album of their biggest success "The Hit Factory" - but they just see that as being honest and actually seem genuinely uninterested in money. Though they admit that they're "probably" millionaires and though Pete Waterman was a modest collection of eighteen cars, they argue that "once you earn about 30,000 pounds a year, enough to be very comfortable, it doesn't really matter."

They are, however, genuinely thrilled by pop music. Every morning they come in raving about some new record they've heard on the radio and they do get very emotional about it all.

"When I hear Rick singing 'Never Gonna Give You Up'," says Pete, I get goosebumps. You have to think, 'this is one of my songs'. 'When I Fall In Love', which is my all-time personal favourite song, I still can't listen without a lump in my throat. I took the video home the other day and on Saturday morning at my house there was me, his manager, my family and a DJ friend and I'm sitting there with tears rolling down my face. That's really pleasurable. The money ain't important. It's the feeling I get when I hear Rick singing. I couldn't pay for that.

"People go on a big dipper or on Concorde because it's what they've always wanted to do and they get a big high once and that's it. Listen to Rick Astley and you'll get a lifetime thrill every time he sings a song of yours."

BANANARAMA

Pete: "To us they're the pop group, the ultimate female group."

Mike: "They're very difficult to please. They're hard taskmasters. They're not what you'd call bubbly effervescent people; they're much more 'I come from East London working class but I'm going to be a strong female' type. Matt and I had to try very hard to get things we wanted to past them."

Pete: "We'd have to sneak things past them so they couldn't see the whole picture. For instance, they'd never have agreed to the idea of 'I Heard A Rumour' so we recorded it in such a way that they never heard more than two lines at a time. Then we put it all together afterwards. They loved it."

Mike: "It doesn't matter that they're not the world's greatest singers. They sound like what they are to me, they sound like they're just ordinary girls.

MEL & KIM

Pete: "They're beautiful people - fabulous, effervescent - and the moment we met them we realised we could write songs in a different style about Mel & Kim. They're two jack-the-lads, but female. They're so independent. They reverse the role. You'd walk into a bar and say to them 'do you want a drink, love?' and they're immediately going to say 'stuff you mate, do you want a drink?'. We use the term 'kissing frogs' - they go round kissing frogs because they know one day one of them is going to turn into a prince."

Mike: "We reasoned that with the two of them you couldn't really do personal love songs so there's a lot of songs on their album where their best mate has fallen in love with this rogue and they're giving her advice."

DEAD OR ALIVE

Mike: "The first album (actually Dead Or Alive's second, "Youthquake") was done in a month and it worked."

Pete: "The second ("Mad Bad And Dangerous To Know") took six months. We've never done anything like that before and never will again. We felt frustrated because we're always trying to make better and records and push back new barriers. They were a nightmare because they didn't want to do anything new. We played them all the basics of House music in early January and they should have been doing that before anybody but they wouldn't listen. We must have recorded 30 tracks and ended up with ten exactly the same as the first album."

SIGUE SIGUE SPUTNIK

Pete: "Their problem is they don't actually know what they want. They want to make lots of money - that's what the song's about! but they don't want to admit it."

Matt: "They gave us an incredibly confined area to work in ..."

Pete: "... and he (i.e. Tony James) also tried to put a confine on the song which was one note. How can you bleedin' have a song which has one note?"

Mike: "It never had one note. A typical example of people who don't have any melodic response."

SAMANTHA FOX

Mike: "Putting it in really cynical terms, they'd made an album that cost a lot of money without a good single to pull off it. So the record company approached us: 'please can you make one record that we can stick on the album and will be a hit to make the album sell?' So we wrote the song, she came in to sing it for two or three hours, went away, we finished the record and it turned out to sell several million round the world. Number one in five European countries."

MANDY SMITH

Pete: "I actually think that if we could break Mandy Smith in Britain there would be an end to musical snobbery in this country."

Mike: "People aren't being given a chance to see her or hear her. They won't play her records on the radio and they won't show her videos on the television because they think she's offensive."

PRINCESS

Mike: I remembered her from a session she'd done as a backing single with Pete a couple of years before, so we got her in. After the first record ("Say I'm Your Number One") it started getting very difficult because other people like her brother started getting involved and started knowing what a hit record was. She'd been trying for years and never had a sniff of a hit before so you'd have thought after the first one they'd think 'don't rock the boat'. Her brother wanted her to be racy and raunchy and hard and aggressive - hence calling her a female Prince - but we saw her as a much softer figure."

Pete: "We decided that she'd go her way and we'd go ours. She'd been offered a lot of money to sign to Polydor."

Mike: "We didn't think 'I told you so'. (She hasn't had a hit since.) We just felt a bit sad. We could still work with her on a one-to-one basis and I know we could still be having hits."

RICK ASTLEY

Pete: "It's obvious what Rick is. He's the male pop star, singing songs that women of 13 to 35 will go out and buy. And they do. They buy them in bucketloads. They buy them in shedfuls. 'Never Gonna Give You Up' is that wonderful record that you buy for your wife because it's that song that says what you want somebody to say to you. With Rick Astley we write songs that are personal to him, but that people can relate to their loved ones.

"I've never had any doubts about him as a pop star. When he first came here, skinny and pale, some people thought we'd lost our marbles, but I always said he'd be the biggest pop star. He is an ordinary guy with a wonderful voice. He's not pretty, he looks ordinary. That's his appeal to people - he's just a normal lad from Newton-le-Willows. Girls go mad at his voice but he still blushes when someone asks for his autograph and it's not put on."

SINITTA

Mike: "She's a bit like a black Shirlie Temple. I don't think you could do really serious songs with her. She's a brilliant cabaret star entertainer."

Pete: "She's such a bubbly character. Girls identify themselves with her. She's one of them, whereas Mandy Smith is not. With the exception of Rick, she's the only artist we've got who can go on stage and put on a great show for 20 minutes. And who else could have sung a song about a toy boy and sold a million records? Sinitta is believable."

Matt: (sniggering) "Whereas Pete Burns wouldn't be ..."

STOCK AITKEN WATERMAN

Pete: "A major reason we did 'Roadblock' was to upset a lot of people. We're not really serious about it as a group, though the boys were working on a track that I really love so there may be another single next year. A lot of people are knocking '...Party Posse' for being like 'Roadblock' but that's what the DJs asked us for."

Mike: "We're not proud. We still make whatever people ask us to make. But I don't think we want to be pop stars."

STEVE WALSH

Pete: "Well, Steve's a laugh, ain't he? We'd never written a club 'put your hands up in the air' record before. He approached me and I put it to the boys and when stopped laughing ..."

Mike: "Initially we had the same reaction as other people: 'oh no, how could you possibly ...?' Then I suddenly thought, 'I Found Lovin''s at number five - why are people rushing out and buying it?'. And so we came off our high horse and started thinking like ordinary people think."