NUMBER ONE, 2 AUG 1989

INSIDE THE HIT FACTORY ...

MONDAY MORNING in south London. Early Monday morning (well, 11am) and the Hit Factory is beginning to rumble into action.

A bunch of fans congregate outside clutching cameras, autograph books and copies of Number One in the hope of catching the eye of a passing mega-star (they're in luck - one J. Donovan is in to record the B-side of his next single later!) while inside the irrepressible Pete Waterman is bustling around.

The place is full of gold discs (some of them dating back to the early '70s) and tea-boys (every one of them you stare at, imagining them to be the next Rick Astley). How many brand new chart-toppers will, you idly wonder, be knocked into shape by the end of the day?

"I'm just going for a rinse then I'll round up the boys," says Waterman cheerily, a veritable fireball of energy. "I'm 42 years of age and I ain't getting any younger," he says frequently, but you can't believe him.

The "boys" are duly rounded up and an unlikely trio they make too. Matt Aitken lurches in, all barrel-chested and unshaven, with a Help A London Child T-shirt and a streaming cold. "I was 15th yesterday at Donington," he tells an impressed Waterman (something to do with motor racing), inspiring Pete into some garbled anecdote about a Ferrari.

Mike Stock, on the other hand, looks like a college boy, fresh-faced and well-scrubbed and, once you wind him up, every bit as animated as the boisterous Waterman. You don't hear much about Mr. Stock and Mr. Aitken, of course, but they're the engine room of the operation, two pop journeymen down on their luck when they encountered Waterman and decided to throw in their lot together.

"We just wanted to make pop records," says Pete. "The three of us had a love of pop music and we felt nobody else was making those records. As barriers were put up in front of by different people - basically the industry - we came up with a plan to beat those barriers."

Aitken: "That's why we started our record label, why we found our own acts and wrote our own songs for them - we didn't rely on people like CBS or EMI. We were Number One with Dead Or Alive for CBS in l985, but did they ring us up and say 'Do you want to do our next act?' No!"

At the time Matt was living in a squat, a penniless Pete built a farm for his kids as a Christmas present out of bits from the dustbin, and they would flee from the bank manager to The Ship in London's Wardour St where the three of them would share a pint because they couldn't afford one each.

"We never forget those times," says Matt. "We were close to the edge financially, but we never wavered in our belief that eventually we would be successful, though I had no idea how successful!"

In the last couple of years they've had unprecedented success, Kylie, Jason, Rick Astley, Bananarama, Brother Beyond, Sonia ... at one time they had seven records in the Top 2O, and their 'Hit Factory 3' album has just come out and looks set to become one of the biggest-sellers of the year. What they haven't had is the respect of their peers. With their volume of success it shouldn't matter to them, but clearly it does.

Mike Stock: "I don't think the industry understands what we're doing or why we get hits. And they don't want to know. We are lampooned regularly, but the people who count - the people who buy the records - think the opposite.

"The only criticism that hurts is when people question our reasons for doing things or make out we're some kind of money-grabbers of svengalis. We do it because we like it and we only set our store on one thing - and that is to make pop records that we're proud of as a medium - we make no sociological statements."

Pete Waterman: "It does hurt sometimes when people get personal about us. The problem is everyone is a music expert and everyone's got an axe to grind. They all think it's easy. So you say 'OK, if it's so easy, then you do it!' but nobody ever does. I've heard records that are desperately trying to be S/A/W with a credibility factor thrown in and it's just nonsense. What we do is honest.

"I believe we're in the second rock'n'roll generation. Everybody's blind and doesn't see it. People like The Smiths and U2 and Clannad are the Perry Comos and Al Martinos (ancient boring crooners from several centuries ago - Ed) of the 8Os. Nobody has seen it yet but people like U2 and The Smiths are boring and old-fashioned and kids today see it as their brother's music. All this knocking about our stuff is from people who don't understand it.

"I'm sorry, I'm 42 years of age (he's at it again) and I heard it when Elvis Presley came out, I heard it when The Beatles came out and I'm hearing it again now. The kids are saying "We love Stock, Aitken & Waterman, we love Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan's great' and they're holding it up as a badge of youth. U2 - forget it! Bono's old! He's got long hair! He's scruffy! If you look at kids today they walk around in brightly coloured gear, they're youthful looking, they're exciting ... and the majority of them are very pleasant people and it's a rejection of the drug culture. They see all that heavy-metal thing and it's so old fashioned!'

"This acid house thing ... it's just a trendy thing, not working class Britain. It's middle class! University students who've got 15 pounds to go to the acid house gig and 30 pounds to buy the Ecstasy. From the abuse and hate we receive it must be exactly the same as people like Little Richard and Elvis Presley must have received. People really hate us - they want to come and cut the electricity cable to this building."

THE CRITICISMS

DON'T YOUR RECORDS ALL SOUND THE SAME?

Waterman: "Great! Exactly like every Motown record, exactly like every Stax record, and exactly like every Beatles record. That means we got it right!"

Stock: "When people say all our records sound the same what they usually mean is that they sound like hits!"

DON'T YOU ALWAYS WORK TO A STANDARD FORMULA?

Waterman: "That's what they accuse Liverpool Football Club of. I'd like their bloody awards! People will never say 'Oh, they've actually got it right."

DON'T YOU MAKE MUSIC THAT'S INSTANTLY DISPOSABLE ... THAT WON'T BE HERE IN FIVE MINUTES, LET ALONE FIVE YEARS?

Waterman: "So where are Black Sabbath? Led Zeppelin? Cat Stevens?"

Stock: "You don't remember Mike Oldfield's 'Tubular Bells', but you remember Gary Glitter. And from the early '60s you remember Motown, but that was regarded as toytown ... gimmick music!"

Waterman: "People who say we won't be here in five years time, well, I bet they won't be here in five years time."

DON'T YOU MANIPULATE YOUR ARTISTS TO A CERTAIN IMAGE?

Aitken: "We don't basically interfere with the way our artists look at all. We never say to them 'You've got to go and have tattooed legs,' or anything."

ISN'T IT TRUE THAT THE ARTISTS HAVE VERY LITTLE INVOLVEMENT IN THEIR OWN RECORDS?

Stock: "How much involvement did Elvis have in his own records? He didn't write the songs, he recorded them live in one take. Something changed in the pop world when it became credible - after Bob Dylan - to write your own songs. But before that, everybody - Cliff Richard, Adam Faith, Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley never wrote a song in their lives. They were just interpreters - singers of other people's songs - and what's wrong with that? That's the finest talent you can have if you're good at it."

KYLIE

Stock: "She was in London for three or four days before we even knew she was here, because HE (Pete) didn't tell us. Her manager turned up and said 'Well, we're here!'. I didn't even know who she was because I didn't watch Neighbours and her manager said 'We're making a record with you and unless you make it today we're in trouble because we fly back tomorrow. That was it!

"Matt and I were galvanised into action. We wrote it there and then and based it around what we knew about her ... we quickly gleaned that she was a soap star and that she was very young and very successful and we thought 'Bloody hell, we should be so lucky!"

Aitken: "It was 'I'm from Australia, I appear in this soap opera called Neighbours'. We said 'I see, how old are you? OK, wait there for five minutes, we'll write a song for you'."

Waterman: "It was all done very quickly and then at our Christmas party six weeks later, I was sitting down after dinner and the disco was going and this track came on and I ran over to the DJ and said 'What's THAT?!? It's fantastic!' He said 'It's Kylie Minogue, "I Should Be So Lucky'. And I went over to Mike and said 'That's gonna be a smash!'"

Stock: "We'd fulfilled our commitment to make the record and kinda forgot about it."

Waterman: "At the same time we were doing the Rick Astley album and the Bananarama album and Sinitta and we were working on 'Roadblock'. You haven't got the time to worry about everything. Not when somebody like Donna Summer might suddenly turn up on your doorstep. You think 'Donna Summer's here - quick!' That's our job. You turn up in the morning and I'm like the foreman, I arrive with the job sheet. I say 'Here we are making a Ford tractor today' and they say 'Right!'"

NEXT WEEK: S/A/W on Jason, Sonia, Big Fun and how to make a hit!