Lucky, lucky, lucky!

WEEKEND GUARDIAN, 27-28 JANUARY 1990

Judy Rumbold on Stock, Aitken & Waterman

Stock, Aitken and Waterman make music for "ordinary people with Woolworth ears" -- simplistic, everyday heat'n'serve pop that sticks to the music charts like bubblegum. Ordinariness is the essence of their success; members of the Jason and Kylie fan club (membership price, an unbeatable £6.99) write letters that go, "Dear Jason, I love you. I have two brothers and a dog and I live with my mummy and daddy."

The fluffy, girly acts SAW write for and produce -- Bananarama, Sinitta, The Reynolds Girls -- are sexless, unchallenging and relentlessly cheerful. Kylie and Jason are, slavishly true to their TV roles, the kids next door. "And when you look at Sonia," says Steve Sutherland at Melody Maker, of another SAW act, "You don't see a star in the David Bowie, Gary Glitter or Madonna mould, you see a dumpy girl behind a supermarket checkout."

These days, few people knock Stock, Aitken and Waterman's success with any degree of vehemence; there seems little point in challenging an institution that has become as entrenched in popular culture as the Sun, Club 18-30 and Spud-U-Like. They claim not to be in it for the money ("once you earn about £30,000 a year, enough to be very comfortable, it doesn't really matter"): rather, Pete Waterman has embarked on a mission to "give the kids what they want", and to make as much pop history as he can along the way.

At the start of their success in 1987 he said, "It's like we're playing Monopoly; we just keep going round and round the board passing Go." The last completely SAW-free chart was published on 28 February 1987, and since then their energetic, upbeat brand of aural candyfloss has bashed out the theme tune to a million teen-romance fantasies. It is the antithesis of the music played by currently popular young northern groups ("anorak bands with lefty politics") that typify everything Waterman despises about the record industry - i.e., that music can convey a meaningful message: "I think it's cobblers. You can't talk about life and' death issues in a three minute pop song."

Waterman -- laddish and likeable with an ebullience that often spills over into loutish ribaldry - articulates their success the best way he knows how, with football analogies. "Everybody's got a hit single in them, but that's not the point. You've got to win the League Cup one season, then come back and do it all over again. You've got to be like Liverpool."

Instead of trophies, SAW accumulate armouries of silver, gold, platinum discs. These flashy, faintly vulgar accolades bear witness to their astonishing success. Kylie Minogue's Tears on My Pillow, currently Number One, is their 95th hit single; 49 others reached the top 40, 12 others made it to the top. Jason and Kylie's Especially For You has been the biggest selling single in the record industry for the last two years and has shifted in excess of 950,000 copies, while as individual artists Kylie and Jason have chalked up seven Number Ones between them. If SAW manage to keep a single in the charts until April, they will have beaten Lennon and McCartney's record of having a song in the top 40 for three-and-a-half years.

Squirrelled away in a shabby southeast London backstreet, PWL (Pete Waterman Ltd) is an unlikely powerbase for such prolific, celebrated output. Waterman owns PWL and various other companies which manage artists, and the whole lot is officially valued at over £30 million. The building's unprepossessing facade is exacerbated by straggling crocodiles of whey-face schoolgirls and mothers with scuffed pushchairs that hang around outside, hoping for a glimpse of Jason or Kylie.

Inside, the downbeat offices still have something of the glorified cottage industry about them, and are staffed by girls called Sue and fierce blondes with prohibitive shoulder pads who studiously protect Jason's wholesome, stubble-free image from the Press on the days he hasn't had a chance to shave. There's a surly henchman too, called Pitstop. He is universally loathed by doorstepping fans for his heavy-handed bullying tactics -- "We hate Pitshit," reads one graffito, scrawled on the outside wall at giveaway 14-year-old height.

Waterman is the boisterous majordomo of the operation and, brimful of puppyish zeal (if he had a tail he'd wag it), he is famous for shooting his mouth off and thinking and occasionally retracting much later. Suffused in a fug :of aftershave, his office is a shrine to the trappings of swiftly-accumulated wealth. He hasn't been rich enough for long enough to have discovered minimalism, and the room is crammed full of too-big, ostentatious furniture, a display of firearms and a miniature pile-up of model sports-cars in a glass cabinet, apeing a lifesize collection of assorted Jaguars and Ferraris worth £8 million which is more carefully stabled elsewhere. Last year, he paid £3.1 million for a 1953 250 Testarossa.

Pete sits in the biggest chair, wears the flashiest shirt and the most gold jewellery. Mike Stock and Matt Aitken settle for serf status, looking properly dowdy and a bit raddled alongside. They are all "probably" millionaires and claim they pay themselves just £500 for each record they produce. But the real money starts rolling in with the royalties; they are an independent company and are paid as writers and producers every time their songs are played on the radio, performed on TV, and when the videos are screened in a pub anywhere in the world.

But they protest to the end their lowkey lifestyles and you know you've arrived, been accepted into the brotherly fold, when you get invited to the pub around the corner. "Jason's one of the lads -- people think he's a poof but he'll have a laff and a pint. And Cliff -- he likes a bevy."

Accused, variously, of being glorifiec knob-twiddlers and grey-haired old men making money out of teenagers, SAW are generally regarded as a likeable benign force in the pop industry, and are admired and envied for their skill at having so successfully manipulated the phenomenally popular dance-music trend of the Eighties.

THE CHILDREN who buy their records by the shedful (a favourite SAW quantifier) and who write heartfelt, overblown messages on the SAW walls "Jason 200,000,000,000,000 per cent" and "Kylie rules the whole of London" - hold them in unconditional esteem, and even dedicate some of their graffiti to them "Mike is a hunk", "I love Pete Waterman." But the bottom line of their personal popularity is that Stock, Aitken and Waterman are simply the lucky men who know Kylie and Jason. But the elder brothers and sisters of Jason and Kylie fans are fond of accusing the team of bringing the sacred reputation of the pop industry into disrepute; they think anyone who doesn't write and produce all their own material is succumbing to puppetry of the most contemptible order. In a Record Mirror readers' poll under the heading "Worst Happening of the Eighties," SAW came fourth, above Chernobyl, Lockerbie, Hillsborough and the Ethiopian famine. Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue came second and third respectively in the Most Revolting Human Being category, and New Musical Express readers voted SAW second biggest bastards after Mrs Thatcher. The eighth position was Deng Xiao-Peng.

There was an incident at a branch of Our Price recently where staff, alleged Waterman, "intimidated younger buyers and mums by scoffing at them and making them feel uncomfortable because they didn't approve of their choice." Woolworth has become the one remaining safe-house where SAW customers can ask for titles like Hand On Your Heart, Especially For You and Sealed With A Kiss without being victimised by derisive staff. Now, fans wary of public ridicule can order records with embarrassing titles through a shop in North London which has started a service wherby records are biked round to them in anonymous brown envelopes: Jason and Kylie outsell everything else by 10 to one.

SAW refute the charge that all they need is a face and a machine to create a hit record. It is a myth, they say, that anyone they work with automatically becomes a millionaire three weeks later, although their success rate with unpromising raw material has been pretty impressive so far. Rick Astley ("just a normal lad from Newton-le-Willows") started off as a tea-boy at PWL and then became a star by affecting the voice of a 45 year-old and wearing a Next suit and Tintin hairdo. For the girls, singing ability doesn't come very high on the list of prerequisites:

"Kylie," they once said, "could have come in and burped into the mike and it would have been a hit." Mike Stock has to sit and cajole potential stars through their scales "and it can be a painful experience, I can tell you." A marketable look involving lots of teeth and hair is a start, and a good pair of legs helps. Oh, and Pete refuses to work with anyone over 24. However, he made exceptions for his heroes Paul McCartney and Cliff Richard, and speaks in tremulous tones about the thrill it was to meet them for the first time: "McCartney? Fabulous -- biggest orgasm I've ever had. Cliff? What a great guy! A gentleman and a scholar!"

As the record industry becomes increasingly chart-led and money oriented, the major record companies are taking fewer risks in signing new artists. They prefer to know exactly what kind of package they're going to end up with, and by handing an artist over to SAW (having made a prior agreement not to interfere) they can be pretty sure a hit-making product will be dispatched at the end.

Waterman's skill lies in being able to pinpoint his audience down to the last, pre-pubescent pimple. Like many DJs turned producers, his work in clubs and radio gave him intimate contact with "the kids" and he has learnt which records fill and empty dancefloors. Together with Mike Stock and Matt Aitken's musical backgrounds one of their more dubious dalliances before the SAW success involved writing the Cyprus entry in the Eurovision song contest - it came 18th -- Waterman is wellequipped to make records that, like all the most successful pop bands, accurately articulate the emotions of their audience. These emotions-made-musical are not very complex; usually a pulpy arrangement of lyrics involving the business of loving, losing and leaving. But, however snivelling]y teenagerly the lyric, the background beat is always jolly.

It is not so much the fatuous, processed nature of the songs SAW turn out that irritates their detractors -- after all, pop music was never meant to be high art -- but more the calculated ease with which they produce one hit after another, "stymying creativity and inventiveness, and plundering other people's tunes along the way," says Tim Goodyer, editor of Music Technology.

SAW cheerfully call themselves the Hit Factory producing records as prolifically as car-parts. They wrote the best selling single of 1988, Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up -- a song they describe as a "120 beats-per-minute galloping jitterer" -- In the time it takes to boil an unpalatably soft egg ("3 1/2 minutes"), and when Kylie Minogue took nearly half-an-hour to sing the words to her latest single, she was considered slow. Nevertheless, she is their most successful product to date; I Should Be So Lucky sold in excess of 800,000 and was the best selling single of 1989. Her first album chalked up two million sales -- the highest selling debut album ever in the UK. Enjoy Yourself, its follow-up, has sold, an average of 50,000 copies a week over the last 16 weeks. Minogue is only the fourth woman in chart history to have three number one hits. (The others were Sandie Shaw, Madonna and Whitney Houston.)

"We work best when we're chucking them out," says Mike Stock, "Four songs a day if we can. I'd prefer to move on to something new every hour, Just to keep our interest maintained. This attitude horrifies pop purists who still think that long-winded, angstful exile "into the studio" with a stash of drugs and booze is the most "creative" way of making a record. Their way of working is also cheap ("£15,000 a single -- we're the cheapest in the world"), because they write most of the songs themselves, play all the instruments on all the tracks, and never employ outside musicians.

Their ideal customers, they say, would be Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra "people who just want to sing. People with great voices and a lot of style," and they've stopped working with prima donna's and stroppy bands who have opinions and who resent the technology. "I hate to annoy musicians", says Pete, though clearly not caring whether he annoys them or not, "But they're all useless! They're out of date! It's like saying there ain't knitting machines, and I'm sorry, but they're here -- they do the job quicker and easier."

Pete also resents too much inquisitiveness from artists keen to learn about how the technology works. "We're not teachers!", he shouts. "We don't even know how it works ourselves -- that's why we employ engineers! We don't wanna know what the byepassfiltermodulatingpuffbangingsnortinggruntingvalve does. We don't give a monkeys!"

The British charts have always been varied and are currently as diverse as they've ever been, accommodating anything from Thrash-metal bands like Anthrax to instantly forgettable aberrations like Andy Stewart's Donald Where's Yer Troosers. The most magnanimous support for a varied and SAW-interspersed chart comes from music journalists, the people who SAW are convinced hate them most. "There could be room for everything from Val Doonican to Leonard Cohen," says Terry Staunton at NME. "People have this idea that we're a bunch of sensitive young men who sit around dissecting Lou Reed songs for four hours at a stretch," he says, "when in fact we go out, drink lots of beer and dance on the table to Kylie Minogue records."

THE LYRICS and titles of SAW records seem the least creative part of the process; Pete Waterman simply compiles a rolling list of phrases, plundered from soap operas and old soul records, that either work or don't work. "I Would Never Hurt You; It's Simple To Walk Away -- they just don't work. But Can't Shake the Feeling ... well, that sounds like the title of a song!" He can't explain why Can't Shake The Feeling works: it just does.

Mike Stock insists that he upholds some standards when he cobbles a few lines around these bodice-ripperish titles. He draws the line, for instance, at the word 'baby'. "Also bottom, sex, and anything else likely to offend. And I try to gel the grammar right. You done me wrong cuz I done you wrong, for instance, sounds stupid."

But few would encourage Mike to spend too much time getting it right -- grammatical accuracy or, indeed, intelligence has not been something generally associated with SAW fans or the people who sing the records. "Jason's friendly, but he's thick," said a girl who'd spent all afternoon waiting for him to appear. "He can't spell. When he signed my name in my autograph book he left the O out of Caroline."

Caroline does her homework outside PWL and reckons she gets better marks as a result. Classroom flunkies are, no doubt, the ones that write "Jason is horney (sic)" and who spell Kylie with a C.

"Pop music has always retarded teenagers as much as it has liberated them," says Paul Morley darkly; his experience as impresario with Frankie Goes To Hollywood gave him some insight into how too much mindless pap call addle the intellect.

Have Stock Aitken and Waterman done for pop music what Pot Noodle has done for Chinese food? "It's personality-led music that produces music with no personality," says Melody Maker's Steve Sutherland. Pop music has a tradition of being remembered for its characters -- Adam Ant, Madonna, Boy George -- rather than the people making the noise, and in both sound and visual departments, some would say that SAW acts are found wanting. "I think people are getting tired of pop music that lacks personality," says Mark Ellen, editor of Q magazine. "Jason Donovan, for instance, has been profiled in all sorts of publications recently, and even under the most intense scrutiny, absolutely no evidence of any character has been found. He's bland -- a non-person. Similarly Kylie Minogue, who is essentially a latter day Julie Andrews."

A rebellion occurs every few years in pop music; punk was an antidote to the glam rock era in the Seventies, Two Tone reacted against punk, followed by New Romantic, and then Boy George and Frankie Goes To Hollywood, which were different again. "Kids want some thing out of pop that they can make their own -- the antithesis of what their younger brothers and sisters like; something their mothers disapprove of." Ellen suggests that anti- establishments bands like the Stone Roses are limbering up to counteract the claustrophobic mediocrity of SAW music. In other words, unless Kylie anti Jason start gobbing on stage and swearing on TV, their days are numbered.

"The Stone Roses," says Ellen, "refuse to play the game, are uncompromising to the last, and totally disapprove of publicity gimmicks. Bands like that are very appealling to a teenager who has been brought up on a diet of SAW."

SAW feel vaguely put-upon that they are constantly asked to justify their phenomenal success in a way that similar backroom-boy-turned-producer outfits like Phil Spector, Holland/Dozier Holland of Motown and Mike Chapman and Mickey Chinn ("Chinnichap") in the Seventies managed to avoid. They remained in the background -- their production skills were always eclipsed by the stars they created. Pete is prone to getting a touch impatient; "up until 1975 when the rock press started, no-one gave a toss about writers and producers. Our job is to write five songs this week. Not to think about it, talk about it, or evaluate it, but to do it."

But SAW go all gooey when Motown is mentioned, and gratefully relish the comparison. "The difference is, we're English not American. If we were American, we'd be gods."

Whether their songs will remembered as classics or formulas is debatable. Most people can only remember a single line from the entire SAW repertoire: "I should be so lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky." But ludicrous songlines weren't their invention. My Boy Lollipop, Una Paloma Blanca and the Birdy Song remain indelibly printed on the brain forever.

"Technically, they are almost the same as Motown," says Mark Ellen; "Motown worked in a similar way in that they'd write a lot of songs first and then find somebody to suit them -- they never knew whether it'd turn out to the Supremes, Martha Reeves and the Vandella's, Diana Ross or whoever. I suppose what SAW are hoping for is that their songs will have the same enduring quality, which I think is pitching it a bit high."

SAW RECKON they're always one step, ahead -- tapping into the next pop trend before the trend even knows its there. If the market changes, so will they. Anticipating a demographic swing towards an older record buying market, they say that they would dearly love to give Johnny Mathis (54)-- "the greatest singer since Nat King Cole" -- a bit of a dust-down; a spectacular SAW makeover in the way only they know how. So if he appears on Top of the Pops next year singing a song about boys and cars, and wearing sequinned hotpants, remember you read it here first. In the time it takes to read this, Mike Stock could have knocked off three or four hits for Mathis.

Mathis' last hit, A Child is Born, shifted 1 million copies -- more than any of SAW's have ever sold. Topping that is the kind of challenge the boys find irresistible. They aim to carry on producing hits for as long as there's light in the strobes and feet pounding the dancefloor. Their ambition is to have "ten records in the top tell at the same time. We're aiming for things as crazy as that."