Waterman in the stocks

DAILY MIRROR, 28 SEPTEMBER 2002

PETE DIDN'T MAKE KYLIE A STAR.. AND I WROTE THE HITS, SAYS MIKE STOCK

by Ros Wynne-Jones

"Crap," Waterman tells one girl. "Rubbish." "Who told you you could sing?" he asks a young lad. Mike can barely contain his annoyance. "They should ask him to sing in a different key," he says. "He's got a great voice." But even as he speaks, the wannabes are leaving the studio for obscurity.

"Who does Pete think he is?" rails Mike. "He knows nothing about singing. He's not qualified to ruin these kids' lives. He thinks talent is blonde hair and big tits."

Then a young hopeful rushes up to Waterman and tells him he's the reason she wants to be a pop star. Because of Kylie, because of I Should Be So Lucky. Mike's kids look up, puzzled. "But Dad, you wrote that song, didn't you?" they ask.

Mike Stock is angry. He has had enough of Pete's version of history. There were three people in Stock Aitken Waterman - the pop factory that chalked up 95 hit singles in the 1980s.

NOW, in an extraordinary interview, Mike is hitting back. Waterman "wasn't within a million miles" of I Should Be So Lucky, he says.

He gestures towards the TV. "I would love to see one of those young kids say: 'Here's a guitar, Pete, play one of your songs'," he says. "Or: 'Here's a piano, Pete, play one of your hits.' He can't play an instrument.

"He never worked with artists in the studio. Matt Aitken and I played all the instruments, created all the arrangements, made the records. Pete was the businessman.

"Pete has absolutely no qualification to judge. We used to see him through our most productive period for about an hour on a Thursday. He would just touch base with us, then he'd go back up to Warrington. For a long period he didn't come to the studio at all."

Where was he? "He was spending a lot of time in Japan, importing koi carp." Waterman had a 12,000-gallon pool specially built at his Cheshire farmhouse.

Mike Stock wrote SAW's hits - from I Should Be So Lucky to Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up, to Kylie and Jason's Especially For You. At one point in the 1980s, Waterman has said SAW were making £1million a day. From March 1986 to October 1990 they had a track in the top 100 every week.

Bananarama, Mel and Kim, Sinitta, Hazell Dean, Dead or Alive and even Sonia and Sam Fox all benefited from the SAW Midas touch. But Mike is concerned that the Stock and Aitken element is being slowly written out of pop history.

"I want to put the record straight," he says, breaking the silence he kept even during the release of Waterman's autobiography I Wish I Was Me in 2000. "He's gone too far now and people are starting to believe he wrote the songs as well as invented pop."

In his book, Waterman says: "I was working seven days a week, 19 hours a day... I literally lived in the studio."

Mike, now 50, his hair shorter and duller than his SAW days, screws up his face in disbelief.

"Pete is a number of things, but he's not superman," he says. "He had his radio show in Liverpool, Radio City, he had his television show, Hit Man And Her, all over the north of England. He had girlfriends, Ferraris, trains, cars. He had a whole world around him and none of it was the studio."

Mike indicates his wife, Bobby. "Ask my family. It wasn't Pete in the studio 19 hours a day. I was the one missing my kids growing up. We worked flat out. I'd be told: 'Oh, we've got Donna Summer coming in in the morning'.

"I'd go to bed with an idea forming, wake up with the idea, get in the bath and develop it and be singing it on the way to work. Otherwise Donna would arrive all the way from America and there would be nothing for her to do." Mike keeps his voice level. "The music industry seems to accept Pete's a buffoon, but I am concerned that it damages young talent to the point where some really good people are being missed or put off."

One of Waterman's claims is he is second only to the Lottery in creating millionaires. Mike snorts with derision. "Who made the millionaires? Without me they would have been all hype and no songs. I believe it was the songs that made the money."

Pete has bragged "anything I did with Kylie sold half a million copies". Mike shrugs. "But who wrote the songs, Pete?"

WATERMAN claims he came up with the idea for I Should Be So Lucky in a conversation with Mike. But his former business partner shakes his head. "Pete wasn't there," he says.

"He was in Manchester. Kylie turned up at the studio to make a record. I didn't know who she was. I'd never heard of Neighbours.

"I sat her down for a coffee and asked her a few questions. In the end I thought: 'Well, she's 19, she's gorgeous-looking in a girl-next-door sort of a way, in the best soap opera in Australia earning huge money and she's got a great singing voice.' 'You should be so lucky,' I thought. Then I made the move to: 'Well, she's got everything else in her life, but she hasn't got true love.' That's what the song is about. I wrote and recorded it in 40 minutes." He pauses. "That song turned out to be prophetic. 'I should be so lucky in love'

"The problem for Pete is that record became a piece of pop iconography, one of those points in the history of pop. So Pete needs for his own ego to be involved with that. A seminal moment and he wasn't there for it. But he wasn't there for most of the seminal moments.

"In 1989 we had seven No 1s. We had a record in the chart for 3.5 years without ever leaving the chart - it's in The Guinness Book Of Records. But Pete was almost never in the studio."

In the next two years, Stock Aitken Waterman sold 40million records., but, says Mike: "It was hard work - On that first day Kylie came in, I was working in the morning with Bananarama, at lunchtime with Rick Astley, and in the evening I was mixing Sam Fox. One particular week, around 1987, I recorded a different song each day for five days.

"All five were hits. Monday was the dance-hit Roadblock, Tuesday was Bananarama and Love In The First Degree, Wednesday was Donna Summer and This Time I Know It's For Real, Thursday was Rick Astley and Together Forever, which went to No 1 in America, Friday was Sam Fox and Nothing's Gonna Stop Me Now.

Mike agrees Pete came up with the title for Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up. He says: "Pete had a girlfriend and they were always splitting up and getting back together and Rick Astley said to him: 'Oh, you're never going to give her up, are you?' Pete said: 'that's a good title for a song.'"

Mike duly wrote it down. "I used to keep a pad for ideas. I still do. I wrote the words 'Never Gonna Give You Up' on the pad, and then I wrote the song. But now people think: 'Pete Waterman wrote that song for his ex-girlfriend.'

He sighs. "Pete is what he is. But he gets carried away. He starts exaggerating, and next minute he's taught the Beatles everything they knew."

Mike and Matt Aitken were working together as songwriters and producers when they met Pete, a DJ turned producer. Pete's version has him spotting the duo performing in a bar in Kentish Town in North London in 1984.

"That's rubbish," says Mike. "I first met him in 1980. He knew me as a writer. In 1984, I came up with an idea and I went to Pete's office in Camden. "A month later we went into the studio and came out with a minor hit [The Upstroke - Agents Aren't Aeroplanes]. The next record we made was a top 20 [Divine], and the next was a top five [Hazell Dean]." Stock Aitken Waterman was born.

"In 1984, our requirement for a Pete Waterman figure was essential," Mike admits. "We were earning a living at it, but we wanted a marketing person to push us in the right direction. Waterman was the man to do that. But when you've had your first couple of hits they speak for themselves.

"So by 1987 to 1988, the records sold on their own, but we absolutely had a deal between us to split everything equally. So I stuck by that through the Rick-Kylie period, where Pete's involvement can only be described as minimal in the making of the record."

But in 1990, Waterman sold half of the company to the major label Warner. The result was a long-drawn-out legal battle between the trio.

Mike and Matt claimed they had agreed over a handshake with Waterman in the early days to split profits three ways. Waterman said the duo were due "cash only" for their contribution and had no continuing interest in SAW's music. "I felt he had sold the family silver," Mike says. "That was all my work. All our recordings. He sold them off without so much as a by-your-leave. He also owed us serious amounts of royalties."

He and Matt withdrew their legal action in 1999, but their friendship with Pete was over.

Mike went on to new successes with Robson and Jerome, recording all their hits for Waterman's rival Pop Idol judge Simon Cowell. Waterman became the Hit Man once more with Steps. But even then, Mike's writing skills were instrumental.

"Pete took the project over when Steps already had 5,6,7,8, their first hit," Mike says. "Then he used a song I wrote for Bananarama called Last Thing On My Mind. Then they covered Better The Devil You Know, which I wrote for Kylie."

Stock Aitken and Waterman dominated the music chart for the best part of the 1980s. But by the time the company disintegrated in the early 90s, they were almost as unpopular as Thatcherism. Their self-styled Hit Factory had become to the charts what GM food is to the modern consumer - artificially constructed fodder for the masses, leaving real talent to wither on the vine. Mike Stock may be proud of the seven No 1s and scores of top-40 hits he wrote and recorded, but does he really want to remind the world he was responsible for Sam Fox's chart-toppers?

"By the end of the 80s you would have thought I was in the arms trade or drug dealing, the way people talked about us," Mike says, "All I did was write pop songs, but I was treated like a criminal.

"In one poll, 'The Worst Thing About The 80s', Margaret Thatcher was at No 1 and we were at No 2." They came in above Chernobyl, Lockerbie, Hillsborough and the Ethiopian famine.

"I think it was Waterman's bulls**t," he says. "In my opinion he upset people. He alienated the industry."

Mike laughs bitterly. "Now, of course, he's firmly ensconced in the industry," he says.

He looks up from the kitchen table. "Look, I've got nothing to promote. I don't want anything."

He has asked for no money for this interview. "I just want to put the record straight.

"In Pop Rivals, Geri Halliwell's the one who's impressed me. Louis Walsh is a genuine gentleman who manages acts and doesn't claim to be a writer or a producer.

"But Pete is unqualified to say the things he's said - and I want the kids he's rejected to know that."