Reproduced from The Western Mail 24 September, 2004

SWITCH on the radio in the 1980s, walk into a shop or a local disco, and the chances are that the sounds tickling your eardrums all had something in common.

Apart from the likelihood that they featured drum machines, synthesisers and heavily coiffured singers, the hit parades of that decade were linked by a shared thread that defined the record industry - and continues to do so today. When the latest Pop Idol or Fame Academy specimen rolls off the production line, think of the original Hit Factory.

Love or loathe the concept, the idea of putting fresh young faces as a front for calculatingly catchy pop fodder can be traced back 20 years, to Stock, Aitken and Waterman. Now for the first time, songwriter Mike Stock is revealing his side of the story, including the acrimonious bust-up, in a warts-and-all book.

Tales of Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan litter the pages of The Hit Factory: The Stock Aitken Waterman Story, providing an audio map of a decade most of us remember for its unique brand of pop. And The Hit Factory, Mike Stock says, goes some way to explaining the confusion behind the tales so often told by his louder former partner Pete Waterman. But he insists that despite rows and legal wrangling, the team that sold more records than The Beatles are still friends.

And if you were the sort of indie kid who grew up liking The Smiths and The Cure while belittling Kylie, Jason and Rick Astley, it might be worth a quick pause to consider that statistic. More records than the Beatles. Strange how some music gains credibility over the years, while the rest seems to be remembered as little more than a joke. But certainly, SAW made such an impact on the music scene that their story cannot be forgotten or ignored.

Mike Stock is answering the phone at last after an entire day of trying to track him down. It turns out he has been - surprise, surprise - in a five hour meeting with his lawyers, a relatively common occurrence.

"It's not much fun but it has got to be done if you have business interests," he says. "Certain things blow up in your face when you least expect it."

Luckily, for a man who spends such time with his lawyers, Stock says he doesn't hold grudges outside the business world - and that includes unresolved matters with former colleagues.

"I have always managed to keep the business side of my life separate from the personal side of things. Pete and Matt (Aitken) can still come down the pub and have a chat and a laugh, especially Matt.

"Pete finds it a little more difficult but I would not say we have fallen out completely, over the years.

"So I have tried to be as honest as possible with the book and put things straight from my perspective. Yes, really, it was a bit like a divorce in the end. But a divorce without the ill will."

Phew. At least that's opened up the difficult subject of the trio's split, a decision that was made despite them churning out so many pop classics.

Or is he just digging it up for the sake of a book deal? "I fought long and hard with my conscience about this book. It is not just a testament to vanity," says Mike. "But it was 20 years ago now. Pop was important to me when I grew up so now we have made our own bit of pop history, I felt it was important to set the record straight."

For Stock, Aitken and Waterman, when the good times rolled in business as well as pleasure, boy, were they good. The SAW team saw hundreds of fledgling pop stars and starlets either launch themselves into the musical stratosphere or fall cruelly by the wayside as they built their empire on songs that you just could not get out of your head.

Songs like Kylie Minogue's I Should Be So Lucky, which dominated her later career so much that she felt the need to recite the lyrics at the Royal Albert Hall as some sort of purging experience.

Tunes like You Spin Me Right Round (Like A Record Baby), are still dusted down every Friday night in venues across Britain, from student unions to family parties, for yet another, erm, spin.

And charity records like Let It Be and Ferry Across the Mersey, the latter becoming the tragic soundtrack to the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster, are still loved.

Whether celebrating the good times or remembering the bad, the standout points throughout the 80s can all be sound-tracked with a record marked SAW. And there were lots of those records - in an era when singles were a real indicator of the public's musical preferences.

"Nowadays you only need to sell a couple of thousand records to get into the top 40," says Mike. "The charts are not news anymore, they are just a marketing and promotional tool. You have got to question whether the BBC is acting in the public interest by continuing to broadcast the top 40."

Strong opinions for a man who so often stayed in the background. Waterman was the big-mouthed publicist extraordinaire, Aitken was the engineering wizard. But the quieter Stock was the man largely responsible for the lasting legacy - the songs. He is furiously opposed to the opinion that the tunes are throwaway hits churned out without any real thought. "I was just romantically in love with pop music in general from a young age. I was writing pop songs as a kid and I am always looking for that elusive perfect song," he says.

"Aitken and I played all the instruments and we had plenty of fights and arguments. Believe me, the passion was there. It could look formulaic or contrived but we would not have had those accusations if we were seen as a 'proper' band like Oasis or the Beatles. Well, we were a proper band. It is just that we had younger singers fronting for us."

The most famous was a cute Australian called Kylie Minogue, held up in the late 80s as the perfect puppet for any pop Svengali; a young and pretty girl already famous from her role in TV's Neighbours. But Stock insists that was not quite the case.

"Really nobody knew Kylie when she first came over to Britain," he says, freely admitting in the book that nobody at SAW gave her any special treatment during their first meeting. In fact they kept her waiting so long that the smash hit I Should Be So Lucky was squeezed out in a 45-minute session - and then shelved for months.

"You have to remember that even Neighbours itself was only on at lunchtime in those days. It actually moved to a peak slot when we had that hit, so nobody really knew her."

Now Kylie has made a £30m fortune and is still belting out hits, but Stock refuses to accept the theory that she reinvented herself and moved away from her roots at SAW. "She might wear a different frock or hairstyle but she is the same old Kylie. You can't pretend you're something you are not.

"The songs have lasted through, and that is what I am really getting at."

He rejects the notion that "real" bands like Nirvana, Blur, the White Stripes and Franz Ferdinand are any different to his own music. "Very often talking about 'real music' is just another image, it is all part of a scam.

"Sometimes you do get a scene like the 'Madchester' era in the early 90s, but that was more about chemicals than music as far as I could tell."

SAW finally imploded as the music industry grew darker at the tail end of the 80s; as cocaine became the currency - something Stock insists he was never involved with - and as the trio got so famous they received blackmail and death threats.

Then came financial wranglings with record label giants Warner, which Stock feels diluted the SAW brand. After Aitken had left, Stock and Waterman were at each other's throats, and the heady days of the Hit Factory were over for good.

Since then, Stock has gone on to produce dozens more hit records and hooked up with Pop Idol's Mr Nasty, Simon Cowell, for several projects.

But legal battles and accusations of "hyping" records - buying their place in the charts - surrounded his new label, Love This Records.

He is still involved in the business now, but fears the industry is in poor health, and may implode. "And they have brought it upon themselves." It failed to learn the lessons he was pushing in the 80s: provide what the public want to hear.

The internet is not helping, with downloads the common way of getting hold of new music these days, but he says the industry should stop being so hypocritical. "They are selling ipods and MP3 players and then blaming the internet for record sales. But if something that people actually wanted to own was being produced, then people would still go and buy it. It is like when Sgt Pepper's came out by The Beatles. Everybody actually physically wanted that record; they wanted to hold the cover and put it in their collection. People do not want to own most of these records anymore and certainly do not want to pay for them.

"A great pop song will cross cultural, generational, language barriers. And the songs you hear now are very inferior. They are boring and middle aged. I may have been 32 when I had my first hit but we put young people who looked like pop stars in front. We really did not do things like they do now. We were a band ourselves and we put excitement and passion into every chord."