"It's great, because I have the roving brief in this team,” he remarked. It's not luck, we're looking out all the time for these sorts of things.”ĭuring the course of which, while keeping abreast of the trends and acting as a sounding board for his two colleagues, Pete Waterman was living the good life. We got the direction we had been looking for, and the results were records like 'I Heard a Rumour'. There was quite a cool little rhythm going on there, and we took to it instantly. That really changed the whole implication, and on top of that there was also a swing element, and so when you program some of the instruments you put a little shuffle into it. "But what used to be known as 'Eurobeat' or 'hi‑NRG' - which had an octave bass going 'boom‑pah, boom‑pah, boom‑pah' - was now a rock bass doing eighths, like Status Quo. "It was still four‑on‑the‑floor as far as the bass drum was concerned,” added Mike Stock, who came up with many of the SAW songs' core progressions and melodies while Aitken devised the grooves, including guitar riffs and bass lines. He'd been doing a lot of travelling abroad, and he brought some records back for us to have a listen, and we noticed a slowing down of tempo and a difference in the implication on the bass.” "The styles of rhythm tracks had changed quite a lot. "Pete had noticed that there had been a change in the type of beats that were coming out of Europe,” Matt Aitken explained during our 1987 interview. However, that all changed after they scored a US number one for Bananarama with a cover of Shocking Blue's 'Venus' in September 1986, and then collaborated with the girl trio on the Wow! album that, written and recorded in 21 days, spawned several more hit singles. None of these hi‑NRG hits were written by SAW. Photo: RetnaĪ former dance music DJ and A&R man, Waterman established PWL (Pete Waterman Limited) in 1984 and, in conjunction with keyboardist, writer and arranger Mike Stock and keyboardist, guitarist and composer Matt Aitken, enjoyed initial success by way of Divine's 'You Think You're A Man', Hazell Dean's 'Whatever I Do (Wherever I Go)' and Dead Or Alive's UK chart topper 'You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)'. Left to right: Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman, at PWL in the late '80s. During the second half of the 1980s and early part of the 1990s, the songwriting/production team of Stock Aitken Waterman virtually swamped the worldwide singles charts with a non‑stop series of carefully crafted, highly processed and overtly commercial dance music records that, while derided by the vast majority of British music critics, resulted in more than 100 UK Top 40 hits and global sales of about 40 million units.īananarama, Mel & Kim, Dead Or Alive, Rick Astley, Kylie Minogue, Donna Summer, Jason Donovan, Divine, Sonia, Samantha Fox, Princess, Hazell Dean - these and many other singers benefited from what was widely perceived as SAW's production‑line approach to writing and recording, which made extensive use of synths, sequencers and a Linn 9000 drum machine to create slick‑sounding 'Eurobeat' numbers adhering to a formula devised by Pete Waterman. They certainly did seem to like the records. "If they do buy them they are doing so not because of art but because they like the records.” "We make records to entertain people for between three to seven minutes, and if they don't like them they don't buy them,” Pete Waterman told me when I interviewed him, Mike Stock and Matt Aitken at Waterman's South London PWL Studios (aka The Hit Factory) back in 1987. Producers Stock, Aitken and Waterman developed a massively successful formula for making pop records - and the story of Rick Astley's 1987 smash hit, 'Never Gonna Give You Up', is a perfect guide to the SAW assembly line.
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