Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman have reunited to share their memories of working at The Hit Factory.
Formed in 1983, the trio dominated the latter half of the eighties with a run of more than 100 chart hits, scoring more than 100 UK Top 40 placements and selling 40 million records.
Revisiting an iconic era in British pop history, Stock Aitken Waterman look back for RETROPOP’s March 2023 cover feature, with Mike admitting: “The overall feeling is it was just too exciting for words. I’d know Donna Summer was coming in on Wednesday morning and on Tuesday evening I’d be thinking, ‘What am I gonna do with her?’.
“The excitement was palpable everywhere, because every time somebody walked out of the door they had a hit. In 1989 specifically, we had about 35 Top 10s and seven No. 1 singles – which are wonderful statistics, but the songs have to be written and there’s a lot of work involved.”
Insisting they treated the job like a 9 to 5, Matt elaborates: “Part of the key was we had a standardised studio day; we’d down tools at 10, go for a pint and then go home and sleep. And we had the weekends off. If we’d have gone tooth and nail and done it six days a week, that would have killed us.”
In addition to penning massive hits like I Should Be So Lucky, Love In The First Degree, Never Gonna Give You Up and Too Many Broken Hearts, the trio were never opposed to a cover version and throughout their later years together especially, SAW worked on many remakes, including Blame It On The Boogie (Big Fun), Sealed With a Kiss (Jason Donovan), Celebration (Kylie Minogue), and End of the World (Sonia), all of which resulted in hits, despite the songs’ origins being decades prior.
“It cut out half the work because we didn’t have to write it,” Matt insists, “but you didn’t want to be doing covers every day. The challenge of writing was a big part of it…”
Mike laughs: “I used to feel an enormous sense of relief if Pete said, ‘Should we do a cover?’
One of their biggest successes, of course, was with Kylie Minogue, and Pete Waterman insists he had no choice but to sign her to his PWL label because no other record company wanted to work with her.
“When we recorded Kylie Minogue from this television series [‘Neighbours’], Mike was really the only person who knew what Kylie was about because he had a family at that point,” he says.
“We made the record and we went to every record company to take that record – including Simon Cowell, which is why he makes all these comments… Nobody would touch her! Everybody said, ‘You can’t make records with TV stars.’ So in some ways, we didn’t have a choice; we had to go and do it ourselves. It really was that simple.”
At the time, Kylie had already topped the charts in Australia with her debut single, but Pete insists the industry was blind to her potential.
“That’s the record industry, isn’t it,” he adds. “They’ll tell you all these things, but they never see the facts in front of them.”
It was to work on a remix of Kylie’s 2015 single Every Day’s Like Christmas and when it comes to potential future reunions, they maintain nothing’s off the table.
“We never said at the time that we wouldn’t do anything again and I haven’t said I never want to see the two guys again,” hints Mike. “If something came up that we all thought was a good idea and it had a meaning behind it, then we probably would!”
“Yeah,” says Pete, as Matt affirms, “I’d go along with that.”
Read the full interview in the March 2023 edition of RETROPOP, out now. Order yours or subscribe via our Online Store, use our Store Finder to locate your nearest stockist, or get Digital Copies delivered direct to your devices.
