Following recent episodes on New Labour and Spycatcher, Sue MacGregor attempts to piece together the tale of producing trio Stock, Aitken and Waterman in The Reunion: The Hit Factory (Radio 4).
The show rather disappointingly doesn’t feature the three big cheeses bickering about the preferred edit on the Reynolds Girls’ I’d Rather Jack, the one-hit-wonder the trio cooked up to hit back at critics and DJs who snubbed their work. Instead we get Jason Donovan and Sinitta in one corner and Waterman plus engineer Phil Harding in another. It’s an uneven panel that makes for a spotty show. Still, what unfolds is a story that is as much about capitalism as it is about showbiz.
Waterman tells an amusing tale about the credited Hit Factory drummer “A Linn” turning out to be a machine. Interestingly, when Spitting Image portrayed S/A/W, they appeared as a modern mythological hybrid: a three-headed monster popping out of a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Part men, mainly machine. This robotic working methodology is confirmed by Waterman. “We had a game plan: make a record and move on,” he says. “An artist would turn up and we wouldn’t want to talk to them. It would be: ‘sing and go home’.” Sinitta says the whole process took 20 minutes. Rick Astley was a perfect fit: he came to The Hit Factory from a Conservative training scheme and ended up with international fame. “The government paid him to be a pop star,” quips Waterman, with Machiavellian undercurrent.
More sinister, perhaps, is the admission that their brand of relentlessly cheesy, uplifting fizz was created as a mass opiate. Waterman calls the songs “the antidote” to the socio-economically cracked 70s and the ruptions of the 80s. “I don’t think a negative record was made in the building,” Harding says. They were also arguably responsible for the modern reality show template. As Donovan says: “It’s a perfect storm – the currency between the emotional connection of people seeing you on TV and a pop song.”
But, like going back and listening to Kylie’s earliest hits, this Reunion feels too brittle to create a sense of warm and fuzzy nostalgia. Still, as a reminder of what a dirty business the pop world can be, it’s an interesting addition to the canon.
