Original subtitles

There was immense joy when a record goes to number one.

We knew every five days we had to churn out a hit.

It was only a matter of, "How do we make great pop music?"

Everything else was secondary to that.

As a team, magic.

It's always clever, it's always catchy.

There was this smouldering genius taking place.

# Oh, oh, oh, oh... #

Over 100 Top 40 hits

in a period of four or five years.

I mean, nobody does that.

# Better the devil you know

# Better the devil you know

# Oh, oh, oh, oh... #

It was classic pop, it was uncompromised.

It's what the '80s were, you know,

and Stock Aitken Waterman defined it.

I always look for the magic.

There's some magic operating in all hit songs.

# Give you up... #

It was fun. It was super exciting.

But they were on a mission, big time.

You were on the crest of a wave.

The harder you work, the luckier you get.

# Never gonna give, never gonna give

# Give you up. #

It's a lot to have one hit, but to have the whole of the Top 10,

I mean, that's just showing off, isn't it?

Most people treated pop music as trivial.

It was more serious than life and death to us.

I knew the industry was out to screw us.

I had to fight all along.

That it ended the way it did was tragic.

# I stand accused Of love in the first degree. #

I'd probably had enough by that time, you know.

Probably sick to death of each other!

I really do believe the three of them are geniuses.

I think the records still sound as good today

as they did 30, 35 years ago.

# Old days, old days

# 0'JaY-"

# Walking in rhythm... #

I'm just immensely proud that I'm part of that legacy.

It was a pretty wild ride.

# When you can't find the music To get down and boogie

# All you can do is Step back in time. #

I was really interested from the age of about seven in writing songs.

You know, you start with a blank sheet of paper,

and you come up with something that can be popular

and sold all over the world.

I got given a transistor radio,

I think I was probably eight or nine.

It had an ear plug with it, I would go upstairs to bed,

and then in went the earpiece, and on came Radio Luxembourg.

That was when pop music started to become important to me.

I'd got a really good, eclectic record collection,

so I started doing discos.

It was a Saturday night, and I was spotted by

the local Mecca manager, and then he said,

did I want a job at the Locarno?

I'd just got myself and electric piano, erm,

had an acoustic guitar and a very primitive drum machine.

Ancl so by the time I'm 10 or 11,

I'm writing some songs and accompanying myself.

I had set myself a quest

of being the greatest guitar player in the world.

"Mum, can I have a guitar?"

The answer to that was, "You can have a guitar,

"but first, you've got to learn to play the piano."

So what that did teach me was proper technique,

and it taught me theory.

I saw that Magnet Records were looking for promotion guys.

Now, the last thing I wanted to do was...

I didn't want to be a promotion guy,

and I thought, "Well, at least I'd get into the music industry."

My band did dinner music, we did weddings, bar mitzvahs.

It didn't really matter, we would cater to most people.

Ancl one particular evening, my guitarist let me down again,

he'd fallen off stage... HE CH UCKLES

...drunk, and I was on the lookout, I needed another guitarist.

I asked the girl singer or anybody, did they know anyone?

Ancl she said to me, "Well, I know Matt Aitken."

I got a phone call one Saturday night,

"Can you do a dep with my band?"

He was a great guitarist, you know.

Ancl these were, well, you know, good-paying gigs in the West End.

Whilst Matt would be playing with me in the band at the Hilton, etc,

on other nights, we would be in rock pubs

doing songs that I'd already written, my own material.

And Matt added a dimension to that, and he was clearly, you know,

influencing what we were doing and how it was sounding.

He said to me one clay, you know, "If we keep relying on these gigs,

"we're not going to get the studio side of it away, the creative side."

I'm going into a studio that I've built under my house,

which Matt had been involved with,

and I'm gonna go into record production

and break it into the wider music industry.

Matt said, "I'm coming with you.

"You know, I'm keen on doing that as well."

Got a call from a friend who I'd signed called Peter Collins,

who really was a writer-producer.

And I was getting nowhere at Magnet. So, I sort of teamed up with Peter.

And we did Tracy Ullman for Stiff.

Tracy Ullman was huge for us.

Then we did Nik Kershaw and Matt Bianco.

So we got an amazing little thing going.

I mean, we had the biggest record in the world

with Musical Youth, Pass The Dutchie.

But I wanted more. I wanted something different.

There was just so many brilliant influences going on

around about that time in the '80s.

When I got really, you know,

became a pop addict in my early teens,

I listened to a lot of British pop.

Duran Duran, Adam And The Ants,

so much of that kind of new-wave music.

The New Orders, the Heaven 17s, the The Thes,

you know, the Bowies, which was sort of unisex

and quite alternative and credible.

Trevor Horn with Frankie and ABC, very processed drums,

so, really, technology came into the pop world.

You had this massive mix of different musical styles

all happening at the same time.

I got a call from a guy called Mike Stock.

He said, could he come and see me?

They came up with Matt, and they played me this song.

It was called The Upstroke.

I came into the studio one clay, and Mike said,

"God, you've had a good shave."

And I said, "Oh, it's cos did the upstrokes."

He said, "That's a great title!"

Ancl so we just wrote this sort of gimmicky, boppy dance track.

There was something about the track that was, like,

"Whoa, this is different."

He let it go to the second chorus, and then he stopped it.

"I like it, but it's got to be more radical."

He sort of reached down under his desk,

and he pulled out a record and put it on the turntable,

and he played this, and it was the...

it was the New York mix of Relax, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, and said,

"Can you make this sound like this?"

Ancl we said, "Yes."

And he said, "You sound very confident."

Ancl we said, "We are."

So, Pete, therefore, had sort of imagination

that he agreed to book a studio,

and that was the Marquee Studio in Wardour Street.

The first record they brought in was The Upstroke.

You know, "This track's been recorded,

"we want it to sound like Frankie Goes To Hollywood."

Mike came up with the band's name, Agents Aren't Aeroplanes.

That was a quote from John Le Carre, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

We had some artwork done like Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

They probably spent five or six drum.

We spent three quid, I think.

Because if you look at the sleeve, it's bloody awful.

But it was evocative of the moment.

And the first person to play a Stock Aitken Waterman record

was the best Dj in Britain at the time, and that was john Peel.

Now, john Peel at that time was the god of music.

He thought it was great!

# The upstroke

# Do you wanna do the upstroke?

# The upstroke The upstroke

# Do you wanna do the upstroke? #

The track sounded a bit unusual.

Certainly, it was different from anything else that was going around.

And that was the start.

It was a progression, you know, we were moving up.

We might have enough money to make another record,

but we weren't making, you know, any big money then.

Mike and I wrote the songs.

Mike and I did the arrangement that became the single.

Peter was our eyes and ears, Peter dealt with the business,

dealt with finding new people for us to work with,

and interfaced on our behalf

with the outside world and the record companies.

We would go down to a pub called the Gladstone

most nights at ten o'clock when we finished.

It was that point when I said, "OK, we've got to do this ourselves."

"If we shared everything equally, production credits, writing credits,

"everything, we would therefore be a strong unit."

And we shake our hands on that, which we did outside the pub.

And from that moment, we were Stock Aitken and Waterman.

And Matt said, "|t sounds like a firm of solicitors."

I said, "I bloody hope so."

There was a point at the beginning of it all

when we were following the trend and saying,

"We need to make high-energy dance music here,

because there's a market."

The high-energy sort of disco which was like underground club scene,

which my mother was really big in,

so she was having like a big hit with So Many Men, So Little Time.

My auntie was also a disco diva.

Amii Stewart, she'd had big hits

with Knock On Wood and Come On, Baby, Light My Fire.

I never knew those kind of songs were called high-energy records.

The guy that's helped us out mostly was Barry Evangeli,

who ran a record label called Pro to Records.

He was purely interested in the clubs,

and Pete knew him, as well as a man called Nick East,

and they were working in that field, in the club field.

And basically, it was me, him and the secretary.

I was the general manager, promo guy.

The first Hazell Dean record, Searchin',

was a huge hit in all the gay clubs.

The first club I ever sang in,

a big gay club in London called Heaven,

and Searchin' was number one in the gay chart.

That evening when I did that show, I actually,

I'd been singing in a band, in London, in a hotel!

I went over to Heaven! Ha!

And it was like, "Whoa!" And, erm, well...

I hadn't even walked on the stage, and they were going crazy,

and I just fell in love with everybody, didn't I?

I mean, they loved me.

# Searchin'

# Looking for love

# All the time I can

# Searchin'

# Looking for love

# I got to find a man. #

Well, we'd had the hit with Searchin',

and Divine's manager came over to London,

and came to Barry and I and said,

"Look, I've got this artist called Divine."

Ancl Nick East told me about Divine

and asked me to make the record,

explained to me a bit more about who he was

and how outrageous he could be.

Excuse me, I promised I'd be good.

We all know stories of what went on in Lust In The Dust or something!

So we knew what we were taking on.

I am Divine!

They bought Divine in, as this sort of middle-aged man,

you know, with a bald head.

AITKIN: The thing is, when he's not in uniform,

he is an avuncular-uncle type.

He said, "Can you make a record?" Cos he has a huge following.

So we said we'd try, but it was off the wall.

When I got into the studio to record him,

cos that's always my aim,

I work with the singers all the time,

and I was trying to make him sound like Pavarotti!

I'd managed to get him to sing this tune quite well.

# You think you're a man But you just couldn't see

# You weren't man enough To satisfy me. #

We were very pleased, and, er, Pete...

I think Pete was quite pleased.

We didn't want to make a record for nobody,

we'd worked out who we were making it for.

Ancl I suppose you could say in some ways that Pete,

we had to please him first, but he always seems to be pleased.

We'd made a record, we send Divine off to the airport with his manager,

and Barry eventually comes in the studio and went,

"You've got Divine singing." We went, "Yeah."

"No, no, no! I don't want him to sing.

"He's got to shout, that's what he does!"

"What've you clone? He doesn't sound like Divine."

Divine had already left for the airport.

There were no mobile phones then, by the way.

So, we had to put a call out,

and we said, "jump in a taxi, come back to the studio,

"we want to re-vocal it."

I got him back into the studio to sing it badly.

And he shouted it twice

and went back in his taxi and caught the plane.

It surprised us, you know, we got in the charts with it.

# Shut the door Take a look around

# Ancl tell me what you find

# Shut the door

# Take a giant step for you Ancl all mankind. #

"If I can get this on Top Of The Pops,

"this will shock so many people."

Everybody was concerned about how he'd come across,

you know, on that show, how behaved he'd be!

Ancl I went to the recording of Top Of The Pops,

and they were very nervous.

# You think you're a man But you're only a boy

# You think you're a man But you're only a toy

# You think you're a man But you just couldn't see

# You weren't man enough To satisfy me. #

"Did you see Top Of The Pops last night?

"Did you see that old woman on there?"

I went, "No, that's not a woman, that's a bloke." "What?!"

And I remember, he pulled the taxi up in Dean Street

like, you know, we'd hit a wall!

The gay clubs were essential.

The whole club scene was essential to breaking a record,

because major labels had the power, had the money,

to get records on the radio.

The only way we could do it was to get the records on the chart

so it would come on the radar of the radio stations.

And when you've got all the major clubs in the UK

playing your records every Friday, Saturday night,

you're creating a demand for it, so when you release the record,

it would go in at top 40, top 30 or top 20.

In the '60s, it was still illegal to be homosexual.

So, you had private clubs,

which were strictly private,

and you couldn't get in unless you...

your name was on the door and they knew who you were.

And I worked at one of these on a Sunday night.

And it changed my life.

All the records that I'd loved to play,

like Fontella Bass, and stuff like Motown,

they just adored.

They danced all night.

And to me, I looked forward to every Sunday.

I knew I could play something there,

and I would instantly get a response,

whether it worked, or it didn't work.

I guess when I went to Heaven,

I was back in '64, '65,

because I saw the same reaction. It was like,

"I can be a company that makes these records for these people."

A club DJ earns his keep by keeping the dance floor packed.

If he puts music out there that nobody likes,

the floor clears up,

and the manager says, "Don't come back."

When we'd made a record, with what was called an acetate,

which was... we used to make a record -

made of wax, it wouldn't last very long -

and you try and get your DJ to play the record.

And I would go up in the DJ, in the cage,

you know, where the DJ was, looking down on the dance floor,

and I would know in about 30 seconds whether I had a hit or not.

They would just stop dancing, or they would go crazy.

I'm in Pro to Records one day, and who should be there?

Pete Waterman. SHE CHUCKLES

"How you doing, then, kid?" "Yeah, I'm doing fine."

Searchin' was sitting at number six in the charts,

and I hadn't got a follow-up.

He said, "Do you wanna come down to the Marquee Studio and meet

these two guys I'm working with?" I said, "Oh, yeah, really?"

He said, "Yeah." He said, "I think you should come and meet them

"and listen to what we're doing."

Peter was in Barry's ear. He said, "My boys are the greatest."

But I got on great with Mike and Matt because they were great...

they were great musicians, they worked in dance bands as well,

and they did a lot of the same sort of shows and all the kind of stuff

that I was doing in various bands in London at that time,

the hotel circuit and all that kind of stuff,

so we had a lot in common, really.

# Over you Go, go, go... #

We had a song that we'd just written for a guy.

"Let's put that up for consideration."

So we re-demoed it in a girl's key and sent that up.

So I said, "I really like this song, but I don't like that chorus."

# Dance your love away Dance your love away... #

But it happened so quickly, and when they sent it to me,

it was Whatever I Do as we now know and love it today.

# Whatever I do Wherever I go... #

And I said, "Yeah, that's fantastic."

And we just...

I just went in more or less as quickly as we could to record it.

Hazell's a pro. Once she got tune in her head, she was off and running.

# Whatever I do Wherever I go

# I'm never coming back to you Back to you

# Whatever you do Wherever you go

# I'm gonna get over you Over you

# Over you... #

This was the first record where I thought,

"They've just got everything right.

"They've got the sound right, the production's brilliant."

# Oh, who are you to turn the knife?

# Oh, I am not your sacrifice

# Who are you when I can't get you Out of my mind? #

Everything about that record was incredible.

# Whatever I do Wherever I go

# I'm never coming back to you Back to you... #

I just thought,

"These guys are in a different league to everybody else."

Hazell went to number four. We got a silver disc for that.

We knew that that "dum-dum, dum-dum, dum-dum"

was a metronomic beat, along with the drums,

that worked perfectly for people who wanted to dance.

DANCE MUSIC PLAYS

Right from day one,

the records we were making had to be metronomic.

Because that's what it was all about.

Our, if you could call it, plan, was just...

write a song, put it to a dance beat.

Then, potentially, you can capture radio,

club and the wider public.

Pete Burns of Dead Or Alive heard Whatever I Do (Wherever I Go)

Coming out of his radio...

He said, "I wanna make a record like Hazell Dean."

...found out who'd produced it, and made contact

with Stock Aitken and Waterman to make his record.

"Would I like to meet Pete Burns?"

Cos they would like us to make a record.

And I couldn't take my eyes off him, so I knew it was, like,

"Whoa, this is quite incredible."

Dead Or Alive, they had a record deal with CBS.

It was, at the time, probably the biggest record label.

Pete said to me, "You know, this is a major act for us,

"on a major label. We've got a great budget."

Pete Burns would always turn up to the studio in the full outfit -

the big hair and the make-up.

And he played me three tracks.

And then he played me Spin Me Round. And I went, "That'll do!"

It was that song, of all their songs that they had,

that Pete thought we should work on first.

We changed the arrangement of the structure of the song,

just to make it flow, what we thought, better.

So, the whole process was very slow, very painstaking.

On that particular track, a lot of the parts were already programmed,

and it was a matter of putting those down with the right sound.

Matt and me didn't really need any help from the band members.

We were busy trying to get the technology that we needed

to realise that record.

Mike Stock told him, quite rightly at one point,

Pete Burns, we weren't teachers,

we weren't there to teach him how the desk worked.

We were there to give him hit records,

which Pete took like a lead balloon.

# Watch out, here I come Come, come, come...

Once we got the vocals on, it was great,

cos Pete just aced it, and, er...

and I just aced it, as well. HE CH UCKLES

Pete Burns, and possibly other members of the band,

didn't really understand the mixing process.

We were at loggerheads. I mean, we really were at loggerheads.

I sort of said, "OK, guys, off you go.

"All of you, out the studio."

And said to me, "Phil, you're staying there."

"We're gonna finish this.

"And if you don't like it, that's it, we're over."

And Pete Waterman and I set about a long evening's mix.

At about 10:30, 11 o'clock, the desk broke down,

and we had to wait for the engineer to come up from South end.

So he didn't get there till 12:30.

First to hear it would've been Mike and Matt.

They used to arrive at around 10:00 in the morning.

Played the record to Matt and Mike, and Mike made some comments,

cos I'd got certain things wrong in the mix.

Now, there's no way, at this point, I can rectify this.

I said, "For Christ's sake, don't say anything."

So, Pete Burns and the boys came in.

And I said to Phil, "Right, whack it up

"as loud as it'll go on the big speaker."

I watched Pete Burns' face. It was like a child.

Within 20 seconds, he's jumping up and down,

they're all whooping, they're all getting excited.

#if I

# I get to know your name

# Well, then I

# Could trace your private number Baby

# All I know is that to me

# You look like you're lots of fun

# Open up your lovin' arms I want some, want some... #

First time I ever heard it in a club,

it was, like, everybody went, "What is this?!"

We had a lot of confidence in the record,

but it just seemed that the machinery of the record company

was preventing it from going to where it want.

And, in fact, it turned out that...

they just weren't pressing enough 12 inches,

and a lot of the demand was for... We had two or three mixes.

They were pressing a lot of 7 inches, but not enough 12 inches,

and that was really throttling it.

Once they caught up with what they should have been doing,

that's when it started to really climb.

I mean, You Spin Me Round was just the perfect pop record.

It was, er... great on the radio,

it was a song that you could really dance to.

Ancl I guess Stock Aitken and Waterman, that was their route,

that's what they did, they made high-energy dance music.

And, of course, gave them their first-ever UK number one.

I'm going, "Thank you very much. I can buy a house now.

"That's it, mansion in the country. Swimming pool.

"I might be able to buy two mansions.

We sort of rubbed our hands, thought

"Yeah, there we are, we've made it."

And nobody called us. Nobody rang up.

Phone stopped ringing, really.

One of the things that was apparent at the time

was that Pete was financially in a hole.

And he had done some amazing ducking and diving.

And I said to Pete, "Look, you're in difficulty financially,

"I'm very happy to give you my money that I've just made,"

and in return, he gave me a piece of the company.

And then he said, "Well, why don't you just run PWL?"

I was saying to Pete, "Pete, we should get our own studio."

That's been my maxim throughout life -

do it yourself, do everything yourself.

It seemed to be Mike driving it.

So at the beginning of '85,

we came out of the Marquee and moved into our own studio.

You went down this cul-de-sac

of what looked like Victorian warehouses.

The Vine Yard, being an old power station,

had very thick walls, so it had some acoustic properties.

You came across this brick building with these steel doors.

But the way this place worked was,

by the time you went up the staircase

and into the studio, people were very relaxed.

It was just a great atmosphere to be in.

We brought with us our team, Phil Harding came with us.

I could feel that this team was going somewhere.

There was a camaraderie there that was built up,

which was part of our strength, I think.

We were all pulling together.

We scrabbled around, because as I said, the phone wasn't going.

We were sitting at number one, and thinking,

"Well, we're in our new studio here, what are we gonna do?"

I mean, we've gotta make a living. We've got bills to pay.

We took on a band called Brilliant.

The lady they got to do the backing vocals on that was called Princess.

Well, she was called Desiree Heslop, stage name Princess -

and I thought, "That's a good voice."

They called me to the session, I came to do it,

they liked how I sounded,

and that's how I started to get to know people.

We wrote two songs that afternoon.

Ancl there was one track called Save Your Love For Your Number One,

and I changed that to Say I'm Your Number One.

Ancl as soon I said that, Mike nearly fell off his chair.

Come the evening, I asked Desiree if she would stay behind

and sing Say I'm Your Number One.

I said, "I've got to do this.

"I can get paid for doing what I love."

It's a song which couldn't be more different from

You Spin Me Round.

The original demo was kind of a Billie jean feel.

"Duh-dun-duh-duh-duh."

Not exactly like that, but more of a mid-tempo thing.

# Say I'm your number one Say, say

# I only wanna be close to you... #

It was Mike's brainwave to turn it into more of a jam and Lewis thing

after he'd heard Desiree Princess singing.

So, I would do any little thing that, you know...

# Say it, say. # Any little thing that came to me,

and they would be like, "Yeah, we'll keep that."

And I was part of it all, you know?

It was... It was my baby, too.

Pete was on holiday.

I finished the record, mixed it with Phil Harding

and stuck a cassette on Pete's desk for when he came back,

see what he thought of it.

Because at the time, we was searching round what to do,

so I'd sort of taken a venture out, as it were,

with an unknown girl, singing an unknown song.

Ancl when Pete came back off holiday, he heard it,

and I could hear the commotion in the office.

He was whooping everywhere, and he loved it.

# Say I'm your number one Number one, number one

# I only wanna be close to you Whoa, whoa

# Say I'm your number one Number one, number one

# Cos you know I'd be good to you Say it, say it... #

I remember hearing the name Princess.

I said, "You can't call her Princess."

He said, "Princess, it's a dog's name!"

"We've got Prince. "You can't have a Prince and Princess."

"Look how many times you said it."

And he said, "All right, Princess. All right, then."

So then he warmed to it.

She was amazing!

I did pour emotion into it,

and no matter what, people feel that.

If you're feeling it, they... they invariably do.

It had... It had... It had that dust on it.

Pete said, "Look, I've just got this studio in south London.

"I'll give you a desk, set a label up."

Set Supreme up, Pete played me Say I'm Your Number One,

he said, "Look, I've tried to place this with the major publishers,

"and they've turned it down. I think it's a hit."

And then, finally when it's released, you know,

we broke into the top ten again.

# Whoa, whoa

# Say I'm your number one Number one, number one

# I only wanna be close to you

# Say I'm your number one

# Cos you know I'd be good to you

# Say I'm your number one

# Won't you? #

She was almost the perfect artist, erm...

Incredible voice,

very articulate, very good at doing interviews.

She had a really unique image, she really stood out.

# After the love has gone... #

Well, we did an album with Princess.

We did several other sort of R&B-ish tracks around that time.

# There's nothing anyone can do

# I'm still in love with you... #

It was so organic, it was so natural, it was so...

We were so cool with each other, everybody was fine. We...

We had... It was a love affair.

# No matter what they do I'm gonna keep on loving you

# No matter what they say They'll never make me walk away

# This far down the line It's still an easy thing to say

# I'll keep on loving you... #

We were family, really were like family.

We had a lot of success with Princess,

and she was offered a big deal from Polydor...

which we couldn't compete with, and she signed with Polydor.

We could have gone on for a long time, I think.

Errn, there were other things,

they were also dealing with other artists now,

and the kind of attention that I would have required...

to present the next stage of Princess

wasn't immediately available.

MUSIC: 'Venus' by Bananarama

Bananarama came to us

because Siobhan came up with this idea of doing Venus.

What, the old shocking blue Venus?

So, Venus was clone because Bananarama had heard Dead Or Alive.

I remember sitting with Matt and Mike, saying,

"What the hell are we gonna do with this?"

Well, at first, we were pretty trepidatious, because you know,

they'd had lots of hits, we'd seen them on Top Of The Pops.

# It's a cruel, cruel Cruel summer

# Leaving me here on my own. #

# Robert De Niro's waiting

# Talking Italian Talking Italian... #

They were the sort of first real established act we'd worked with.

I think Matt felt, as I did,

that, you know, that's a bit of an extra pressure.

We kind of liked it when we worked with artists for the first time,

who had never had hits, new to the industry,

cos that's like a blank canvas,

and we could be experimental as well as creative as we liked.

So, I recorded the vocals for that.

They get behind the mic, and they knew the song backwards.

I mean, a couple of hours, I've got it down.

I don't need any more.

I couldn't find anything wrong with it.

It's all basically unison,

there's no really harmonies or anything going on.

So I said to them, "That's it, girls, we've got it."

They said, "No, you can't have got it.

"It takes us three clays to do vocals."

I said, "Why does it take you three clays to do vocals?"

"Well, previous producers always took that long to..."

I said, "Look, as far as I'm concerned,

"you've come in and clone it, it's all fine.

"Leave it with me."

Venus, as a song, had a boogie bass line.

Ancl I said to Pete and Matt, "Look, this song will lose something

"unless you keep that bass line, it's integral to the feel of it.

"But we'll brighten it up, we'll chivvy it along,

"and we'll make it sound dancey."

We played the girls the mix, or the tentative mix.

And I said, you know, "So, girls, what do you think?"

Not a word.

So I said, "Well, you must think something."

"Well, it doesn't sound like Spin Me Round, does it?"

"What? You didn't say you wanted it to sound like Spin Me Round."

"Well, what do you think we came to you for?"

We came back to the studio, and we just put a bit more...

turned the percussion up a bit.

And we got all the Dead Or Alive tapes out the studio,

we took all the percussion off Dead Or Alive's Spin Me Round

and put it all on Venus.

And we came back and they went, "Yeah, that's it!"

And we went, "Phew!"

# She's got it

# Yeah, baby, she's got it

# I'm your Venus, I'm your fire

# At your desire

# Well, I'm your Venus I'm your fire

# At your desire... #

The record has guitar on it.

Guitars are a no-no on dance,

high-energy, northern soul, Boys Town records.

You didn't have guitars, you know...

But that song, coming from the '60s, featured guitars,

and so we, rather than just play the guitar, got Matt to play...

It's a B sus.

HE IMITATES GUITAR

Then we put it into the sampling machine and sampled it,

so it made it sound more electronic.

JANGLY GUITAR

It didn't do that well in the UK.

It only got to number eight or something.

But in the States, this flew out the door. Went to number one.

Venus became, worldwide, number one.

To most people, it was the follow-up to Spin Me Round.

Because Pete had not wanted to do another high-energy record,

so what Pete didn't do, Bananarama did.

The turning point, without a question, was Mel And Kim.

We knew we'd got it right with Mel And Kim.

They gave us the confidence that we needed.

KIM APPLEBY: Mel was in the club, and the producer walked up to her

and said to her, "You're beautiful, what do you do?"

She said, "Really, I want to be a singer.

Ancl he said to her, "That's fantastic.

"I'm looking for a singer, but I'm looking for two girls.

"Do you have anyone else you can sing with?"

Ancl she said, "Yeah, my sister."

Ancl he was like, "Does she look like you?"

She was like, "Everyone thinks we're twins."

And then from there, we started to do demos.

Mel And Kim had a manager.

And he wanted them to work with some other producer.

I said, "No, we work with Stock, Aitken and Waterman."

Mel and I were really excited because they had produced

and written this track for Princess.

We just were convinced it was three brothers,

it was three Black guys that'd clone that.

Ancl down they came. Ancl I imagine our faces...

was a picture.

She couldn't believe that, as it were,

two white guys sitting in a studio had come up with this R&B,

American-sounding song or record.

They just appeared so old.

Really kind of not funky, not groovy.

Once they started working together, they just fell in love with them.

Mel And Kim were a little neutron bomb, really.

They were wildly enthusiastic about working in a studio,

wildly enthusiastic about working with us.

Because of Princess doing this R&B soul thing,

Nick had come to us and said

perhaps they could go down a similar route.

And we recorded, or had written, a song called Sisters...

# Sisters, sisters... #

...which was a bit R&B.

I put them behind a microphone,

and they couldn't sing with headphones on.

It freaked us out, hearing our voices come back,

because we were used to just singing one-on-one to each other.

We spent the clay singing that, and they were really happy.

They said, "Look, we go to the pub after.

"Do you want to come to the pub?" We were like, "Yeah, OK."

So there was this lovely little pub that eventually became our hang-out.

Couple of bottles of lager, and they were away.

They were, you know, fun.

We were falling off the chairs, all of us.

I just think they had never met girls like...

Because we were kind of like...

We were, we were streetwise, we were tough,

but we were also very feminine at the same time.

I turned to Mike and went, "Got it.

"These girls now become our rebels."

Pete said, "Scrap the track, we need something tough,

"something edgy for these girls."

One of the things that Pete recognised,

and probably Matt and Mike did,

was that if you take somebody completely raw and unknown,

then they've got a chance to monk! that

and make that into something the way they see it.

Ancl they were really confident about their own opinion,

which you have to be as a record producer.

You can't sit there going, "Well, what does everyone else think?"

Working-class girls who had had it rough all their life,

and that would give every young girl in Great Britain...

...something to look forward to.

Ancl we went back in the studio, and up on the monitor was

Showing Out (Get Fresh At The Weekend) -

in brackets.

Ancl I remember Me land I going, "What's showing out?

"What does that even mean?"

I mean, you've got to imagine,

these three guys who were so unlikely,

producing and writing a song called Showing Out,

and coming up with a lyric like that, which they know nothing about.

And it was such a genius lyric and such a genius song,

it was just... Everything was just so unlikely.

So showing out is just showing off.

Which is what they were doing all the time,

they were laughing and giggling.

And we recorded on the record, you can hear giggles and laughs,

where you incorporated it because it felt real to do that.

Because we were used to the cans now,

we went into the vocal booth, and we just sang together.

Once they mixed it, which we got on vinyl by October,

we had the 12-inch.

It was a killer track, it's still my favourite Mel And Kim track.

They were sassy enough to carry it off, and it was absolutely perfect.

# You'd better live in love

# In luxury and sunlight... #

The dance routine, we learnt in my living room in London Fields.

We'd stand in my living room, and it was all like,

"OK, and then you turn. OK."

It was all... all clone at home.

# Show, show

# Show, show

# Show, show, showing

# Showing out

# Show... #

We charted at somewhere in the 30s,

and then we got a Radio 1 play list, and then we got Top Of The Pops.

# Get fresh at the weekend

# Showing out

# Get fresh at the weekend

# Showing out... #

Yeah, top five.

They were the first new artist

that Stock, Aitken and Waterman worked with from scratch.

Working with those two girls and what we wanted to do,

we became a group. Three boys and two girls.

Showing Out got to number three.

We thought it was going to do number one because it was different enough,

and it didn't, and I think that was a bit of a disappointment.

I think we just wanted to make a more poppy record

and Respectable was it.

Respectable, for God's sake!

I think we knew we had a winner then, at that point.

Once we got the vocals down. And the girls just sang it brilliantly.

It was as if it was, you know, as much their composition as ours.

When we're singing the track, it's just very straight,

none of the effects are there. There's no...

# Tay, tay, tay, tay... #

It's just... # Take or leave us... #

And then later, all the magic happens.

You're always looking for new sounds, new ideas,

new ways to use technology and looking for new technology.

This thing called a Publison, a French sampling machine,

came to our attention.

Which meant you could play the vocals back at various pitches.

It's the start of the chorus, "Take our leave us..." So it goes...

# Tay, tay, tay, tay T-t-t-t-tay, tay. #

Nick East hated it.

I was worried it was a little bit too commercial.

And the "tay-tay-tays" worried me.

Sol rang Pete and said, "I love it,

"but can you take out the tay-tay-tays?"

I said to Mike Stock, "They don't like..."

"They can't take it off." "What?"

"Can't take it off. Take that off, I'm out of here."

I'd never heard him say that before. Ever.

"We have the right to stand our ground,

"and I'm telling you, that is important."

The one thing I'd say about Pete was that he never once...

"would criticise or, in any sense, denigrate our songs,

or the songs or the records that we made.

That night, I flew to Amsterdam with Mel And Kim,

and they were doing a big TV show there.

Ancl it used to be a show called Countdown.

It was huge, it was their Top Of The Pops.

What do you think about Bruce Willis?

I think he's lovely.

Yeah, he's gorgeous. Really, huh?

It was the first airing of Respectable.

And, like Top Of The Pops,

you do two, three, four, sometimes five takes.

# Tay-tay-tay-tay T-t-t-t-tay... #

And by the end of the second take,

the whole studio was singing "tay-tay-tay".

OK, I got that wrong, that works! Sol rang Pete.

# Tay-tay-tay-tay T-t-t-t-tay... #

"For Christ's sake, don't take that tay-tay-tay off the start!

"We've got a club here in Holland going nuts about it."

# Tay-tay-tay-tay T-t-t-t-tay

# Take or leave us Only please believe us

# We ain't ever gonna be respectable Respectable

# Like us, hate us But you'll never change us

# We ain't ever gonna be respectable Respectable. #

The minute that video got shown on Saturday morning television,

it was all over. It was Mel And Kim wall-to-wall.

They were your girls next door.

In the '80s, there was a lot of depression, people were broke,

a lot of people on the dole. And then Mel And Kim came along.

They were like a... a breath of fresh air.

Just really fun, colourful, bright, young, inspirational.

It was phenomenal.

I mean, it sold something like about 750,000 copies in the UK.

We were like a little team, and we lived in a little bubble.

So we would regularly go to clubs with Mel And Kim.

We hung out with Mel And Kim. It was good times.

And Mel's favourite saying was FLM.

You'd ask her, "How are you?" "FLM."

"Is that all right?" FLM.

"What do you think?" FLM.

We were always walking around the studio going,

"Yeah, BLEEP lovely, mate.

That was BLEEP lovely, mate.

I remember we recorded it and Mike said,

"We can't call it FLM, for God's sake."

# FLM... #

Fun, love and money.

# If you're in confusion Here's the solution

# Fun, love and money

# You can't get the answers If you don't take chances

# Fun, love and money... #

We always recorded all the laughter

and all the chat between Mel and Kim, it's all on tape.

Because they were funny, the pair of them were funny.

And it made the records very different from anybody else.

They'd just get us to talk to each other with no track.

Mike would just throw questions at us and say, "You got a boyfriend?"

You now, Mel might've said, "Boyfriend? Boyfriends are boring."

Ancl then he kept it.

Those songs sound exactly like the way Mel and Kim were.

That's them. A snapshot.

That album was written around our personalities, and for me,

that's why I think our tracks have a slightly different vibe to them.

I thought we were on to a real winner here.

The wind was taken out of our sails. We heard that Mel wasn't very well.

Mel had been kind of complaining about back problems.

She kept saying her lower back was giving her pain,

and we just put it down to,

we were heavily kind of being choreographed at that time.

The whole thing was routines, and it was a hectic schedule.

We'd gone to japan, which was a nightmare

because it was like a 16-hour flight.

Ancl she was in absolute agony.

By the time we got there, all the promo they had set up,

we couldn't do nothing.

Ancl by this time, I was thinking, "OK, something's not right here."

Ancl eventually we flew back.

She went to Barks for tests,

and then it came back saying she had cancer.

I can't tell you...

Obviously, for Kim, erm,

her sister, her baby sister is so ill.

We had FLM out, and there was absolutely no promo going on for it.

And I was adamant that I wasn't going to do it, and I didn't.

Because I was there looking after my sister,

and it was very important for me that we went through this together.

They gave her chemo, and you know,

and she put on a huge amount of weight.

Obviously lost all her hair.

And Mel was adamant that she didn't want anyone to know.

Cos we were palming them off,

saying that she had hurt her back in dancing.

Ancl that worked for about, I don't know, six months.

After a while, the press got suspicious.

So it turns out that a reporter had shown up at her house

and told her that she was from the hospital, and she was a nurse.

That's how low the press is.

Then it all came out. Yeah, it was...

It was a very hard time.

We were talking a year and a half of just hospitals.

She'd had all her chemo, and she was...

Her hair was starting to grow back, she was slowly coming back to Mel.

And she said, "You know what would be great, mate?

"If we were back in the studio."

We obviously banned everybody from the studio that night.

We didn't think she wanted people around, but she did.

She said, "Where are all the boys?"

We said, we didn't think you'd want to see 'em. "Get 'em all back."

She was bandaged up, erm, got protective around her spine.

Ancl we had to sit her down

on a stool behind the microphone to sing.

It was very, very, very difficult.

Very difficult.

They were great with her,

and it was like the old days, it was like being back again.

She'd have died in the studio if we'd let her.

And the plan was, I went in first to do a guide vocal.

And he'd given us this song, and it just...

I wasn't feeling it. it just wasn't working.

And then Mike disappeared and came back with That's The Way It ls.

And again, written about our situation.

# That's the way it is

# Every number one

# That's just the way it is... #

That's the way it is.

And I thought...

That... You know...

That was it. It... It...

It did sum it up. There was nothing we could do.

That was it, it was the way it is, and you can't get round it.

Looking back, we must've been very fresh at the time.

We didn't think it because we were just being us.

I believe that, if we'd got round to the second album,

I think those girls could have taken the world.

I think they could have been Madonna or Jackson.

It was a great time. We left our mark.

People still care, which is incredible.

And, you know, Mel lives on in the music.

When I first met Pete, it was, without question,

a defining moment for me in my life, my career.

I had just started a tiny little record label.

I had an artist, I heard a record they'd made by Hazell Dean.

And I loved this record, and I wanted to know who produced it,

and I tracked them down to this place in the Borough.

And I came in thinking I was doing them a favour

because I had a record I was just about to release.

So he puts the record on, plays it for 20 seconds and goes,

"That's a hit, mate."

We had a massive hit with So Macho.

It sold about a million copies.

That left us with a problem because we needed another song

and we only had one song.

He turned round to me, and he went, "What are you doing here?"

And I went, "I want you to give me a record for my artist."

And he went, "I'm too busy."

And I went, "Doing what?"

And he just gave me this awful wink, like, "Watch."

I said, "I've no idea what you're talking about."

And then it just went... boom.

# I heard a rumour

# They say you've got a broken heart

# I heard a rumour

# Yes, I did, boy

# Ooh, ooh, ooh... #

# Girl, I can prove it

# Yeah, I can prove it

# Girl, I can prove it... #

# Nothing's gonna stop me now

# And I don't wanna Talk it over... #

# Only you can set me free

# Cos I'm guilty Guilty

# Guilty as a girl can be

# Come on, baby, can't you see?

# I stand accused

# Of love in the first degree... #

Singles in those days, you know, you had a number one,

number two single just in in the UK,

you're talking about a million, million and a half copies,

physical copies sold just in the UK.

Then you've got the rest of the world.

There was a lot of money sloshing around.

Stock, Aitken and Waterman were forever being sniped at

by the music press.

The cool music press would go,

"Oh, it's another Stock, Aitken and Waterman

"manufactured bit of cheese."

Suggesting that what we did was easy, or rubbish.

Radio didn't like what Stock, Aitken and Waterman were making.

They hated their records.

Let's get that very plain. We were hated.

They were really unhappy.

Without radio, Pete and Mike and Matt kept having all these hits.

You've got three lads that took on the world and made a fortune.

You know, we were David, we had a catapult.

We didn't have artillery.

Some of the stuff we did, yeah, it was straight bubble gum,

but the vast majority wasn't. It might sound simple,

but there's a lot of artistry involved

in making it sound simple.

There was a snobbery towards them. Of course.

The second you become so successful,

there is a backlash.

I think it was the fact that they were occupying

the top ten every other week.

But at the end of the day,

you can't deny how brilliant these guys were.

We went to the Royal Albert Hall to collect an award

and the bunch of Djs with funny hats and whistles pelted us.

They threw cans of beer, cans of piss and anything else at us.

Ancl I got hit there with a can of something that smelt horrible.

That's why Pete wanted to do Roadblock the way that he did it.

To get back at the Djs.

Mike went off and recorded this bass and drum pattern

with a chord thing on it and presented that to me.

MUSIC: 'Roadblock'

Sol put a drum loop down.

I put a... a bass line onto it that was a bit weird.

I was driving home, and Gary Crowley was on the radio.

He was saying, get down there, it's gonna be a roadblock.

What a great title, we'll have that for this song.

We'll call it Roadblock.

We got Lucy, Nicky and all the girls from the office. We got Pete in.

And we all went behind the mic and sang, "Roadblock, roadblock."

# Oh-oh-oh

# Roadblock Roadblock

# Ro-o-o-o-oad Roadblock... #

We put a load of crowd noises on it.

Made it into a party record, basically.

They didn't tell people who it was.

Because they didn't want their name to put people off playing it.

And all the cool radio Djs were playing that,

you know, like, so happy to have some decent music to play,

instead of that Stock Aitken Waterman rubbish.

A particular magazine

was always reviewing Bananarama singles,

and the only reason they wanted to review them

was so they could slate them.

But they were the first to review Roadblock,

not knowing it was us,

and they said, that's the best goddamn dance record of 1987.

# Roadblock... #

It was a bit of a spoof, but I think it got to 13.

Ancl of all the tracks we made,

I probably hear that most often these clays.

When we all found out that, actually,

Roadblock was Stock Aitken and Waterman,

I went, "Fair dues. Fair dues. It's a really good track."

# And partay'. #

I had a story in the newspaper,

because the boy who'd starred in one of my music videos,

I'd started to date him.

So the newspapers were saying, "Oh, Sinitta has a toy boy."

I got this phone call saying, "I've got your hit, mate."

And I went, "Which one?" He went, "Your hit for Sinitta."

So I got in my car, drove down to the studio,

and he played me the bridge, actually, of the song.

And it was enough to go,

"Right, I've got to get her in the studio as quickly as possible."

I remember thinking that I was gonna be treated like a star,

because I'd had a hit.

And I got there, and to my horror, Mike Stock is on the piano,

and the first thing he does is start playing scales

and hitting notes and saying, "Sing this note".

And I was like, "It's OK, I'm already warmed up.

"I was singing in the car on the way here."

"No, I just want to see if you can sing in tune or not."

And I remember thinking, "Right, this is gonna be interesting."

The biggest anomaly of all

of the way that we worked is that Mike and I,

we had never met the artist that we were going to work with

until the moment the studio door opened.

Most producers will go out to dinner.

There'll be a lot of schmoozing and getting to know you.

"It's all gonna be fine. Isn't it gonna be great?

"We're really looking forward... "

With us, it was just very cold and bang.

"Sing the line about, you know, you want everyone to know."

"OK, I'll sing that." And he said, "OK, good, well done.

"That's the quickest we've ever recorded a track."

And I said, "Well, we haven't sung it yet."

Like, you had to do one perfect take in the old days.

But they sort of, a line here, a line there, a line, a line,

and then they kind of just put it all together like a puzzle.

As soon as the tape rolled, she was right in the groove.

Squarely in the groove, fantastic.

Double track it.

"Shall we go to the pub?"

And I said to Simon, "We haven't done the track."

He said, "Don't worry about it, just say thank you."

A week later, they sent us Toy Boy.

# Everybody's talking

# When they see me walking

# With this little boy of mine... #

Simon, who was so dedicated to his passion of hits,

you knew that when you gave him a record like Toy Boy,

he would do his best to make it a hit.

# He's my toy boy Toy boy

# I'm out with my toy boy

# Toy boy... #

You've got to remember, at this point,

I had no money, I had nothing.

I had one artist, and I really did believe

that the only people who would give her those records

were Stock Aitken and Waterman.

I knew even there it was them.

It was very exciting, erm, kind of surreal.

Cos I've now been around the world. I've performed at the Tokyo Dome.

You know, I've knocked Madonna off the top of the charts.

You know, I'm now Whitney Houston.

Pete had this... amazing knack

of finding somebody

who would not necessarily look like a star.

But they had a good voice.

He could see the way that he would be able

to successfully bring them to market.

The first time I was in the presence of Pete Waterman, let's say,

he'd come up to see a showcase

that our then-managers had put together.

Then came the third group.

They were called FBI.

I started as the drummer in that band.

And then I kind of progressed into being the singer.

# Now it's always tragic... #

I couldn't take my eyes off him.

# In the past... #

A former girlfriend of Pete Waterman's, she'd seen him.

Ancl she said to me,

his voice gave her the...

got her all wobbly.

I'm just trying to put it in a better way than that.

I don't know what to say, really.

I'll take that kid.

I'll sign him as an artist.

I remember he had red leather trousers,

and we all knew that he had ajag as well,

because the jag was outside.

And we're all thinking, "Red leather trousers, jag, music business.

"This is the way to go."

We've got him a youth opportunity training program me. A YOP.

And he's gonna get 20 quid a week, we had to pay him 20 quid a week.

I ended up being a tea boy at Stock Aitken Waterman's place.

But it was amazing. It was like a really great apprenticeship.

And that's what he did, he came down and served us tea

and sandwiches for a good year, I think,

before we actually worked with him.

There is only me that makes decent tea down here.

Somebody's got to do it, you know.

He was a singer and an artist that Pete wanted to develop.

But the rest of the building weren't told that.

And he stayed with me in Crouch End in my flat.

So became sort of flatmates.

I used to go into the studio every single day with him in the morning.

We'd get up, we'd have a cup of tea.

We'd jump in the car, and off we'd go.

And he had a huge massive big '80s phone.

He'd be screaming and shouting at people.

I don't think I ever saw Pete where he wasn't on it.

I don't think I ever saw him where he was just chilled.

He was always chasing the dream.

Rick was around Bananarama and Dead Or Alive.

He just was part of the team.

So I was sitting at the desk in the morning,

preparing for them to make

You Spin Me Round or, you know, Respectable.

I played table tennis with those guys.

When I think about that,

there's so many things about their building and their set-up

that I had no reference, so I just thought, "Well, it's normal."

But it obviously was not normal.

It was not normal in any way, shape or form.

You've got to understand we had a great staff.

And our staff were family.

So Rick was family.

There was also the side of it where

they went to the pub every night - and I mean every night.

They were gonna talk shop, they were gonna talk business.

They were gonna talk about the records

and probably talk about the artists.

I was kind of allowed to sit with them.

Ancl it was only some months later when Pete said,

"Actually, Rick's here to develop as an artist and as a writer."

Ancl we started helping Rick and working with him.

He has a baritone.

But when he reaches the high notes,

it's committed and full and accurate.

Ancl I thought, "We need to make a song

"that will show that voice off."

Peter had come up with this title, Never Gonna Give You Up

just to get the starting point.

We were just shouting lines to each other.

Ancl after about five minutes of that, Mike says,

"Great, I've got that, fantastic."

Then we sat down and wrote the verses.

When you're laying a master down on anybody's vocal,

you're putting down something that's never been put down before,

and sometimes, you've got to do it note by note.

Mike was pretty tough, I think, in terms of getting you

to do the vocals the way he wanted them.

# We're no strangers to love

# You know the rules And so do I... #

And he had a certain thing in the way

that he wanted the vocals to be.

And all good producers do, and I've come to realise that.

But as a 21-year-old, 20-year-old kid,

I thought he was a bit of a tough nut, to be honest.

But he kind of had to be.

I was very inexperienced. I didn't really know what I was doing.

Peter came in and said, "By the way, how's that Rick Astley track going?"

Ancl we said, "Well, we seem to have hit a bit of a brick wall."

Ancl the reason it wasn't working

was that Rick's voice was dragging the track back.

Because it's so big and so all-encompassing,

and so powerful that there was no funk in it.

There was no rhythm, there was no groove.

We found a track that was out at the time,

it was a sort of house music track

that just happened to be in the same key, as well, weirdly.

We basically grafted that rhythm track onto what we had,

and suddenly, it worked.

It was just like, "Wow, where did that come from?"

# Never gonna give you up

# Never gonna let you down

# Never gonna run around And desert you... #

I mean, it's so difficult for me to talk about that song,

because it's literally part of my DNA.

# Never gonna tell a lie And hurt you... #

That record is the absolute turning point

of everything in my life,

and so I'm pretty emotional about it, even today.

I'm still unbelievably grateful for it.

When people saw Rick for the first time, they were shocked.

I think people thought he could be a Black American singer.

All the cabbies in London said, "Did you see that guy last night?

"I thought it was Luther Vandross."

I have to say most of my favourite singers were American.

American Black guys.

And without them knowing it, they taught me to sing.

Most people thought it was someone else singing,

and it wasn't really him.

One of the morning shows,

they sort of thought they'd catch Rick out,

so they rang Rick in a hotel in Glasgow

and asked him to sing on the radio live.

That wasn't a problem for Rick.

Radio I just took off.

Cos once he'd done that, every Dj on Radio 1

all day was talking about it.

And for days saying, "Did you hear this kid? He's unbelievable."

I played this song, and I think I played it again.

It was so good.

# Never gonna tell a lie And hurt you... #

It is just the perfect pop song.

Once these things are released, we are onto the next things.

We're not paying much attention.

Till suddenly, I find out he's on Top Of The Pops.

# We are no strangers to love... #

MAN: Close for three, can you?

Ancl suddenly, we're number one.

Ancl we are number one in France,

and Germany and all of Europe.

In 25 countries, we're number one.

Some records you can't stop, you know.

It's one of those melodies that puts you in a time and a place

and reminds you of where you were.

And it defines a moment in time.

Kylie Minogue was a name that neither Matt nor I had heard.

Ancl Neighbours was

just before the one o'clock news on the BBC.

How would you like to come in and try singing in a proper studio

to see just what you can do?

I mean, we are always on the lookout for new talent,

and thanks to Scott here,

we might just have struck gold with you.

Me? You want me? That's right.

I could be a singer!

That's great.

I don't believe it!

In Australia,

Mushroom was a company owned by Michael Gudinski,

who was a promoter.

He was doing the tours and the big gigs.

Pete had done a thing where he seconded Mike Duffy,

one of our engineers, to go down to Australia.

We sent Mike down on a sabbatical for six months

to teach these guys how to use the equipment.

One of the first things Michael did was to give Kylie to Mike and say,

"Make a record with her," and they chose The Loco-Motion.

# My little baby sister Can do it with ease

# It's easier Than learning your ABCs

# So come on, come on

# Do the locomotion with me... #

That became the biggest-selling single of the decade in Australia.

I got Mike on the phone. He always calls me boss.

"Boss, I've got a hit. I'm number one in Australia."

"Are you?" "Yeah, I've sold 100,000 records."

The next logical step,

with Neighbours being a big success in the UK,

was to go to the mothers hip,

the homeland of where Mike Duffy came from,

and go to Stock Aitken Waterman.

"Would you do the next Kylie single for me?"

I said, "Yeah, course, no problem.

"The next time she's in London, pop her round the studio."

Now, what I can't say to him is,

"I've got six records in the top ten,

"and I've got artists queueing out the door.

"We don't have time."

I got a phone call from Pete.

He said, "Have you heard of this TV show called Neighbours?"

And I went, "Yes."

He said, "Do you know who Kylie Minogue is?" I went, "no."

He said, "Well, she's the star of Neighbours."

And he said, "I have a deal with Mushroom Records.

"They want me to sign Kylie Minogue.

"Will you sign her?"

And I went, "Yes, if you make the record."

And he went, "No."

I said, "Well, then I'm not signing her."

So for about five years,

I felt physically sick every time I heard one of her records,

thinking, "God, if she'd been signed to me,

"my label would have gone insane."

So we arranged for Kylie to come over for a week,

and she would be in the studio with Matt and Mike.

And we would make a record, and then she would go back into the show.

Neighbours was a gruelling soap-opera schedule,

so in order to have time to get to London,

the scriptwriters would have to write me out of the storyline.

This was my first international trip

and I was, what, 19 years old or something.

I speak with Pete and say, "Kylie is here.

"How can we get her into the studio? What's the time?"

He said, "Well, the guys are working

"on some other things they need to finish.

"Give us a day or two, and we'll come up with something."

David Howells,

who was waiting for Pete to tell him

she could go to the studio,

took her out for every museum. She went to Windsor.

Took her everywhere he could, took her shopping.

The clays rolled on, and we'd ask each clay,

and each clay, we would hear they're not ready.

On the final clay she was in the country,

she was going back that afternoon to Melbourne,

four o'clock plane out of Heathrow.

There was an unwritten rule that David Howells

would not go into the studio.

I'm not directly communicating with Matt and Mike.

I'm communicating with Pete.

Pete communicates with Matt and Mike.

We don't have any more clays.

We've got to get this clone and get back to Melbourne.

So I broke the unwritten rule of

"don't talk to Matt and Mike in the studio".

David comes to me

and said, "Well, Kylie's in reception now."

I said, "Who? Kylie? Who's Kylie?"

"Kylie Minogue."

So I get on the phone, I call Pete. He's in Manchester.

"Pete, do you know Kylie Minogue?"

"Oh! Forgot to tell you. Oh, shit."

You have to tell her to go, because we don't have time.

But Mike, being the gent he is, said,

"We got to make time. She's here.

"And she's flying back this afternoon."

We had two or three tracks that were lying around,

certainly one for Bananarama that hadn't been finished

and hadn't made it to the album.

I said, "Why don't we just tickle one of these up?"

Ancl Mike said, "No, we got to write something from scratch."

So, erm, we did, very quickly.

Because David Howells had told me all about her,

everything in her life seemed wonderful.

Why does she want to become a pop star?

She's got everything she needs. She's a famous actress.

She's doing it all. Why does she want to work with us?

I thought "Perhaps she hasn't got love."

She's got everything else,

but she really wants love, and she hasn't got it.

"I should be so lucky in love."

Ancl the song is a sad song, you know,

"It's all in my imagination."

# In my imagination

# There is no complication

# I dream about you All the time... #

I really didn't know what to expect.

I'd only been in a couple of studios prior to that.

I got the first verse clone.

I said to Matt, "Go over there, write a second verse.

"Follow the meter."

So, they presented the song, I Should Be So Lucky.

Talked me through it, played it to me.

"This is how it goes."

Ancl she was quick.

Ancl she was learning the words as we were feeding them to her.

So she could project it to the mic, and she was good at that

because she learned a Neighbours script every clay.

I'm sure I sang it line by line to make sure we had everything

before I left again.

I do remember thinking, "This is really high."

It's a very high song to sing.

# My heart is close to breaking

# Ancl I can't go on faking The fantasy that you'll be mine

# I'm dreaming That you're in love with me

# Ancl I'm in love with you But dreaming's all I do

# If only they'd come true

# I should be so lucky Lucky, lucky, lucky

# I should be so lucky in love

# I should be so lucky Lucky, lucky, lucky

# I should be so lucky in love. #

Kept getting telexes from Australia saying,

"When are we gonna hear the record?"

So I remember thinking to myself, "I'd better listen to this record."

Pete wasn't terribly interested in this record.

And then I had an amazing phone call one day from Michael Hurll,

the BBC producer, who was in Australia.

"I hear you've recorded Kylie Minogue."

I said, "Yes."

"I've seen this girl. I'm down here. She's fantastic.

"I'd like to do something with her."

For the Christmas morning with Noel Edmonds,

which had the record Christmas viewing on.

# In my imagination

# There is no complication

# I dream about you All the time... #

I was thrown into the back of a convertible car

and flying around Sydney doing this video,

which I remember being embarrassed of for years,

and now I absolutely love it. It's so amazing.

# To give you all my loving

# If one clay You would notice me... #

And suddenly, before you know it,

we've had a number one record and a major new star.

Woolworths have come in for 200,000.

And for the first time,

we saw hands-on

how much money was generated by an artist and a record company.

Suddenly, we are making... millions and millions of pounds.

We're selling millions of records.

Ancl I think that was the downfall,

because then the accountants need to take over.

Welcome to the hit factory in London.

He was like a box of fireworks, you know?

When Pete heard the record, he went, "Kerching."

We're number one for five weeks,

and somebody says, "What's the follow-up?"

They still worked at an incredible pace.

Singers like that just come in, do the job.

The next thing I knew I'm on Top Of The Pops, number one.

It could get testy at times.

Matt decided that he'd had enough.

I thought, "Well, if that's the way you feel, fine. Screw you."

It wasn't the same.

# I know it's for real. #

MUSIC: 'Respectable' by Mel And Kim