Young guns go for it: Stock, Aitken and Waterman in the 80s
It was 20 years ago today that a musical watershed was passed. Not as venerated as Sgt Pepper but almost as lucrative: for 1985 saw the first number one for the UK's hit factory managers, Stock, Aitken and Waterman.
Over the next decade their trademark brand of brutally-sequenced kindergarten melodies spread like a rash across the charts: in 1989, 28% of all records sold in the UK were SAW productions. Churning out tunes and arrangements for a succession of biddable young singers with little or no creative role, the team gave the world both Kylie and Jason, not to mention Rick Astley, Mel and Kim, Bananarama and Samantha Fox.
Their success was such that SAW took to comparing themselves to Motown, though quite apart from questions of quality, this rather downplays the production team's pretty copious output of failures - only the most terminal pop trivia obsessives will remember the careers of Lonnie Gordon, Delage, Erik, Pat & Mick or Jeb Million.
As tends to happen with really successful careers that aren't brought down by drugs, money rows broke up the partnership, which dissolved in the early 1990s amid some pretty bitter litigation.
Time, however, appears to have healed the rift, and the team have just announced their intention to go back to work. "Can they reclaim their crown in a world of iPods and chart-topping Arctic Monkeys?" wonders an article in today's Times, rather suggesting that their time has passed.
I'm inclined to think, however, that SAW's work in the 80s - much as it seemed painfully obvious on its release - was in fact way ahead of its time. Pete Waterman became one of the architects of the Pop Idol phenomenon this century, but most of its key components were in place at the SAW mill long before the programme aired.
It wasn't simply a matter of moulding impressionable youngsters hungry for celebrity. They also recognised the usefulness of a TV tie-in: hence the value of inviting the Neighbours over.
Another of their blazing insights, whose currency has yet to wear out, is that the pop audience does not necessarily want brilliantly talented, charismatic, original or even very good-looking performers: there's a huge appetite for people who are almost luminously ordinary, because they make the common dream of becoming famous that much closer.
Linked to this - perhaps their most brilliant idea, and one which augurs well for their continued success - is the team's realisation that when it comes to chart music, it's pre-pubescent kids who are now the vital demographic. The SAW team - as they proved when they tossed off an apparently authentic funk workout in Roadblock - knew perfectly well how to make quite sophisticated music.
But they also knew they were after the pocket money of the last remaining age group to whom pop music really mattered: so they delivered a weird, sexless disco with its melodic roots firmly in the nursery rhyme.
We might not have liked it, but it sounded great to the innocent - and probably still will.
