I love 1988... Kylie video for her monster
SAW hit, I Should Be So Lucky
Pete Waterman's website has, proudly emblazoned, the tagline: "Desperately sinful, wicked and absolutely unforgettable". Well, arguably the wickedest thing he's done in the last five years was to make his charges One True Voice, the male winners of Popstars: The Rivals, look like forgettable Westlife clones, while their distaff "rivals", Girls Aloud, were allowed a much naughtier image and became hugely successful.
The ex-members of One True Voice must be hoping that Waterman's recently announced reunion with 80s songwriting partners Mike Stock and Matt Aitken is less than productive. So will anyone who had trouble navigating the 1980s for the No 1 singles by Rick Astley, Jason Donovan and Kylie (before she was cool) getting in the way.
All told, SAW produced 200 infuriatingly bland, cynical Top 40 singles, which came to define 80s pop. Who knows how long they would have carried on, leaving their tinny stamp on the Top 10, had they not run up against a new breed of pop singers in the early 90s who were unwilling to give SAW complete control over their music. In 1991, they did the merciful thing and split up.
But while Stock and Aitken disappeared, possibly to compile a megamix of their hits for asbo-lout-deterrence purposes in shopping centres, Waterman hadn't yet finished with the British public. In the late 90s he made a comeback with Steps, imaginatively describing them as "Abba on speed". (NB They weren't. Abba were good.) Latterly, he has been a judge on Popstars: The Rivals and Pop Idol.
Now, the threesome have decided we've been missing them for too long, and plan to return with their own reality show - similar in format to Pop Idol, with SAW writing the winner's material.
This should be terrible news. It's manifestly unfair to unleash their tinny production values and old-school Svengali approach on some kid who wasn't even born when Jason Donovan was grunting Too Many Broken Hearts.
The odd thing is that I can't wait. I genuinely believe it will be good to have them back. It's not just because time has endowed their 20-year-old hits with a nostalgic magic (there can't be a thirtysomething in the country who doesn't bark with joy when I Should Be So Lucky comes on in All Bar One), but because chart-pop is in such a dismal state that it's time to let some old hands sort it out.
Wretched Jason Donovan may have been as a singer, but his SAW-written tunes were memorable in a way that he wasn't. By contrast, the Shayne Wards and David Sneddons that now pass for stars are stuck with songs that they themselves probably can't remember five minutes after they record them. If things carry on like this, pop as a thriving, frothy genre will die out. What will the much-admired Pop Justice website write about then? It can't be allowed to happen. Time for Stock, Aitken & Waterman to fix it.
