Pete Waterman: 'For us, the song was absolutely the most important thing'

The show, written by Debbie Isitt, creator of the Nativity! musical comedy films, follows the story of a star-crossed couple with wedding jitters and tropical dreams, and features more than 25 songs that emerged from SAW’s hit factory in the 1980s, including 10 number ones.

Waterman reveals this is not the first attempt to translate their songs to the stage – in fact there have been “six or seven” in the past 10 years – but knowing a little about Isitt’s credentials, they agreed to meet her and producers. “At that point it was just to look at the story and quite quickly we got the impression that she got what we were about,” he says. “This is a very different thing to do, a musical, rather than make records, it’s a completely different process, and you have to trust the producers, who are very successful, that they know what they’re doing.”

The backstage team is certainly strong. Besides writer and director Isitt, who also won a Bafta for her TV adaptation of Jacqueline Wilson’s book The Illustrated Mum and successfully adapted the first Nativity! film for the stage, the show is choreographed by Jason Gilkison, creative director of Strictly Come Dancing, with musical direction by George Dyer, who has worked on the likes of Annie, West Side Story and The Wedding Singer.

Waterman, who attended rehearsals “every other day to work with them and just keep my eye on the music”, admits to finding musical theatre an “alien world” to the cost-conscious environment that SAW worked in during the 80s. “You must remember that when we were making these records, studio time was at least £1,400 a day and you’d got the musicians who were all on £400 or £500 for a session...so you’re racking up a bill. These guys can spend four or five hours just working a dance move. I’m like, ‘It just cost you eight grand that dance move!’ They don’t think like that at all.”

While Stock Aitken Waterman retained total control of the music – “We would never give up that right,” Waterman insists – they did allow the production team room for their own ideas. There were occasions, however, when he had to put his foot down, he says. “I don’t think they were used to anybody saying, ‘No, I’m not having that’, but then when they’re working through it, they go, ‘Yeah, yeah. Well, have you got something that could go in there?’...That’s the way that the collaboration really works: I took two or three songs out which I didn’t think worked and put a couple of new songs in.”

Even in the early stages of the tour, it would seem that there’s still some wriggle room. “As a record producer, you’ve got to know your audience, which is radio and television, so you’re making records for a very specific purpose. It’s the same in the theatre, but it’s a different audience,” Waterman says. “In theatre you can do one wonderful thing which you can’t do in the record industry, you can change it for the next night if it doesn’t work. I can’t ring the record shop and say, ‘Could you send the record back? I want to change the bass, please.’”

What the stage show has brought out, he feels, is the poignance in many of the song lyrics that was perhaps overlooked even by the fans who bought records by Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan or Rick Astley. “There was no question that people were buying the records because they liked the record and the artist; I don’t think even we expected them to listen to the lyric intensely,” Waterman says. “I think that some fans did, but some fans just loved Kylie or Jason and bought the records.

“We never treated it like that; for us, the song was absolutely the most important thing. If it happened to be Kylie (singing it) it was a bonus, but the song was the most important thing. So here we are 35 years later and thank God we paid attention to the song and not the artist because it’s the song that works – and when you come into this situation, it’s not Rick Astley, it’s not Kylie Minogue, it’s not Sinitta or Sonia, it’s the song. Now you’re 35 years removed the lyric suddenly takes over. The actual melody and the lyric completely becomes a new entity and that’s very well demonstrated by the is musical. Even I cry every night, it gets you every single time.

“If we’d have put You’ll Never Stop Me Loving You out as record like it is in this show, we couldn’t have done it because at the time we were making sort of dance-pop records. Now it’s a fantastic heart-rending ballad this way, and it gets me every single time because we know why we wrote it. I was on the radio when that girl told me her story, so there am I 35 years later listening to that story and it gets me every time because the reason that we wrote is the way that Debbie’s portrayed it, which is amazing.”

Toy Boy, originally a hit for Sinitta, is another that’s been given a surprising new treatment, Waterman says. “It was a bit of fun, we wrote it about a club called Henry Africa’s in Wigan; little did I think 35 years ago that every place it plays everybody would be jumping up and down singing Toy Boy, for goodness sake. If you’d have said to me what would be one of the hit songs of the musical, I would not have picked Toy Boy by any stretch of the imagination.”

Besides Minogue’s first chart-topper that gave the musical its title, one of the best-known numbers is Never Gonna Give You Up, which catapulted Rick Astley to lasting fame. Waterman finds himself “dumbfounded” by its continuing success (thanks in part to the internet phenomenon of Rick-rolling). “You could have never expected it,” he says. “It took no more than an hour to record. We did it on the way into the studio, Mike stuck it down with Rick and we forgot about it, and now I think it’s the 18th most played record, three American presidents have used it as their inaugural music and Rick’s out there doing Glastonbury. Hello, hang on a minute, where’s this come from?”

Its ubiquity caused Isitt some concern when audiences started to join in during the show, Waterman says. “One of the things in the show is the audience participation is unbelievable, and it’s a problem and it’s not a problem. Some people who go just want to watch the musical but it’s very hard to watch a musical when you’re bursting to sing along or dance. There’s a part where one of the characters goes ‘We’re no strangers to love’ and the whole audience go ‘You know the rules and so do I’. Debbie’s going, ‘I didn’t want that to happen’. Sorry, Debbie, everybody knows this song, the minute he says the line you know the audience are going to join in, you can’t hold that back!”

Kylie Minogue even has a part in the show – in digital form. “It’s quite a major part of the idea,” Waterman says. “She is the bride’s alter-ego and the interaction between the two is fantastic. I think that gives the audience a bit of a shock but they get it and they quickly get into the story because of that role that Kylie plays. Kylie’s funny in it and there’s a part where she starts going into song titles and the audience just fall about laughing because they are all her own hits.”

Waterman has stayed in touch with many of the artists that he’s worked with over the years. “As we talk I’m waiting for a taxi to go and see Kylie, and I see Rick regularly,” he says. “I haven’t seen Jason for about a year. I saw Sonia at the opening night (of I Should Be So Lucky). I haven’t seen Bananarama in a couple of years because they all live in Cornwall now, they’re no longer around (in London) and they don’t tour as much as they used to, but most of the artists I still bump into. I didn’t fall out with anybody, so if they’re around we still see each other.”

Back in the 80s, he felt like a father figure to many of them. “I was over 40, they were 17 and 18 and I had a huge responsibility because all our staff were young, so you take that responsibility seriously. I couldn’t just be flippant, they were looking for me to guide their careers and look after them, particularly when you ask someone like Sonia who’s young to come and live in London for a while, that’s a massive responsibility.”

Given the state of the world, Waterman hopes that I Should Be So Lucky will provide some escapism. “The one thing about this musical that we couldn’t have planned is that the timing is perfect,” he says. “With everything that’s going on in the world there ain’t a lot to laugh at, it’s pretty serious. So for two hours I promise you you’ll come out laughing and with a smile on your face. It wasn’t brilliant in the 80s, but everybody’s got strong memories of being happy. There were some pretty dreadful things happening in the 80s too. So a bit of escapism doesn’t hurt and if you can go out an enjoy yourself for a couple of hours, surely that’s the right thing to do.”

In 2024 it will be the 40th anniversary of Waterman joining forces with Stock and Aitken​​​​​​​. But ever since leaving school in Coventry in 1962, his career had been full of twists and turns. His first job was as a fireman on British Rail steam loco​​​​​​​motives. “I had my first train set in 1948 and I lived next door to a railway line, so the railway has been with me all my life. To go on the railway at 14 was natural for me...it was what I thought my destiny was​​​​​​​.”

The Beatles’ breakthrough in 1962 inspired him to try his hand at DJ-ing in local dancehalls – but music had long been an interest, he says. “I was a choirboy from six years old and so church music was a very big part of my life. By 1956-57 I started collecting rock ’n’ roll records. There were no such things as DJs then but by the late 50s and early 60s dancehalls were starting to pop up. In 1962 you’d got The Beatles and the gunpowder is lit and the explosion is enormous, and I was the right age at the right place at the right time to see that happen, and I’d got this amazing record collection so people were asking me ‘Can you go and play records before the groups come on?’ It wasn’t called a DJ, it was called a Master of Ceremonies.”

It was at the Locarno nightclub in Coventry in 1978 that Waterman met a young Neville Staple, who introduced him to his band​​​​​​​, then known as The Coventry Automatics​​​​​​​ and later The Specials. For a time Waterman was their manager.

He recalls: “I’d signed Chris Rea (to Magnet Records, who he was then working for as an A&R man) and I’d fallen out with the record company over Chris Rea so I decided to give up the music industry​​​​​​​ and go and work on a building site in Coventry​​​​​​​ and this noise was coming out of an xpelair at this pub and I went in and there was this group practising. I knew Neville and I knew Lynval (Golding) and Horace (Panter) from the local area, and I knew Terry (Hall) because he lived two streets from me. I didn’t know Jerry (Dammers) at all, but I knew the rest of the guys​​​​​​​ and they were all regulars at the Locarno anyway.

“They were playing what is now described as 2 Tone but then people thought of it as punk reggae. I remember Jerry playing Too Much Too Young and I just went ‘It’s a hit!’ I think they thought I was completely nuts but that’s beside the point. I got them their first gigs and I brought them to London to do their first recordings. I would have loved to have carried on but I had to pay the mortgage so I took a consultant’s job with a company in America that was working on a musical called Grease. So I lost out on The Specials but I gained on Grease.”

Waterman had a long-standing assocation with reggae, having sold it in his shop The Soul Hole in Coventry in the early 1970s. In 1975 while working in A&R in Philadelphia he took a short holiday in Jamaica and discovered Susan Cadogan’s version of Hurt So Good, which he helped to become a hit in the UK.​​​​​​​ Later, working with producer Peter Collins, he scored several hits with the band Musical Youth.

In 1984 he set up his own company PWL and linked up with producers Matt Aitken and Mike Stock.

He remembers: “I did Pass The Dutchie by Musical Youth and I was in America for a long time and came back via Canada because I was missing working in the record industry (in the UK). I came back and I’d got Musical Youth, Nik Kershaw and Matt Bianco at the time but my phone didn’t ring.

“Then one day I got a phone call from a guy I’d met two years previously called Mike Stock who said he’d got this record and could I listen to it. I was working in the Stiff building at the time with Madness and he came over and played me these songs and I said, ‘They’re fantastic, I think you’ve got something that’s good, perhaps we should form a production company together’. I played them a couple of tracks and I had some keyboards in the office which they started to work on and I literally said, ‘We’ve got to have a name, let’s put our names in a hat’. We did and we pulled them out and it was Stock Aitken Waterman. Matt said, ‘It sounds like a firm of accountants’, so I said, ‘I hope so’.”

SAW were at the heart of the Hi-NRG boom in the mid-1980s, scoring big hits with Dead Or Alive, Hazell Dean and the actor and drag artist Divine. Waterman says he’d cottoned on to the music’s popularity in gay clubs. “Throughout my career I’ve played basically R&B, Motown and Philadelphia records​​​​​​​ so when I came back in ​​​​​​​’83 the only clubs that I enjoyed going to were the gay clubs​​​​​​​ where they still seemed to be playing uptempo songs in the way Motown’s uptempo​​​​​​​ nor Norhern Soul. The rest of the clubs had gone particularly heavy funk, which wasn’t for me. I remember going to Heaven and those places and watching people dance, they were predominantly male, but it was the music that intrigued me. So my best mate had this little gay label called Proto ​​​​​​and he’d got this girl called Hazel Dean who’d got a record out called Searchin’ ​​​​​​​which I quite liked and I could see going down in the clubs so we remixed it for him and then it went on to be a hit and then he asked us to do the follow-up​​​​​​​, and he’d signed Divine so that’s what we focused on.

“The reason why we focused on it was because it was the only way I saw that we could get into the record industry. The rest of the record industry didn’t interest me at all. That Hi-NRG scene, like Blue Monday, all that stuff to me was exciting​​​​​​​. All the New Romantic stuff that was going on didn’t interest me, it was boring.”

Launching their own independent label was the next step. “Necessity is always the mother of invention,” Waterman says. “We’d made I Should Be So Lucky by Kylie and nobody wanted it. We tried everywhere, everybody turned it down, so my mate who had the distribution company Pinnacle ​​​​​​​said, ‘You’ve got to put it out yourself’. ​​​​​​​I said, ‘No, I don’t want to be in the record industry, I just want to be a record producer’, and literally he talked me into it and the rest is history. I guess it was a logical progression but it wasn’t a logical progression that I understood at the time​​​​​​​. I’d love to take the credit that I was so much of a brilliant marketing man that I saw ​​​​​​​the opportunity to make £1m for myself; I wish I had seen that opportunity.”

Minogue and Donovan both had a profile as​​​​​​​ actors in the Australian soap opera Neighbours at the time. “That’s why nobody would sign Kylie,” Waterman says. “People were saying you can’t sell TV artists as record artists.” SAW ​​​​​​​quickly proved the naysayers wrong, but Waterman says that he didn’t have a clear vision of how things would pan out.

“I remember distinctly talking to Kylie very early and saying, ‘This is like a skyrocket, you touch the blue paper with your match and off it goes. You have no idea where it’s going but you know it will come down to earth at some point. So let’s hold onto the stick and enjoy the ride wherever it takes us.’ And it really was like that. We probably did the first album in less than four recording days, half in Britain and half in Australia in between her filming Neighbours. So there was no grand plan of what we would do or how we would do it. We didn’t have time. The rocket went off and we were hanging onto the stick.”

When working with more established artists such as Donna Summer and Bananarama, their approach all came down to the songs. “I was a big fan of Bananarama, the boys probably were not (the same), but this to me was I wanted to record Bananarama, so that was an easy one for me – and the same with Donna Summer.

“I knew Donna’s husband Bruce very well and I loved Donna. There was a negativity around her at the time and I think the boys expressed a reserve that there might be too much of a backlash because of her religious views; I said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t care. Donna Summer is Donna Summer. It’s the music, not the politics and if we make a great record, people will buy it, if we don’t they won’t.’ In Donna Summer’s case it was absolutely about the song. She was wonderful to work with, she became a great friend, but when we played the record to Geffen they hated it, tThey were beside themselves. So I got these long midnight calls with John Kalodner and David Geffen about how they wanted to change this record. In the end after about an hour on the phone, I just said, ‘Do you know what? Let’s forget it. I’ll send you your money back, I’ll wipe Donna off the tapes and I’ll get somebody else to sing it.’ End of conversation, I put the phone down.

“I had a call two days later from Atlantic Records in New York. The PA said, ‘I’ve got Ahmet Ertegun who wants to talk to you’, and Ahmet Ertegun was God to me. He said ti me, ‘Listen, I’ve just heard this Donna Summer album, it is amazing, why won’t you let Geffen have it?’ So I went through the whole thing about Geffen wanted to put guitars on, change the rhythms and blah blah blah, and he said, ‘No, Pete, I want this album as it is. So leave it to me, I’ll go and talk to David Geffen. I’ll take it off Geffen and I’ll put it out on Atlantic. I’m coming over to London, I want to come and see you’. He came down and sat in the studio and he said to me, ‘Never, ever change what you do. When you know it’s right, do what you do, tell them to go away. I wish I’d have stuck to that when we made records, so many time we changed the record for the record industry and we regretted it. Aretha Franklin still tells me to this day she can do the vocal on I Say a Little Prayer better.’

“The thing was with Donna Summer they had spent so much money making that album Dinner With Gershwin. As far as Geffen was concerned Donna was never going to get a royalty and they were never going to get their money back, so they were desperate to try Stock Aitken Waterman because at least they might make some sort of money just based on the name. They were looking at it from a different point of view; now the fact that we recouped Donna’s advances and made money for them all was so unexpected to them. But This Time I Know It’s for Real is a classic song, and on that album there are probably four of our best songs, and there’s one of them in this musical, but the real SAW fans know those songs inside out. Breakaway is a classic song that’s in this musical, but unless you’re a real fan you don’t know it but you can see all the real fans pick straight up on it.”

Alongside music, Waterman’s love of the railways has never left him. Indeed he has amassed a​​​​​​​ valuable collection of steam locomotives, including, it turns out, Flying Scotsman. “I am the only living owner now, everybody else has gone” he say​​​​​​​s. “(Tony) Marchington, Bill (McAlpine), Nigel Gresley, the London North Eastern Railway, they’re all gone, so I’m the only living owner now.”

He believes it’s much loved for “the history”, adding: “​​​​​​​It was always the Flying Scotsman, the brand leader. I bought it because people were paying a fiver for a lump of coal off it when I could have bought a bag of coal for three quid.”

I Should Be So Lucky runs at the Grand Theatre, Leeds until December 30, Sheffield Lyceum from January 16-20 and Hull New Theatre from February 19-24.