Monthly Archives: July 2012

“I’ve just formed a band.” Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and the London folk revival, 1967.

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You’re a Scandinavian TV crew making a documentary about the British folk revival. You have a chance to alight in London at any point during the 60s and grab as much footage as you can over a few days. Where do you alight your Tardis? It’s a tough choice. By the law of averages there must have been a night when Jackson C. Frank and his producer Paul Simon both played at legendary all-night folk hole Les Cousins. That would be pretty special. Or the time Bert Jansch and Transatlantic Records’ Nat Joseph were entrusted with the job of taking a visiting Bob Dylan to Ewan MacColl’s folk club (and later thrown out for making too much noise). It’s a tough call.

 

 

This must surely run it close though. In 1967, Denmark’s Folksanger programme arrived in the West End and, much as any documentary makers would have done in a pre-internet age, would have followed a few leads, elicited a couple of recommendations and descended on a couple of likely venues. By any criteria, they didn’t do at all badly. Yes, there’s a good reason why the dark-haired American guy doing a passable version of Woody Guthrie’s Hard Travelin’ didn’t go on to greater things. Neither does it do him any favours that he thinks Bob Dylan invented topical songwriting.

Setting him aside though, the rest is frankly incredible. Already an established draw in 1967, Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick inadvertently illustrate the flexibility of this folk revival by tackling a song whose origins sit firmly outside of it. The pair would have almost certainly first heard I Haven’t Told Her, She Hasn’t Told Me on Peter Sellers’ 1959 album Songs For Swinging Sellers. They address each other like two cooing lovebirds by way of Noel Coward, camping it up in a manner that suggests they don’t care what this tells Denmark about the British folk boom.

London looks amazing in the outdoor footage, Carnaby Street so drenched in period detail, it looks like an ersatz reconstruction of its mythical self. For some reason, shoppers are caught from the waist down as Penny Lane plays in the background. Impeccably tailored trouser legs point forward like the beaks of exotic birds. West End strip joints cry out for the accompaniment of Bert Jansch’s Soho, released a few months previously on the album he made with John Renbourn, Bert & John. But in the light of what’s to come, that’s nitpicking.

Here they are. First John, in his natural habitat, making light work of I Know My Babe from his second album Another Monday. Then we get to see a little history being made. In what appears to be their shared St John’s Wood flat, Bert and John face each other and work out – possibly even improvise – a new composition. If you had everything they’d recorded at that point, you wouldn’t have recognised it. Between them, on the settee, there’s a woman immersed in today’s crossword. Anne Briggs perhaps? Her apparent indifference to what’s going on around her, coupled with her frequent presence in that house at this time suggests it might be. Whatever, you can’t help but be impressed by this show of bohemian insouciance. In 1967, most people would never have even seen a camera crew, let alone been the object in focus.

Interviewed a few minutes later, Bert reveals: “As far as myself is concerned, I’ve just formed a band – which comprises of drums, bass and two guitars and all sorts of singers, playing music which we like… which derives from all sources…. Some will be worked out. Some will be improvised.” The song being improvised was given a name, as was the band. Bells resurfaced a few months later, as the second track on Pentangle’s eponymous debut album The Pentangle.

“Panpipe Sonia, anyone?” Stock Aitken & Waterman, 2006

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On a wet Thursday afternoon, Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman are all but anonymous among the convening businessmen in the huge atrium of Marylebone’s Landmark Hotel. Even Pete Waterman’s latter-day incarnation as talent show judge seems not to attract any glances of recognition. With the passing of time, it seems mildly surreal that these three middle-aged men were voted in one newspaper poll below Margaret Thatcher but above the Chernobyl and Lockerbie disasters as one of the worst things that happened to the 80s. And yet, at their commercial peak, a certain section of the public – rock fans, students, music journalists, indie bands – loathed Stock, Aitken & Waterman. In 1987, they even inspired a parody single. With an ostensibly similar production, Morris Minor & The Majors’ This Is The Chorus suggested that anybody could get a top ten hit with this sort of superficial, anodyne pap. Except that, actually, they couldn’t. Unlike any of the 38 songs on the trio’s newly-released Gold anthology, This Is The Chorus barely charted.

Understandably, Stock, Aitken & Waterman like to be reminded about the barbs of their detractors. Far from muting them, the criticisms gave them extra focus. Mel & Kim’s

Respectable was written after the trio failed to make the shortlist for the Best Producer award at that year’s Brits. In a typically bullish retaliation, Waterman took out an ad in industry bible Music Week, which read, “You can love us. You can hate us. But you’ll never change us. We ain’t ever gonna be respectable.” By merging Waterman’s ad with some quotes attributed to them in a hostile NME interview, Stock and Aitken came up with a song to which even their critics ceded grudging respect.

Inspiration, they say, was taken from anything and everything. “It had to be that way, because the turnover of songs was so quick,” says Matt Aitken, a bluff Lancastrian who, prior to meeting Waterman, spent the early 80s performing in pubs alongside Stock. On the day that Kylie Minogue arrived to record he debut single, Waterman had forgotten to tell his colleagues that she was due in. With Rick Astley, Bananarama and Samantha Fox also in to record singles, Stock and Aitken asked her to go for a coffee and return in forty minutes – just long enough for them to write I Should Be So Lucky. Bananarama’s Love In The First Degree was a title stolen from an old country song.  Stock remembers that the spur for Astley’s debut single Never Gonna Give You Up was a gold disc of an identically-named song by Musical Youth which Waterman had produced five years previously.

It was Astley, of course, who finally gave Stock Aitken & Waterman a profile across the Atlantic. Months before, a prominent placing for Mel & Kim’s Showing Out in Eddie Murphy flick Coming To America had the song poised to break the US. But when the record appeared showing two sisters of mixed race on the sleeve, Waterman recalls that neither black or white radio stations would go near it: “By the time Rick came along, we learned from our mistake. We didn’t have a picture of him on the sleeve.” Within ten months of leaving the family home in Lancashire and becoming the trio’s tea boy, Astley had given Stock, Aitken & Waterman their first American number one.

Spend long enough talking to Stock, Aitken and Waterman and – slowly but surely – an internal dynamic begins to emerge. In a previous century, you can imagine Stock and Aitken as chemists busily concocting their lucrative miracle cure-all, while the silver-haired Waterman donned blazer, straw hat and unleashed the patter to passers-by. Though Waterman’s lack of musical input prompted stinging words in Mike Stock’s 2004 memoir The Hit Factory – the two “proper musicians” spent the 1990s struggling to repeat the success of their late 80s imperial phase without Waterman’s populist touch.

“I’m a DJ,” explains Waterman, wielding his club sandwich like a weapon, “When you’ve been deejaying as long as I have, you know what works. If students were so upset by those Kylie records, well… it wasn’t anything I hadn’t seen before. I used to deejay to students over thirty years ago. I remember the first time I played Stevie Wonder’s Superstition and people were up in arms. Up! In! Arms! Can you imagine that? People talk about Motown in hallowed terms, but back in the 60s, it used to be known as Toytown.”

“Wherever you go, you always have to contend with perception problems,” says former double glazing salesman Mike Stock – these days, mercifully rid of the Loadsamoney highlights which sat atop his younger barnet. “In America it was the colour of Mel & Kim’s skin. In Britain, it was unthinkable that we could put our names to a record that was actually cool.” Most incredibly successful producers might have cackled contentedly to themselves as they threw another wad into the hearth. Stock, Aitken & Waterman took no small delight in teasing their persecutors. All of which brings us to Roadblock. Released shortly after M/A/R/R/S hared up the charts with Pump Up The Volume, this was the sought-after white label that blazed a trail across the clubs of Britain. NME raved about it. DJs loved it. Then, it came out – with “Stock Aitken & Waterman” emblazoned across the sleeve. “We weren’t trying to fool the public, you understand,” explains Stock drily, “We were trying to cock a snook to critics who were forever telling us how bad we were. So we thought we’d make something they’d like. And, um, forget to tell them it was us. Ha ha!”

In fairness, it must be added that – along with the Kylies, the Astleys and the Bananaramas – there were singles for which Stock Aitken & Waterman deserved all the ripe tomatoes the nation could throw at them. Despite her constant availability for reality TV shows, supermarket openings and, probably, children’s parties, no sane organism on the planet has yearned to revisit Londis Cilla schtick of Sonia. The absence of Sinitta has yet to make a single heart grow fonder. As for Cliff Richard’s I Just Don’t Have The Heart – well, it just didn’t have a tune. Waterman admits that there were problems when it came to doing The Peter Pan Of Pop™ justice. “The difficulty with us and Cliff,” explains Stock, “was that every song with which Cliff’s had a hit has first been played to his milkman. But we don’t have time to make demos, so Pete was cast in the role of persuader – getting him to come in and record the song without having heard it. I think he told him the cassette deck was broken.”

As with all successful songwriting teams, Stock Aitken & Waterman’s golden era began to loom more behind than in front of them. Having been able to keep his critics at arms length, Waterman bitterly notes that by 1990, the dissenting voices could be heard within his own record company. For that year’s Rhythm Of Love album, a maturing Kylie Minogue expressed an interest in working with Madonna collaborator Stephen Bray. Waterman didn’t agree with her choice although he reserves his harshest words for her management who, he alleges, were reluctant to include any of the trio’s songs on her album.

It’s worth pointing out here, that the quartet of S/A/W tunes that did make it onto the record – What Do I Have To Do?,  Shocked, Step Back In Time and Better The Devil You Know – number among the finest pop songs of the era. As last hurrahs go, those songs took some beating. But in a world about to be swamped by grunge and Britpop, Stock Aitken & Waterman quickly became an anachronism. While Waterman gave us Steps and Stock helped mastermind the rise of Robson & Jerome, Kylie foundered.

Presumably, the trio kept tabs on Kylie’s plummeting career as she yielded to the whims of postmodern Hoxtonites on The Impossible Princess? That must have surely hurt? Pete Waterman is nothing if not philosophical about the singer’s Weird Years: “Well, if Kylie wants to be Kylie, you have to let her. It’s all part of growing up, isn’t it?”

As they’re quick to point out, it’s all water under the bridge now. The trio saw Kylie before she left for Australia to undergo treatment for breast cancer. While doing so, the trio found that their hunger to work with each other had returned. Nonetheless, when Stock, Aitken & Waterman’s reformation was recently announced, the news caught many by surprise – not least because of the lawsuit which Stock and Aitken launched against Waterman over allegedly unpaid royalties. Though the lawsuit was dropped in 1999, a Mirror interview in 2002 depicted an angry Stock, enraged by his former colleague’s participation in Pop Idol: The Rivals. “Who does Pete think he is?” Stock was quoted as saying, “He’s not qualified to ruin these kids’ lives. He thinks talent is blonde hair and big tits.”

It’s a view that Stock appears to have moderated dramatically this afternoon. Waterman – with his impressive ability to spin an angle – says the merely feud proves that he prefers to live “in a world where honesty still counts for something. You see, we never had a contract. We only ever shook hands. But that’s not the way lawyers like to work.”

Will there be a contract for S/A/W/ – Phase Two? “No,” insists Waterman, “We don’t need it. We live in a paper trail society – but you know what? There’s [ital] still [ital] honesty in this world.”

And will it be easy to pick up where they left off fifteen years ago? In these pop-savvy middle-youthy times, where grown-ups are allowed to buy Sugababes and Girls Aloud records, what’s left for them to kick against? “Oh, there’s always something, don’t worry about that,” says Waterman. Then he waves over to the musicians in the hotel bar. They appear to be playing some vaguely ambient take on Andean folk instrumentals. “They’re our first signing. Panpipe Sonia, anyone?”

Racey: “A Showaddywaddy lacking a waddy.”

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I remember pretty clearly the day that Racey changed my brain so that from that day on, a little bit of my brain would be forever Racey. As a treat for being patient whilst going shopping with my mother, she took me and my brother Aki to Debenhams’ record department. We were allowed a single each. Aki bought Cool For Cats by Squeeze. I plumped for Lay Your Love On Me by Racey. To Aki, my choice embodied everything that sucked about having a younger brother. Punk had happened and, by virtue of being “new wave”, Squeeze were briefly affiliated to it.

With hindsight I can now see what Racey were. They were one last hurrah by RAK’s in-house songwriting magicians Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman. A dud Mud. A Showaddywaddy lacking a waddy. At least that’s how they’re fated to be remembered.

Thirty years later though, with that bit of my brain that will forever be Racey, I am not most people. I hear Lay Your Love On Me, with Richard Gower’s oddly pleading vocals and an organ hook that begs to be sampled and a Proustian avalanche ensues. Kept from the number one spot by Bright Eyes, Some Girls (originally intended for Blondie, triviaholics) remains probably their best known hit – and where, for most people, the story ends.

But my loyalty knew no bounds. I bought their only album Smash And Grab and remember feeling moved by the valedictory self-written rallying cry We Are Racey (“We are Racey,” it claimed, “And we move with the speed of sound”). But, as Racey’s stock plummeted, so did my local record shop’s stock of Racey records. I had to get them ordered in – although in pre-internet times, I’m not sure how I even knew that they were coming out at all. In theyears that followed, I tried to get into cooler music, but throughout this time, I showed unerring loyalty to Racey.

And, indeed, continue to do so. Written by Gower, their 1981 b-side Let Me Take You Home Tonight lives in the special box I keep in the kitchen where all my best sevens live – Fats Domino woozily reconfigured by a lovelorn pygmy from Weston-super-Mare. Bob Stanley likes it and he’s in Saint Etienne, so there. Convinced that their 1981 non-hit Rest Of My Life still had “legs” if covered by the right person, I sent an MP3 of my scratchy vinyl copy to Ronan Keating’s A&R man, and received precisely the sort of reply that A&R men send to lunatics. Fair enough, really. He probably passed my email around the office to general hoots of merriment. You’re probably laughing too, aren’t you? I know I’m not cool. But I am Racey. And that’s enough for me.