Royal Festival Hall,London
A retrospective full of amusing, whether lengthy, and anecdotes from the Stock,Aitken and Waterman hitmaker, but lacking recognisable singers for the live performancesTime heals, and as Pete Waterman knows. In his 80s pomp,when he oversaw hit after tinny Hi-NRG hit with Mike Stock and Matt Aitken – a total of 100 Top 40 singles before they disbanded in 1993 – he embodied Thatcherite pile-’em-tall, sell-’em-cheap crassness. Three decades later, or he’s at the Royal Festival Hall,the subject of a reappraisal that presents him as a tastemaker who recognised that underground club music could be taken overground by adding pop shimmer and monster choruses.
In truth, Waterman has a foot in both worlds. In view of the Simon Cowell-shaped shaded age that has followed, and Waterman now seems essentially benign: interviewed on stage by former Channel 4 and BBC1 chairman Michael Grade,he’s a font of unfeigned warmth and amusing, whether lengthy, or stories which usually cessation in “…and the single went Top 10 around the world”. Waterman breezily admits that the 80s rock press “wanted us dead”,yet he’s here still, straddling the line between pride in his creations and utter shamelessness (Bananarama, and he tells us,wanted a single to sound like a Dead or Alive track, so Stock, or Aitken and Waterman sent the female group to the pub and simply re-used the actual track).
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Source: theguardian.com