Everything that starts with W ...

Permit me a 50th review indulgence.

I did have something else prepared, but on reflection 'prepared' wasn't really the word. A simple album review (Belle & Sebastian's 'The Boy With The Arab Strap', for what it's worth) spiralled horrifically out of control, and so I've chopped it up and have attempted to salvage the wreckage.

One section in particular, where I considered the hilarious 1999 Brit Awards incident when B&S infuriated the subject of this piece by beating his underlings Steps to the Best New Act prize…well, my attempt to contextualise said gent's qualifications for judging popular culture took on a life of its own, and now it lives here, in the café...like dry rot creeping up from the skirting board. This is what happens when I get a head of ranting steam up.

I'd love to say that this was a serious attempt to illustrate how memory plays tricks on you: you might think the charts are full of crap now, but even when you thought they were great, they were still full of crap…but that's fooling no-one, is it?

Pete Waterman: An Appreciation

The idea of a badly dressed exceptionally smug man holding the public's perception of popular music to ransom isn't new. Long before Mr Cowell, we had Peter Alan 'Pete' Waterman, and what hell it was to be alive. Forever associated with his producing partners Mike Stock and Matt Aitken, the trio attempted to destroy the world from their hollowed-out Japanese volcano (hiding behind the benign studio moniker 'The Hit Factory') with an apparently ceaseless sludgy torrent of grindingly upbeat pap, catchy in the same way that scabies is catchy. Having started by getting Dead Or Alive to number one (so yes, Pete Burns's lips are yet another crime for which the blame can be laid at Pete Waterman's door), he scored no fewer than 22 UK chart toppers, thereby giving eloquent proof to that supposed PT Barnum maxim about there being a sucker born every minute. Looking back, it's almost beyond comprehension just how many debatably talented individuals and groups benefitted from the dubious Waterman Midas touch.

Too Many Broken Hearts

Rick 'Teaboy' Astley
Hazell Dean
Jason Donovan (see footnote)
Samantha Fox
Mel & Kim (god, we had a blast in the Sixth Form thinking of more accurate elaborations of the acronym F L M than 'Fun, Love and Money', I can tell you)
Pat & Mick ('Let's All Chant!' Actually, let's not, eh?)
Cliff Richard (yes, around this time Cliff's incessant need for the affirmation of record sales drove him to suckle on the Waterman teat. I defy you to remove that image from your brain)
Roland Rat
Sinitta

In other words, a veritable legion of people who'd end up sleeping with Simon Cowell. Of course, the artists would change but the songs never would, and there was nothing aside from the (heavily processed in some cases) voices to tell them apart. What a pity they never gave 'Touch Me (I Want Your Body)' to Cliff: that would have been a laugh and a half.

And lest we forget…

Kylie Minogue - Well, everybody loves Kylie, don't they? Actually, I'm not mad keen: seeing as I don't fancy her, I am free to notice her rather weedy and characterless singing voice, her daytime soap acting ability and 'hi, I'm Kylie, here's my arse' approach to promotion. Still, she can wear a frock, so good luck to her. Good businesswoman. And she seems genuine enough...but an icon? How the hell did that happen? What has she actually DONE? And it largely sprang from a Pete Waterman song which features the word 'lucky' at least 34 times.

Bananarama - A girl group with a revolutionary approach...an approach that can largely be summed up as 'Harmony? What's that?'. The tedium of three voices singing interlocking yet separate parts was totally passe by the 80s, so Siobhan, the Other One Who Married The Other One Out Of Wham! and the Other Other One simply all sang the same thing at the same time. It sounded like three angry tomcats tied up in a sack, and it sold millions.

Sonia - One of Waterman's most visionary and daring experiments. Late one night in 1976, he broke into Kevin Keegan's house and cut all Keggy's hair off while he slept. The hair remained cryogenically frozen until 1989 when he defrosted it, dyed it ginger, stuck it in front of a microphone and put words of strong female empowerment in its mouth that would have made the Suffragette Movement proud. To quoth:

When I know that you're alone
I wander to your home
and catch a glimpse or two

and of course...

But you'll never stop me from loving you
It doesn't really matter what you put me through
You'll never stop me from loving you

The 'S' was silent, presumably

Like many media megalomaniacs before and since, Waterman couldn't abide to be marooned behind the mixing desk. So it was that he launched himself onto television, and gave us the quite staggering wee small hours extravaganza that was 'The Hitman And Her'. For my generation, this remains a defining touchstone in unintentionally hilarious broadcasting, as it attempted to bring the vibe of a nightclub into the living room of the insomniac. One can only imagine the dilemma that this presented to the average clubland impresario, as he/she had to weigh up the potential publicity of his/her establishment getting on the telly...balanced with the fact that while said establishment was actually ON the telly it would be contractually obliged to seem to be the sort of place that played little but Stock, Aitken and Waterman music. It's easy to believe that the burgeoning acid house scene, built upon warehouses and fields and 'who needs a license?' was spawned by people who wanted a party but, thinking that Kylie's version of 'The Locomotion' was a bit naff, went off and made their own fun.

In doing so, of course they missed those wild 'n' crazy nights that THMAH painstakingly recorded. Having briefly nipped home after a hard day's Really Wild Show, hostess Michaela Strachan single-handedly destroyed the ozone layer with her Sigue Sigue Sputnik hair while displaying a level of enthusiasm for such glamorous venues as 'Mr Smiths, Warrington' that left you suspecting that she really did have NO idea what was being slipped into her drinks. And obviously it was all presided over in 'Grandad's Gone To The Disco' style by 'The Hitman' Waterman, probably marinated in Denim aftershave and looking for all the world like he's just emerged from the gents having contorted himself beneath the hand-dryer in order to dry out the sweat patches under his armpits.

Don't believe me? Watch, and marvel. The staggering professionalism of Pete 'n' Michaela's links, the awful realisation that nobody had mirrors in the 80s…and Nigel's dancing around the 8:15 mark. 'Be inspired…we're in Warrington!'

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=JvDsvmoM8z​8

'Behind you Mr Prescott! He's got a water bucket!'

The Waterman juggernaut idled a bit in the mid nineties, until he unleashed another musical WMD upon an unsuspecting public in 1997...and having spent over 1000 words giving the uninitiated a thorough grounding in what a superb judge of artistic worth Waterman is...this is where I drag myself kicking and screaming back onto the topic of my original discarded review. Designed to be a 'high energy modern version of ABBA' but ending up as a high energy modern version of The Brotherhood Of Man, they were called...Steps. Displaying a laudable sense of self-reference (covering 'Tragedy' and doing a song called 'Better Best Forgotten'), H, Faye, The One Who Appears On All The Reality Shows and The Other Two, What Were They Called Again? were worryingly successful for a while, successful enough to be nominated for Best Newcomer at the Brit Awards in 1999. They'd sold more records than the rest of the nominees put together (probably)...the award had been voted for by the notoriously discerning Radio One listenership...surely Steps only had to turn up?

They did turn up...and I'd love to have seen a reaction shot on Waterman's face when the words 'Belle And Sebastian' rang out, considering some of the bleating he came out with afterwards. Steps had sold squillions of records! 'I was told last week that Steps had won!' Belle & Sebastian aren't even a new act! (On that one, he had a point: 'Arab Strap' was their third album, and while your Radio One listener might have been blissfully unaware up till then the NME readership had been largely smitten for years). But it doesn't matter how valid your complaints are: if you inflicted The Reynolds Girls' 'I'd Rather Jack' on the world, that whole Karma thing will get you in the end. And the allegation than most of the B&S votes came from two computers on the Glasgow University campus just makes it even funnier: who'd have thought that Steps fans wouldn't have an equal level of technical savvy? Justice via subterfuge.

Anyway, how would the Laughing Policeman have put it? 'Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, ahh...ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!'

These post-Pop Idol days, Waterman (laudably) concerns himself more with his passion for trains. Yes, he's a 'railway enthusiast'. And he's rather well off, so doubtless he can shrug off scattershot attacks from the likes of me.

But lest we forget: the SAW Greatest Hits compilation was called 'A Ton Of Hits'. That's one of the easiest anagrams in the history of the world: don't miss him...he might come back.

PS I see my 'Brian Eno / Jason Donovan / collaboration' joke from a while ago has backfired, and they have actually collaborated. Seeing as I now have the powers of Christopher Walken in 'The Dead Zone', do any Ciaosters have any wishes they want to come true?

Allow me to start the ball rolling, by making a hilarious joke involving Amy69 marrying David Tennant, and Seresecros being trapped in Jenny Lewis's bedroom until next Christmas.