YOU SPIN ME ROUND

 

employees some months, simply due to the cash‑flow situation. It was good that it happened in a way, because it meant that the people who'd just joined the company to make money had left. And those who were prepared to skip mortgage payments and stick together were rewarded with a subsequent bond that made the company much stronger.

 

In the end we got in a new MD, Dave Howells, and introduced some real financial discipline. We cut down on the money we spent on couriers and cabs and stopped people taking lunches that lasted all afternoon. If we were going to make the business work, we had to be single‑minded about it. What's more, we couldn't afford to waste the reputation as hitmakers that we were developing. Eventually, Tony and Eamon from the bank rang up to tell me they were coming down to see me. They said it was urgent.

 

1 took them to a very pleasant lunch. 1 wasn't panicking, but 1 knew the money subject was going to crop up eventually. Back at the studio Eamon finally asked, 'So, Peter, how do you think you're going to pay us back?'

 

1 told him about all the projects we were doing, but had to admit that we weren't actually getting paid immediately. Along the way, 1 mentioned a record we were thinking of putting out.

 

'Play me the record,' he said.

 

'What?'

 

'Play me the record.,

 

So 1 put it on. It was by Princess and it was called 'Say I'm Your Number One'.

 

'How much money do you need, exactly? he asked.

 

I told him thirty grand ought to just about cover it.

 

'You've got it,' he said and shook hands on the loan there and then.

 

He loved the song and so the only reason the business survived at all was that my bank manager fancied himself as an A&R man.

 

 

 

 

11 Respectable

 

THE PRINCESS SINGLE WAS VITAL to our development, and the story behind its release was, like so many of the pivotal moments in my life, a mixture of instinct and accident.

 

The Spelt Like This sessions weren't working out and we really were just banging our heads against the wall trying to make something out of them. I'd had enough of it all and 1 remember driving along the motorway on Bank Holiday Monday in the spring of 1985, deciding that we had to scrap the project. 1 rang up Mike Stock and said, 'Look, we can't keep on doing this band any more. We're just wasting our time. Let's be men and accept that enough is enough. I'm going into EMI tomorrow to tell them they can have the tapes.'

 

A few weeks earlier I'd talked to my old mate Pete Robinson at RCA. He had Bucks Fizz and he was desperate to do something with them, so he'd asked us to come up with some songs for them. At the same time another friend, Jack Stevens at Epic Records, had asked us to write a song for a girl called D.C. Lee. We'd been wondering what to do, but were happy that there were at least a couple of people showing interest in us coming up with something ourselves. Sitting in the car that day, driving down the motorway, 1 decided we had to force ourselves to take a chance. And the first stage was abandoning the Spelt Like This debacle.

After I'd told Mike we were going to give EMI their tapes and pull out of the project, 1 asked him and Matt to go to his house with Andy Stennett, a keyboardist we had.

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'Write some songs,' 1 said.

 

The next day 1 went into EMI and had a huge argument with them, but eventually managed to extricate us from working with Spelt Like This. 1 knew that we were in a hugely precarious situation. The EMI money was something we really needed, and the Allied Irish bank were going to be questioning all the cheques I'd written any day soon. At the same time, the girl that 1 was going out with had been seriously ill and needed to get away, so we went on holiday to Mallorca together for a week. A German publisher had offered to lend me a villa for a week and it seemed too good an opportunity to miss, especially because 1 was skint.

 

Before I left, Mike played me a song he'd written called 'Say I'm Your Number One', a song that we thought we might be able to get D.C. Lee to use. The brief I'd given him for writing it had been to come up with a song that girls could mouth at guys they fancied in clubs and then, if they were rejected, they could pretend that they were just singing along to the lyrics. One of the session singers we used was a girl called Desiree Heslop and she sang on the demo of the song. Her brother had come to me and announced that he wanted to release the record himself because it was so good, but I'd said that Desiree was only a session singer and had just been paid to sing on something we were working on for D.C Lee.

 

1 went on holiday for a week, spending all the time worrying about how we could make things work with the company, and when 1 got back, Willie said he had something to play me. But 1 had to promise I wouldn't fly off the handle.

 

'Why?' I asked.

 

'Well, it's something Matt, Mike and Andy have been working on. But you've got to give it a proper listen,' he said.

 

And he played a tape of Desiree singing 'Say I'm Your Number One'. They'd done a fantastic job with it; the arrangement was superb and the vocals were so brilliant, 1 remember actually seeing the hairs on my wrist stand up.

 

'YEEEESSSSS!' I shouted.

 

Later on 1 found out that all the other people in the office were either hiding or listening with their cars against the wall. When 1 shouted, they'd thought I'd hit Willie or something. But I loved it.

 

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'There's bad news as well,' he said.

 

'What do you mean, "bad news"? How could there be bad news with a track like that?' 1 said.

 

'Well, the boys think we should release it ourselves.'

 

'Absolutely, categorically not,' 1 said.

 

Everyone was shocked. They knew that 1 liked the record, so the obvious move seemed to be for us to put it out. That was common sense. But it wasn't common sense to me. We were producers. I hadn't promoted a record myself for years and the other people around me hadn't promoted a record in their lives. We had a hard enough job as it was trying to persuade the bank that there was any justification for us writing all the cheques we'd written over the past few weeks. Me, Mike and Matt weren't going to suddenly start a record company on our own.

 

Then 1 had an idea. 1 decided to get back in touch with Nick East, the guy who'd done promotion for Barry at Proto.

 

I had a meeting with Nick and 1 said, 'Why don't you form your own record company.' And 1 played him Desiree's song.

 

'I haven't got a penny, Pete,' he said.

 

'That's OK,' 1 told him. 'I'll sort it out for you and to start off, I'll give you this record for free.' He loved the track, so he was interested.

 

'Here's the deal,' 1 said. 'You start a label and license the track from me for free. And you promote it. But you've got to deliver the record, to really make sure it sells. You've got to give me the enthusiasm and commitment you had when you were working for Barry. You've got six months before you have to pay me anything.'

 

He said he had a name for the label: Supreme Records. It sounded good to me. So he agreed; he somehow came up with a bit of money to get things started, then a few weeks later Eamon from Allied Irish Bank came in and gave me the thirty grand loan on the strength of hearing the track. That thirty grand was enough to start pressing copies.

 

Desiree's brother Don had become her manager and was determined to make sure that no one took advantage of his sister. He used to sit in the studio telling us that the aluminium in mixing desks was contributing to the exploitation of people in Africa, things like that; but he was a big

 

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bloke, so you never wanted to argue with him. He also felt he could come up with ideas for marketing her, and announced that he had a name that Desiree was going to use: Princess.

'But what's Prince going to think?' I asked him.

'It's going to be Princess,' he said. So we left it at that. Desiree became Princess.

At that time the whole dance scene was driven by pirate radio and the buzz you could build by having records played on pirate stations. We wanted to exploit that, so we pressed the record on a white label 12‑inch and made it look like it had come in from New York. Nick promoted it to all the pirates, talking it up as this hot NY record. They all started playing it.

A couple of weeks later 1 got a phone call from Pete Robinson at RCA. He told me he'd spent the last fortnight trawling around New York trying to track down the people who'd made the record. He originally thought it must have been a Jam and Lewis record. It was only when he got back that he suspected it might have been me behind it. 1 admitted it was and he tried to buy it off me. He was surprised when I told him it had already been sold to Supreme Records, and so it wasn't for sale. In the past he'd known that he'd always have a chance of buying a track off me, but this time 1 was insistent that he couldn't.

Because of the promotion that Nick had done to the pirates, the record really started flying. Back then we used to have telex machines in the office and all of a sudden people were sending telexes offering huge amounts of money to put the record out in different territories. And I owned every­thing: 1 owned the production, the publishing and the master tapes.

The record went into the charts just outside the Top Forty, and we were ecstatic. We were a tiny little company, pitching ourselves against the whole record industry, and we'd made an impression. This wasn't like nowadays where you could just shoot into the charts for a week then straight out again. This was obviously going to start building into something.

But Don, Desiree's brother, came into the offices and started complaining. He seemed to believe that unless it had come straight into the Top Ten, we'd failed. I couldn't believe

 

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what he was saying; this was the most exciting thing that had happened to me! It was a dream come true. Matt, Mike and me; the team. And no one could take that away from us. We'd taken on the world and won. I had to tell Don that just because you didn't go straight into the charts at Number One, it didn't mean you weren't going to have a hit.

 

The next week the song had gone into the Top Twenty and we got Top Of The Pops. The day before the recording, Don came in with Desiree and said he had to see me about something urgent. He told me that he and Desiree were having a rough time. They couldn't pay their rent for the flat they were living in, and they needed a few grand to get their situation sorted out. By now Princess had sold something like 100,000 records, so they'd earn at least ten thousand pounds later down the line. I rang up Eamon at the bank and asked

 

them to put ten thousand into Don's account.

 

1 went out for the day and when 1 got back there was a blue BMW outside the office. I asked whose it was and 1 was told that it belonged to Don, Desiree's brother. He looked a bit sheepish, having dashed straight out and spent his cut on a motor, but 1 think he appreciated the

 

could bring about.

 

That record went on to really establish us. Wherever we went after that, all around the world, it became our calling card. It was the first independent Number One by a black artist in Germany, a country that Nick had given promotional copies to DJs in. No one had done that there before and it set a precedent. We sold loads and picked up awards all over Europe. It was the making of the company, because it was the first record that was just the team. There were no outside influences and suddenly we'd attracted a lot of people all over the world, who all saw that we were a team worth employing. In America, my old buddy Eddie O'Loughlin picked up on it and bought it to release over there.

 

So, not only did it make great money for us and bring together a core group of people at the company, it also established our credibility quite sensationally all over the world. Six months later 1 met Jam and Lewis face to face. They were with Janet Jackson, whom they were producing. Jimmy Jam pulled me over and introduced me to Janet; he

 

immediate success we

 

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1 WISH 1 WAS ME

 

said, 'This is Pete Waterman. Him and his guys are the only people who can compete with us. We know where they've stolen their ideas from, but they do it with style and take it into a whole new place.'

 

It was a great compliment from someone I really respected.

 

That one record was a statement that we were going to stand on our own and not worry about anyone else. it was the record that made Stock, Aitken and Waterman and we didn't care if we failed after that, because we'd proved to ourselves just what we were capable of.

 

We'd also got over the worst of the cash‑flow problem. By August 1985 when the song was a Top Ten hit, the royalties started to flow in from things like Dead Or Alive. Supreme was Nick's label, but 1 owned the master tape to 'Say I'm Your Number One'. 1 controlled the artist, 1 owned the rights. Everyone involved got paid and it was a very equitable deal but at the end of the day 1 took the risks and 1 called the shots. For the first time, no one could take advantage of me, because the money came directly to me. And serious money was starting to come in.

 

Early in 1986, we were approached to work with Bananarama. At that point the band was moderately successful, but hadn't done anything for a while. 1 was going out with their manager, Hilary Shaw, and she suggested we might be able to bring something to a track they were working on, a cover of the old song, 'Venus'. 1 was very keen to work with them because 1 was a fan of their music and loved the way that they were so obviously influenced by all those old sixties girl groups.

 

When 1 met Bananarama they reminded me of the Belle Stars. Siobhan, Sarah and Keren were three very opinionated, wild tomboy girls, with the same great image that Madonna adopted later on. They were very much part of the whole Soho scene and all their friends worked for the Face or ran clubs and stuff and they'd be out at every party going. They were the hardest drinking girls 1 ever met, and real mancaters ‑ in the nicest possible way.

 

They came down to our studio and laid down the track. It was all right, but nothing out of the ordinary. We always went

 

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