Hazell Dean - Whatever I Do (Wherever I Go) Remix 88

There's nothing like taking the bull by the horns. And this was nothing like it! I could have been slaughtered.After all there I was seated in the recreation room of Vineyard Studios opposite Mike Stock, one third of the All Boys production team of Stock, Aitken and Waterman which has put Hi Energy and ElectroDance firmly on the musical map. And the first question I ask him is how come all their records sound the same? Frank Bruno might have been punched out for less. But instead Mike Stock's eyes lit up in amusement."Oh, I see." The knife goes in there already, eh? And, thankfully, he burst into laughter. No primadonna paranoiac with an ego problem this one.To an extent, though, I meant what I'd said. In much the same way as it could be claimed that all those Phil Spector classics cut with The Ronettes, and The Crystals sound facsimiles of each other, so there seems, at first listen anyway, to be more than a passing resemblance between the Stock/Aitken/Waterman dancefloor sensations like Divine's So You Think You're A Man, Hazel Dean's Wherever I Go and Dead or Alive's You Spin Me Round. At least to a dyed-in-the-wool Rockist like me who doesn't know the difference between 'crucial' and 'wicked' and thinks a club is something you put your money into for Christmas. But then again, one man's similarity is another man's style. And Mike Stock, Matt Aitken and Pete Waterman certainly have style. And all the success to go with it they could wish for.Of course success is something Pete Waterman has lived with for the last 10 years. Ever since he spent 80 Jamaican dollars on a young Carribean singer by the name of Susan Cadogan back in 1974 and came up with a quarter of a million seller in Hurts So Good. A former club DJ who has continued to keep his ear closer to the ground than arguably any other individual in the industry, it was Waterman who recognised the potential in a young jingle writer called Peter Collins and helped him develop into one of Britain's most successful producers by wheeling and dealing and setting up the scenery while Collins took the applause for a whole string of hit singles by Matchbox, The Piranhas, The Lambrettas, The Belle Stars, Musical Youth, Tracey Ullman and Nik Kershaw, to name but a few. All good things come to an end, of course, and the two Petes parted company late in 1983. But it didn't take Waterman long to form another production partnership with another bunch of young hopefuls. In fact it took him no time at all. Such is the way Mike Stock tells it:"Matt and I had a 24-track studio of our own in South East London. We've been working together as a songwriting team and in bands and so on for a good three or four years and we used the studio, which was in my house, to demo other people as well as hone down our own ideas. But really we were pissing in the wind until we met Pete. We used to think all you had to do was make a record, throw it off the roof of Broadcasting House and you'd get a hit. But it doesn't work that way. Quite clearly we needed someone like Pete to tie the loose ends together. We started hawking a project around and he was the only person we met in the business who really grasped the concept, which was to 'invent' bands. We wanted to make records which were distinctive in sound, modernistic, and contemporary and then find people to front them afterwards. Nobody we saw in record companies could come to terms with the idea. They all wanted to see the band first!"At that introductory meeting was forged the links of a production partnership largely unique in the UK. In the All Boys Organistion Messrs Stock and Aitken are responsible for the sounds and the arrangements, the artistic and creative side of the process, much similar to the function fulfilled on the movie set by the director and the camera man. Pete Waterman, on the other hand, like a movie producer, takes executive control of everything else. He puts the nuts and bolts together. Which means more than simply the deal making and the costing. He has first and final say in the music too."Pete is the map maker. Or the route finder. He's the one who puts the dartboard up on the wall and tell us to aim at the bullseye. We have a meeting before we start any project and decide exactly what kind of record we're going for. Then we throw the darts. The way we see it if we've got a dartboard we might just hit it. If we didn't have anything there then we'd just be chucking them straight at the wall. Of course we have arguments all the time. But we trust him implicitly. He's very sharp. When we first started we used to try to slip things past him. Like we used to find the boom dada bass lines really got on our nerves so we'd put them down something with a bit more of a funky groove. We knew that wasn't what Pete wanted for the record, so we'd switch it out whenever he was in the room and try to sneak it back into the mix. But he'd spot it immediately. When we did the final mix of Hazel Dean's Whatever I Do it was technically distorted but Pete loved it. Now I'm not actually too technically minded, that's more Matt's thing, but I was worried about what the distortion might do for the record's chances in a high tech marketplace. So we did a quick remix while Pete was down the pub. He wasn't fooled. The excitement was in the distortion. So we have a theory now that white noise equals excitement. And you've only got to listen to Prince's records to hear how true that is!"It's only now, some 18 months and a whole string of hit singles by real artistes and real bands later, that Mike Stock and Matt Aitken's original dream of 'inventing' bands is coming true. Even as we spoke Say I'm Your Number One by Princess, the first release on their own Supreme label, was picking up serious radio play and shipping out of the warehouses into the shops. An R 'n' B Soul record with a funky groove, Say I'm Your Number One is far removed from the Hi Energy, handclaps and cowbell jobs with which the All Boys Crew made their name. Some might reckon such a departure in style to be a mistake, but Mike Stock believes it to be a definite step in the right direction."People automatically associate that brash, glamour Rock dance stuff with us because they think we can't do anything else. We've even been held responsible for Gary Glitter's last couple of records. Which is silly because we've never had anything to do with him."So how did they become so closely identified with Hi Energy and its variously mutant offspring?"The first proper production work Pete organised for us was Divine's So You Think You're A Man. He'd already had a lot of records out and so the mould was set and we had no alternative but to go along with it. I think we honed it down, refined it and made it more direct. It was all a bit wishywashy before. Hi Energy, as it was called, was a bit of a hybrid. There was a lot of EuroPop in there. We managed to cross it over to a wider market. Instead of making it cheap and cheerful as it had been done in the past we made it sound expensive and high tech and made a virtue of it. Pete Waterman is a firm believer not just in keeping abreast of musical trends but of the technology too. So we made sure the recordings were of the highest standard so that, in clubs particularly, when you wind up the volume, things will stay very separate and not suffer the usual distortion. That was just about the same time that Frankie Goes To Hollywood started and we got caught up in that whole thing."In 1984 the gay club scene truly came out of the closet and with Divine and Hazel Dean in particular Stock, Aitken and Waterman made one chart killing after another. But it was with Dead Or Alive that the team began to rack up real units. Not just hundreds of thousands but millions sold all over the world with the Youthquake album and its hits Spin Me Round, Lover Come Back and In Too Deep. And if band, record company and public alike were hugely impressed just imagine what the All Boys' bank manager must have thought as he forwarded them enough money to buy out the original owners of Vineyard studios and equip it with one and a quarter million pounds worth of the most sophisticated electronic recording equipment currently on the market.Digital is the order of the day, of course, and Stock echoes Waterman's claim that Vineyard will soon be the best-equipped studio in Europe and that it already surpasses Trevor Horn's SARM West set-up. He points to a top of the range SSL desk, a Mitsubishi 32 track digital recorder, the latest Publison sampling and harmonising apparatus from Europe to augment their family of seven separate AMS digital delay units, as well as the latest SRC SMPTE-based sequencing equipment which has rendered their old LM2 and Linn 9000 system obsolete. Couple that lot to the usual order of synthesizers like Fairlight, Emulator, and PPG and Mike Stock testifies to a policy of aggressive purchasing which, so far at any rate, is paying dividends. Creatively as well as commercially."We're not short of technology and we use it wherever it's applicable. But we still use people. All the members of Dead Or Alive were needed to make something like Spin Me Round. There's live percussion and guitar on the record and the original sequences came from the band too. Admittedly we put them into the Fairlight but that's only because we own more sophisticated synthesizers than they do. They're all singing too. The point about many of their tracks is that they develop in the studio, they aren't exactly written beforehand. Pete Burns often goes to the microphone with nothing more than a handful of phrases he's picked out of whatever books or magazines he's just been reading and it all comes together from there. I'm in charge when it comes to vocals and I usually record him with a Calrec Soundfield microphone and track him once. Provided you've got his interest and he's excited by the backing track then he's very quick. All you have to give him is a decent mix in the headphones and he'll do it from the top to bottom in one or two takes and we'll only have to go back to patch up a couple of points. Which makes him the most professional singer we've had to work with in that respect."I don't believe in putting a lead singer through hours at the microphone. And as for backing vocals I like to make full use of the AMS. The longest delay we have is 15 seconds which is long enough to store a whole chorus if you want to. So that's exactly what we tend to do. We record five minutes of music but make the last two just a series of tailouts of the chorus. We use those tailouts to build up all the block harmonies for one complete chorus. Obviously we don't need all the instruments taking up the tracks, just a guide piano and drums will do. That leaves something like 22 tracks to build up all the harmonies and double or triple track them if need be. Then you take them off the end and fly them into the AMS so you can then add them to your backing track mix at the touch of a button. Not only do you only put the singers through it all once, but you get a perfect chorus everytime and you can make capital out of it by lopping a word off, or using just a phrase or two in other parts of the song like the bridge or wherever.Well, spin me round and get me to the doctor!

Hazell Dean - Whatever I Do (Wherever I Go) remix 88

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