

They certainly did seem to like the records. "If they do buy them they are doing so not because of art but because they like the records.” "We make records to entertain people for between three to seven minutes, and if they don't like them they don't buy them,” Pete Waterman told me when I interviewed him, Mike Stock and Matt Aitken at Waterman's South London PWL Studios (aka The Hit Factory) back in 1987.

Producers Stock, Aitken and Waterman developed a massively successful formula for making pop records - and the story of Rick Astley's 1987 smash hit, 'Never Gonna Give You Up', is a perfect guide to the SAW assembly line.
