Now that’s what I call music

One of the members of the government’s HS2 Growth Taskforce is remembering the first time he went to a gay club. ‘There was a club in Coventry that was only open on a Sunday night, at the Quadrant, and a mate of mine said, “There’s a DJ there who plays some fantastic music that I know you’ve never heard, so why don’t we go down?” It was a gay club, or a queer’s club as it was known then. I loved it. Oh, I loved it. I couldn’t believe that blokes were dancing with each other. The music was awesome.’

A few years later, in the early 1980s, he ‘lived for six months with a gay mate, and we were out at gay clubs every night of the week, but it was great for me because I was watching the marketplace from a punter’s point of view. New Order’s “Blue Monday” was just happening, and I was [thinking]: “Look at this, there’s something going on here.” I had a good four to five months watching the marketplace as an insider almost.’

This member of the HS2 Growth Taskforce is not, unsurprisingly, one of the great and the good of industry. It’s Pete Waterman, the record producer and songwriter whose songs — co-written and co-produced by his colleagues Mike Stock and Matt Aitken, and recorded by an array of artists of varying degrees of actual talent — were the sound of the British charts from 1984 until the end of the decade. Stock Aitken Waterman might have sounded like a moderately successful regional accountancy firm, but they were as all-conquering as Holland-Dozier-Holland, the Motown songwriting team who inspired their own brand name. They had more than 100 UK top 40 hits, including 13 number ones, selling 40 million records, and became millionaires in the process — 50 of the hits are gathered in a new compilation called The Hit Factory Ultimate Collection.