Andrew Eaton-Lewis: The Hit Factory was ahead of the curve in the invention of the pop star

The trio are back in the news thanks to Hit Factory Live, a concert in London’s Hyde Park this July. Rick Astley, Sinitta, Bananarama, Brother Beyond and others who owe their livelihoods to the once ubiquitous 1980s production team are teaming up to pay tribute.

It must have taken, ooh, 15 minutes to assemble that line-up. Nowadays the only place most Hit Factory acts are wanted is on the nostalgia circuit, and they surely jumped at the chance to play a big venue again, as they’ve been doing for years already at 1980s revival festival Here and Now. The exception is Kylie Minogue – who, at time of writing, is conspicuous by her absence from Hit Factory Live, although there are rumours she’ll show up to duet with Jason Donovan.

But then, Hit Factory acts were never expected to succeed on their own terms. They were expected to sing along to pre-prepared, identikit backing tracks and do what they were told. If they’d had any vision of their own they wouldn’t have got through the door.

Pete Waterman is fond of saying that lots of people hated the Hit Factory, and I suspect it bothers him far more than he’ll admit. I was one of the haters, and still am.

What I love about pop music is its euphoria. A fantastic pop song – Crazy In Love, Ray Of Light, Take Me Out – will make you giddy with excitement. With the odd exception (You Spin Me Round, Love In The First Degree), Hit Factory songs – and they all sounded roughly the same, regardless of who was singing them – were plodding, joyless things. Waterman took pride in pointing out how quickly they were written, but you never sensed that this was because they’d appeared fully formed in a transcendental rush of inspiration, just that they’d been dashed off in a “this’ll do” way.

SAW were pioneers, but not, as Waterman has been suggesting lately, of dubstep or drum and bass. Instead they were ahead of the curve in the invention of the modern British “pop star” – a singer trained like a dog (or, if they’re lucky, an office worker) to sing in a particular way, to a particular type of tune created by someone else, for an audience who just want more of what they already know they like. Nowadays it’s Simon Cowell, a man whose cold, ruthless methods make me almost – almost – nostalgic for the Hit Factory, a plucky little indie label so aware of how lucky they were that they wrote a song about it.

» Last week Andrew... got a bit obsessed with the new trailer for Prometheus, which seems to promise both the horror of Alien and the epic scope of 2001. Who is the strange scarred figure by the waterfall, dammit?