Pop Music Production

Manufactured Pop and BoyBands of the 1990s

Phil Harding, Mike Collins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780815392811
  9780815392804
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351189774
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Pop Music
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Pop Music Production delves into academic depths around the culture, the business, the songwriting, and most importantly, the pop music production process. Phil Harding balances autobiographical discussion of events and relationships with academic analysis to offer poignant points on the value of pure popular music, particularly in relation to BoyBands and how creative pop production and songwriting teams function.

Included here are practical resources, such as recording studio equipment lists, producer business deal examples and a 12-step mixing technique, where Harding expands upon previously released material to explain how 'Stay Another Day' by East 17 changed his approach to mixing forever. However, it is important to note that Harding almost downplays his involvement in his career. At no point is he center stage; he humbly discusses his position within the greater scheme of events. Pop Music Production offers cutting-edge analysis of a genre rarely afforded academic attention.

This book is aimed at lecturers and students in the subject fields of Music Production, Audio Engineering, Music Technology, Popular Songwriting Studies and Popular Music Culture. It is suitable for all levels of study from FE students through to PhD researchers. Pop Music Production is also designed as a follow-up to Harding's first book PWL from the Factory Floor (2010, Cherry Red Books), a memoir of his time working with 1980s pop production and songwriting powerhouse, Stock Aitken Waterman, at PWL Studios.

1

BoyBands and Pop Music Culture

1.1 INTRODUCTION: BUILDING TOWARDS THE 1990S

Pop culture is a broad topic that can take in many aspects from the creative industries. The term pop art came into common use sociologically during the 1960s when Andy Warhol explored the relationship between artistic expression and celebrity culture from his ‘Factory’ studio headquarters in New York. Sociologist, Howard S. Becker, was a forerunner to Warhol on the theme ‘sociology of deviance and art’ but it is the legacy of Warhol that influenced the pop music culture from the 1970s onwards. Warhol’s pop culture consisted of collaborations in art, video and music. When I arrived in New York in the late 1970s his influence on the pop culture scene, including music, was still in evidence. I will use an academic framework around Pierre Bourdieu’s arguments in Distinction (1984) and commentary on the value problem (high and low culture) in cultural studies by academics, such as Simon Frith (1996), to uncover how social constructionism created the BoyBand phenomenon in the 1990s. In terms of high and low pop music culture, my subject falls into the latter category yet still generates its own cultural capital in mass media creativity and commerce. This chapter will discuss pop culture in terms of the music industry and will focus on manufactured pop music. Simon Frith (1996) states that the value judgment of popular culture ‘has been quite neglected in academic cultural studies’ (Frith, 1996, p.8). Twenty years on from writing, there is a wider academic access of popular music culture with many diverse publications, such as The Art Of Record Production: An Introductory Reader for a New Academic Field (Frith & Zagorski-Thomas, 2012), which discusses music production culture for academic study. On presenting the title of my PhD thesis to a number of colleagues whom I would consider to have ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu, 1984) in pop music, the name Larry Parnes repeatedly came into the conversation as one of the first entrepreneurial pop music managers to manufacture his acts. Music journalist, Matthew Lindsay,¹ offered these views of the manipulative style of music artist management that led to what I call the manufactured pop and BoyBands in the 1990s:

Going back to someone like Larry Parnes, a manager in the 1950s through to the late 1960s and a renowned gay Svengali, he had a roster of talent that he groomed. He changed their names, he styled them and they became something exotic; acts like Tommy Steele, Marty Wilde and Billy Fury. Then you had The Beatles; their manager Brian Epstein groomed them in their early days, he put them in Pierre Cardin suits etc and that made them a little bit more acceptable to the general public, a bit more mainstream as opposed to staying with the all-leather look that they had themselves. It’s interesting to look back on The Beatles because they developed into something so singular as themselves that you tend to forget about that first phase where he took a rough slab of marble and chiseled it into something that was going to be palatable to everybody. Then you go into the 1970s and you’ve got someone like Tam Paton [manager of Bay City Rollers] who was doing the same type of grooming with them. Then you look at The Monkees and they were manufactured as a pop group in the USA to rival The Beatles. But what really constitutes a manufactured BoyBand? You could even go to The Sex Pistols and their manager Malcolm McLaren; to some people they were a BoyBand, and their image was totally outrageous, totally staged by McLaren.

(Lindsay, 2014, personal interview)

Lindsay raises the question ‘what constitutes a manufactured BoyBand?’ and it is his view that the manufactured pop music culture started with 1950s British impresario, Larry Parnes, and could be applied to The Sex Pistols in the late 1970s. He suggests that they were also manufactured and groomed by Malcolm McLaren and could even be termed as a BoyBand by today’s understanding of that cultural label. I am going to argue that this style of management for the manufactured pop music genre is both prevalent and necessary.

In his book about pop music culture, The Long-Player Goodbye (2008), author Travis Elborough describes Parnes:

Larry Parnes, British pop’s original Svengali, dubbed ‘Mr Parnes, Shillings and Pence’ by Fleet Street, prided himself on his ability to turn out boy-next-door stars that British teenagers, evidently a nervy breed back then, could identify with.

(Elborough, 2008, p.176)

Appealing to British teenagers, especially young female teenagers and, importantly, pre-teens, has been the core market for BoyBands throughout the recent decades. Lindsay goes on to say:

There’s a good point to be made here about pop music because it used to be the underdog, it was something that was sneered at [in the 1960s and 1970s] which gave it a slight power that it didn’t quite have. David Hepworth of the magazine Smash Hits [1970s–1990s] said that the pop wars have been won [in the 1980s] and we now live in a pop world and pop has now got the hard task of learning how to rule. In the 1990s was when it changed – there’s something about pop music that gets the better of you, it might be trite, it might sound really conveyer belt production-wise and yet there’s something about it that you find irresistible and I think that we got to the point in the 1990s where it got very bland.

(Lindsay, 2014, personal interview)

Lindsay suggests that pop music was the ‘underdog’ during the 1960s and 1970s, not only in the pop culture media but also, I would suggest, in academic commentary. From a position of working with SAW at PWL Studios and being at the forefront of pop music ‘ruling’ in the 1980s, I would suggest that the ‘bland’ observation could find its origins within that decade and that the 1990s was a natural extension of that. I am not sure I agree that pop music became bland in the 1990s, I would say it was worse in the 1980s and that the 1990s dragged us out of that, especially with the Britpop scene, with acts such as Oasis and Blur. Lindsay’s comment about ‘conveyer belt production’ refers to the PWL ‘Hit Factory’ studio in the 1980s. In his book, The Art of Record Production (2013), Richard James Burgess refers to pop producers as ‘Auteurs’:

Auteur producers write the songs, play instrumental parts, lay down guide vocals, engineer, edit and perhaps even mix as well.

(Burgess, 2013, p.10)

The idea of auteur emerges from film-making in France and was coined by American film critic, Andrew Sarris, in the 1960s to indicate a director who is viewed as the main creative force and who has complete creative control over the elements of production. Burgess suggests that this type of music producer and practice started in the 1960s at Tamla Motown, with teams such as Holland, Dozier and Holland (who wrote and produced for The Four Tops, for example) and continued with producers such as Gamble and Huff (The O’Jays, The Jacksons and Teddy Pendergrass), L.A. and Babyface (Shalamar, Bobby Brown and Paula Abdul) and Jam and Lewis (SOS Band, Janet Jackson and Alexander O’Neal). Today, those auteur characteristics can be identified in producers such as Timbaland (Justin Timberlake and Rihanna), Kanye West (Jay-Z and Alicia Keys), Max Martin (Britney Spears and Katy Perry) and the collaborators they surround themselves with. My commentary on manufactured pop and BoyBands is focused on the UK and Europe as this has always been the main cultural and social environment where I have had the most experience and economic capital. Lindsay has further commentary to add about British pop culture from the 1980s that will help to lead us into the 1990s with comparisons to today’s pop market:

If you compare a 1980s Bananarama record to a more recent Saturdays record, you find that Bananarama made great pop records and The Saturdays just sounded too establishment [predictable and bland]. If you think about what happened with the explosion of pop in the early 1980s you had these artistic pop records that were huge; Human League, Duran Duran and Soft Cell. Pop music then was really edgy for a brief flurry of activity in 1981–82 and then along came PWL [1984–1990]. Then for a few years from 1990–93 it wasn’t cool to be a pop star [hence the demise of PWL] – then suddenly you get Take That, East 17 and you get Britpop [Blur and Oasis]. Neil Tennant of Pet Shop Boys would say; remember their song ‘How Can You Be Taken Seriously?’ – that was about watching Bros on the Terry Wogan TV show and they were saying ‘yeah, we’re about longevity’. I think with pop music – things happen initially for an act and they are explosive but it’s completely disposable. The brilliant thing about the Pet Shop Boys was that they didn’t seem to be trying to make you like them. In the 1980s, in their imperial days, it was like: This is what we are, we understand pop music, we’re incredibly literate in it [Neil Tennant worked for Smash Hits magazine in the early 1980s] and we don’t have to make you like it.

(Lindsay, 2014, personal interview)

This is one viewpoint that provides an insight into popular music values from somebody who has clearly been observing and commentating on pop music for a long time, in particular from the 1980s through to today. Lindsay has consciously followed Csikszentmihalyi’s (1992) flow mantra of immersing oneself in the culture that you wish to make your creative profession, internalizing the subject to the point that you become an expert who is in demand by the industry. This is something that most successful music producers have done throughout their careers and we can become unaware that we are subconsciously judging music with an industry practitioner’s ear all of the time. Another respondent with a valuable viewpoint of pop music culture was successful UK songwriter, John McLaughlin:

John: I think kids need pop bands; it’s a basic need. It’s what got me into music. I was 7 or 8 when my dad used to play the records on the radio and you see them on television. Now we’ve got One Direction and that’s got kids into music and I believe you need that. For me it was pop and then punk and I think a lot more kids picked up guitars and stuff because of that.

Phil: Others have said to me that at the time, bands like Bay City Rollers in the 1970s, were not called BoyBands, it is only since the 1990s with bands like New Kids On The Block (NKOTB), Take That and East 17 that we started using the word BoyBands. Do you agree with that?

John: Yeah exactly, at the time they were just pop bands or teen pop bands but ultimately we can now say that Bay City Rollers were the biggest BoyBand in the world.

(McLaughlin, 2015, personal interview)

McLaughlin confirms my point that the term BoyBand entered pop music culture in the 1990s simply because of the sheer numbers of BoyBands that record company executives wanted to sign, and were therefore manufactured and groomed by music managers and entrepreneurs to meet the demand. This point is excellently illustrated in the Channel 4 television series ‘Boyz Unlimited’ (2000) where the A&R executive is seen to be in competition with other colleagues saying ‘well he’s got two BoyBands signed and I’ve only got one, so I’ve got room for one more’. I agree with McLaughlin that ‘kids need pop’ but they will desert them once they can no longer identify with them, hence we see a continuing ‘factory line’ mentality in creating ‘the next big thing’. Longevity for pop acts now is less likely than it was in the 1990s as it is no longer part of the manufactured pop formula. Much of my 1990s pop and BoyBand production and songwriting successes were achieved under the guidance of creative music manager, Tom Watkins. Lindsay is currently researching Tom’s career with a view to completing his biography and has these observations to offer on Tom’s style of music management and attitude towards pop culture and the acts whose careers he guided:

What I think is really important about Malcolm McLaren and Frankie Goes To Hollywood (FGTH) is what Tom Watkins did with Bros, by comparison, where he took something that was squeaky clean and added some edginess and the frisson of outrage; and you could say that was something of a hangover from what Paul Morley [music journalist and ZTT Records A&R] and Trevor Horn [music producer and ZTT Records owner] were doing with FGTH. Just adding the feeling that it’s all a little edgier than what it really is. Even with ‘When Will I Be Famous’ Tom had to cajole Bros into singing that; I don’t think they wanted to do it. It was a bit Hi-Nrg for them. But then they want to screw with the formula too quickly don’t they? When Bros put ‘Push’ [their debut album] out and it’s huge and they start saying ‘no we wanna be taken seriously – let’s change direction, we wanna be U2’. Well the obvious answer is you’re not! You don’t have that credibility or sound or fans. So Bros made a second album that wasn’t really pop music; it alienated all the fans. With East 17 there was an element of rogue anarchy going on, like putting the dog [the East 17 logo on their early releases] signs and posters up around London and getting ex-convicts doing graffiti all around London and then putting the dog sign on the front of the record sleeve [to connect the two together] with no name, created an air of mischief and a little bit of iconoclasm that was a hangover from punk or something like punk; it’s mischief making. You don’t get that with One Direction. It’s almost like they’ve gone further back to the days of Larry Parnes where everything is sweet and clean – cookie color.

(Lindsay, 2014, personal interview)

When a band such as Bros behaves the way Lindsay is describing, it alienates everyone around them who have helped to achieve that initial success with hit singles and a successful debut album. We will see as this book develops that an identical story unfolds time and again with the manufactured pop and BoyBands I worked with in the 1990s. Tom Watkins’ cultural capital in pop music throughout the 1980s was a perfect platform for him to make what was essentially a comeback with East 17 in the 1990s. His company, Massive Management, had grown with previous business partners in the 1980s to a relatively large workforce in their central London offices, running the affairs of the Pet Shop Boys and Bros. When Ian Curnow and I met him in 1992 his central London office had been closed and Massive Management was run from his home address in Maida Vale with Richard ‘Biff’ Stannard, his new young partner and aspiring pop songwriter and producer. The important thing for us about Tom was his tremendous enthusiasm and the industry network around him:

Maurice Oberstein’s [former CBS/Sony Music UK Chairman] quote was ‘you don’t need the brain of a lawyer, or the brain of an accountant or any kind of established administrative figure, you just have to have an understanding of it and have the ability to appoint the best people to do it’. You need controversy, you need Sigue Sigue Sputnik, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, you need an element like when Bros came up and there was a perfect pair of twins and Ken the idiot who was the most successful one of them all.

(Watkins, 2014, personal interview)

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Watkins surrounded himself with major ‘players’ in the higher echelons of the music industry, such as Maurice Oberstein (CBS/Sony Records) and Lucian Grange (Universal Records).

Success in pop music terms could be measured in a number of ways, usually the UK charts for a UK act, but one important factor in the 1980s was success in the USA market. Nicky Graham, the songwriter and producer behind the Bros success, noted:

I remember when we tried to break Bros in America and we played Madison Square Gardens supporting Debbie Gibson and backstage half the Epic Records team turned up with NKOTB and one of the reasons Bros never broke USA big was because the label resented paying the money back to the UK when they said they could create their own BoyBand i.e. NKOTB.

(Graham, 2015, personal interview)

That gives an indication of the internal politics that existed with major record labels such as Epic/Sony Records during the 1980s and this continued throughout the 1990s. My own experiences of pop culture throughout the 1980s was somewhat colored by my time as chief engineer at PWL Studios from 1984 to 1992. Much of that time was spent participating in and observing the rise and fall of the Stock Aitken Waterman songwriting and production team. I had the opportunity whilst based at PWL to form a remixing and production partnership with Ian Curnow, an established session musician and music programer who had toured the world as MD of successful pop act, Talk Talk, throughout the ear...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Author and Editor Biographies
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction – Methodology: Research and Interview Questions
• 1 BoyBands and Pop Music Culture
• 2 The Business of Pop Music Production
• 3 Pop Music Production Creativity
• 4 Pop Music Songwriting
• 5 Pop and BoyBand Production
• 6 Pop Music Mixing
• 7 Pop Record Examples
• 8 Conclusions and Theories
• Appendix: Technology for Pop Music Production
• Glossary of Terms
• Bibliography
• Discography
• Index