Mike Stock
Back on May 10, 1995, an executive from the peermusic office in Los Angeles, Brady L. Benton, was spending a few days in London on business. That afternoon, he made an extracurricular trip to Hundred House in South London, where Mike Stock and Matt Aitken had their offices and studios. Although the music publishing expert was an industry professional, he was also a mega-fan of the Stock-Aitken-Waterman team. While waiting to meet Mike and Matt, he was escorted into a room where the walls were adorned with dozens of gold and platinum records, mostly for the team s work with Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan. Overcome with emotion, he broke down in tears (of joy), just one example of the love and devotion fans around the world have long held for the trio affectionately known as SAW.
Music has become a key part of a queen’s post-Drag Race armoury . United Kingdolls. Photograph: Guy Levy/BBC/World of Wonder
If you’ve spent the past fortnight with the words “Bing-bang-bong sing-sang-song ding-dang-dong” reverberating around your brain, Freddy Scott would like to apologise. “To those who say they can’t sleep because they have UK Hun?
stuck in your head,” the songwriter says, “I’m sorry–ish.”
Scott and his co-writer Leland are the creators of the viral hit from the British edition of RuPaul’s Drag Race
. Written as a homage to Eurovision and performed by the show’s drag queen contestants, UK Hun? by United Kingdolls, with its earworm chorus, entered the UK Top 40 at No 27 last week, ahead of established pop acts such as Rita Ora and Pink. It beat the reality TV show’s previous highest chart entry, Break Up Bye Bye, which peaked at No 35 in 2019.
Rick Astley performing in his heyday (Image: Getty)
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As for his performance history, Rick has been in the business since the mid-1980s.
He signed with Stock Aitken Waterman, the songwriting trio known as the Hit Factory, at the age of 19 in 1985, and two years later he released his debut song and major hit, Never Gonna Give You Up.
In the subsequent few years of fame, his first eight singles were all Top 10 hits, with his focus on pop-inflected earworms.
After a little while, Rick moved towards his roots in the soul world, which was less successful, and at aged 28, he retired from the music industry after releasing four albums.
Baffled: the Pet Shop Boys
Credit: Shutterstock
It’s A Sin, Channel 4’s drama about a group of gay friends in the Eighties as the spectre of Aids appears on the horizon, has been receiving rave reviews for its humanity, heart and humour. But the Pet Shop Boys song after which the hit show is named can lay claim to its own dramatic story, albeit one that is more bonkers than poignant.
It’s a Sin was the second UK number one single for the deadpan synth-pop duo, often dubbed the Gilbert and George of pop. The song topped the charts for three weeks in July 1987. A gloriously over-the-top track that featured a NASA countdown, claps of thunder, choral chanting and quotes from the Latin Mass, It’s a Sin marked the peak of what Pet Shop Boys’ singer Neil Tennant would memorably call the band’s “imperial phase”. It also had one of the most catchy synth hooks of the decade.
Divine performing at Heaven in 1981
Credit: David Corio/Redferns
It’s A Sin, which begins tonight on Channel 4, follows a group of gay men in Eighties London as the HIV/Aids crisis comes to define their lives. The vibrant and profoundly moving series begins in 1981, two years after entrepreneur Jeremy Norman opened groundbreaking gay nightclub Heaven in the arches beneath Charing Cross station. For the show’s writer-creator Russell T Davies, it was a no-brainer to include a few scenes set in this fabulously cavernous space that was once frequented by Freddie Mercury and Boy George. “How could I not? This is gay London in the Eighties. Heaven was compulsory,” says Davies, a former Doctor Who showrunner who also created the seminal series Queer as Folk.