While indisputably living legends in the world of writing and production, look a little closer, and you’ll find that the career and reputation of UK super producers Stock Aitken Waterman actually rocked steadily between multi-platinum smash hits and umpteen WTF failures throughout the 80s, right into their parting of the ways in the early 90s.
While publicly always playing up to their hits and reveling in their industry-confounding success, they nevertheless could never quite resist trading a little credibility in exchange for an easy payday on the quiet.
So while their early work with Dead or Alive (You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)) and Princess (Say I’m Your Number One) are undisputed genius, and even their Neighbours soap-star milking exploits with Kylie Minogue (Better The Devil You Know) and Jason Donovan (Another Night) now rightfully get the credit they deserve, there’s more than a few projects in their portfolio that they’d rather keep on the low down.
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Yes, offering the mic to diminutive antipodean songbirds was by no means as low as they’d stoop and while highly-lucrative million-selling embarrassments with the WWF wrestlers, Robson & Jerome and The Power Rangers would finally help bring their careers to a collective close in the ’90s, the boys weren’t afraid to taint the well even in their heyday.
Rat’s entertainment…
UK readers, cast your mind back to April 1983. Britain’s breakfast TV wars were in full swing and, enduring audiences as low as 300,000 for their TV AM exploit, ITV were staring expensive failure squarely in the jaw while BBC’s Breakfast Time rival soared.
But programme director Greg Dyke had an ace up his sleeve.
That ace was Roland Rat, an irreverent, sarcastic, ‘did he really just say that?’ puppet character, created to cater for the early-morning, kids-and-young-family audience left high and dry by the po-faced competition. And following the introduction of the Rat’s mid-show interjections, the turnaround was remarkable. So much so that in 1985 the BBC captured the rat for itself, with a six-figure, no-more-early-mornings contract and his own Saturday evening prime-time chat show.
We’re not making this up.
Roland Rat: The Series, as it was ingeniously titled, would – of course – require a theme tune and given that the condom-eared, murine sensation had already released two hit singles, Pete Waterman was falling over himself for a piece of the action.
Thus Living Legend was born. Written and produced by Stock Aitken Waterman it’s a 30-second TV theme, a single mix in both with and without rat A and B-side forms, and a 12” ‘Rat In My House Mix’, and a record so embarrassing and buried that it not only doesn’t feature on the official SAW website’s discography it also entirely fails to get a mention in both Pete Waterman or Mike Stock’s autobiographies.
And considering its number 104 chart ‘peak ’, that isn’t surprising. In fact, if it wasn’t for the fact that we own a copy (of the single AND the spin-off album featuring TWO further original SAW creations) you’d be forgiven for thinking that we were making this whole thing up.
But the fact that the single was sandwiched in between SAW’s work on Mel & Kim smashes Showing Out (Get Fresh At The Weekend) and Respectable has made Living Legend an elusive talking point for SAW historians.
And there’s no mistaking that 12” mix – featuring zero rat input and new lyrics – as anything other than lost SAW gold.
