Doing the locomotion

Pop guru Pete Waterman is an unlikely trainspotter, but the trains that dominated his childhood are just as important to him today, offering an unusual retreat from the pressures of celebrity,  as Al Senter discovers

There can be few figures who have wielded more of an influence over the course of British popular music than Pete Waterman. In the mid-1980s, as the lynchpin of Stock Aitken Waterman—the writing and producing trinity known as The Hit Factory—Waterman plotted the pop trajectories of, among others, the winsome Neighbours stars Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan. More recently Steps, the teeth-and-smiles singing and dancing troupe, became the latest chart-topping sensation created by the silver-haired Svengali.

Waterman’s contribution to the music industry was recognised with an OBE in 2005, and he has collected several honorary degrees en route from an impoverished Coventry childhood to multi-millionaire status. Arguably he is now best known as one of the all-powerful pundits on Pop Idol and subsequent television programmes that have blended the reality show with the traditional talent contest. Like a latter-day Judge Jeffreys, Waterman was dubbed Pete Slaughterman by the media for his ruthless dissection of so many showbiz pretenders. Now the hitmeister supreme has installed himself and his PWL empire in an opulent suite of offices and state-of-the-art recording studios quarried from County Hall, the sometime HQ of the Greater London Council that stands on the south bank of the river Thames.

The first surprise when one enters Waterman’s lair is the choice of reading matter that is neatly arranged on the coffee table in Reception. Instead of the expected copies of Music Week and NME, you find railway magazines, full of elegiac accounts of trainspotting weekends at Carlisle station half a century ago. Could the blunt-speaking, tough-talking Iron Man of British pop have a softer—even a romantic—side that expresses itself in a love of trains?

When Waterman eventually emerges from his office, he admits to an obsession that dates from his earliest days growing up in a bleak Coventry suburb during the grey 1950s. What lit up those monochrome times was the railway adjoining his home, a branch line that connected Coventry Colliery with the main network over which the sooty coal trains would rumble day and night.

“My grandfather would take me for walks and we’d stand for hours on the railway bridge, watching the trains go by,” he recalls. “Life was so innocent then. My mother wouldn’t be worried if I had gone by myself to look at the trains. But even in those days, it was the industrial rather than the romantic aspect of railway engines that intrigued me. I thought of the engine more in terms of the pure power that it generated.” Although he hung out with the kids who collected numbers, Waterman insists he was never a trainspotter. “My interest was entirely practical. Perhaps it was also a bit of a rebellion against my father, who worked in an aircraft factory and talked about aeroplanes all the time.”

One particular event crystallised his passion. “I think I was about five,” he says. “I watched them change the line outside my house. They were putting in a point so that they could take wagons into the Fyffe’s banana warehouse nearby. I was blown away by the sight of the 75-ton steam cranes lifting the immense point into position. It was the most exciting thing that had happened in our part of Coventry for years.”  In those days, he says, trains took you everywhere—to work and on holiday. “I still remember the excitement of getting up at three o’clock in the morning in order to catch the train to the Co-op camp at Rhyl in North Wales.”

The engines that lumbered past Waterman’s council flat were humble, anonymous workhorses; it wasn’t until he paid a visit to nearby Leamington Spa that he caught his first glimpse of the aristocrats of locomotion “in all their copper and brass”—the engines of the Great Western Railway. In the mid-1950s, the nationalisation of the railways was a relatively recent development and the different companies still guarded their separate identities and stations.

 “At home, all I’d seen were black coal trains, but here were beautiful green engines with fabulous names,” Waterman recalls. “Even then, it was the engineering side that fascinated me. I wanted to find out how steam power made the wheels go round, how the mechanism worked and how they made the whole process so beautiful.” Back then, every small boy wanted to be an engine-driver, he says. “The engine-driver was king. You’d have to wait until you were 50 before you were allowed to drive a train. The job had the same status as a doctor or a teacher. After all, driving a 640-ton engine with a thousand passengers on board was a hell of a responsibility.”

 By the late 1950s it was clear that steam’s days were numbered, and hundreds of engines were mothballed in preparation for their final journey to the scrap-yard. In an incident that could have sent young Waterman’s life on a downward spiral but which, ironically, hinted at his future success, the junior entrepreneur found himself confronted by the majesty of the law.

“The sheds were full of engines ready to be scrapped,” Waterman explains, “and they were being chopped up. I was just a 10-year-old kid. I didn’t know that you weren’t allowed to help yourself to pieces of wagon wheels and swap them at school.” Fortunately the authorities took a lenient view of his misdemeanour and he was sent to work as a Saturday morning junior in the engine sheds at Wolverhampton. It was there that he first experienced what have become twin obsessions in both his music and railway careers: painstaking craftsmanship and the bonds that create a working unit.

“Like the record industry, driving an engine is about motivating teams. A steam engine, in particular, is like a kettle that has to boil. You have to continue filling it up with water but still keep it on the boil. I’m not interested in driving it: what excites me is the fireman’s job. But it’s about working with the driver and managing the engine together.” And that, he stresses, is a “fine art” requiring years of experience. “You have to build up a rapport with an engine.”

 Waterman left school with no qualifications and semi-illiterate, both barriers to the engineering career that his passion for railway engines might have suggested. Instead it was music that claimed him. Throughout the 1960s, he arguably pioneered the concept of the personality DJ as the public gyrated to his eclectic choice of music in venues ranging from Smethwick Baths to Mecca’s grandest ballroom. His encyclopedic knowledge of songs from different music genres made him a useful consultant when pop groups were looking for fresh material, and the move into writing and eventually producing was almost inevitable.

It was the formation of the Stock Aitken Waterman partnership in the autumn of 1984 that marked the turning-point in Waterman’s fortunes. The new team’s insistent, trademark Hi-NRG beat resounded in every disco and would dominate the charts for most of the following decade. Now a wealthy man, Waterman could afford to return to his old love and at last fulfil some of his boyhood ambitions.

“Even when I was a DJ working very late hours, I’d go along to the Severn Valley Railway and potter around and help with the painting,” he recalls. “It was fun just being around guys who were trying to recreate a railway. I was in my mid-20s but the other blokes were 30 years older. They’d grown up in the 1920s and so they wanted to recreate that era, the railways’ golden age.”

According to Waterman, nobody really thought about preserving diesels in those days. But he wanted to recreate what he and his contemporaries had seen in their youth, not what their parents had known. To that end, he formed the Waterman Railway Heritage Trust—a body that has to date preserved 15 engines for the nation. He also owns the London & North Western Railway Company, which repairs and maintains these engines. Twice a year he heads down to the Somerset town of Taunton, where he once again takes to the footplate for a spot of fireman’s practice on the preserved West Somerset Railway. And it’s hard work, as he explains: “The line that runs from Taunton to Minehead is the hardest stretch in Britain—it’s uphill all the way. After a weekend of being a fireman, I’m completely knackered.”

Does he dirty his hands? “Of course I do. You should see the bathroom after I’ve washed off all the grime and soot and dust. I once booked into a hotel in Chippenham and I walked into reception at 11 o’clock at night, after a hard day’s work. You should have clocked the concierge’s expression when he looked at me. All you could see of my face beneath the layers of dirt were my lips and the whites of my eyes.”

 A new stage in Waterman’s fascination with the railways is Just Like The Real Thing (www.justliketherealthing.co.uk), a venture that sees him meeting up most weekends with other, like-minded “fruitcakes” to build models with the same precision he employed to conquer the charts in the 1980s. Engines, rolling-stock, station buildings and bridges are recreated to scale and to exacting standards of accuracy and period authenticity; the fruits of all this activity are displayed at model railway shows throughout the year and sold online.

But a barn on a 200ft site at Waterman’s home houses an ambitious magnum opus—a project that he cheerfully admits will never be completed. It is a recreation of the station at Leamington Spa on that day in 1955 when he was first enraptured by the magnificence of the Great Western Railway and its locomotives.

“It does what I want a model railway to do,” says Waterman. “You can’t see it all at once: you have to move around to get the full impact. Leamington Spa General is

on a curve and it has wonderful, big viaducts. There’s 14 of us fruitcakes in the club. We’re trying to push British railway modelling into the 21st century through the use of computers and modern technology.

“It’s all about teamwork and we all do different things. Take the scenery, for example: we need to find out how much grass would have been grown by the trackside or which species of tree would have been on site, and doing the research is part of the fun. We’re developing new techniques while retaining traditional skills. Most kids today wouldn’t know what a soldering iron is. But give them a piece of metal and it forces them to create something.”

Despite being in his 60th year, Waterman seems as smitten by the railways as he was in his youth, and is as integral a part of the contemporary music industry as he ever has been—the PWL brand now includes a radio station that transmits music via the internet. As a frequent visitor to the corridors of power, Waterman could surely take on the Transport brief among all his other responsibilities. Who knows, a blast of his Hi-NRG sound might even get the bosses of Network Rail, Virgin or GNER all dancing to his tune.