20 July 1989
Succession planning is tricky for any business, but especially a self-styled Hit Machine. Teen pop idols have a short shelf-life and high turnover rate at the best of times. Soap stars as teen pop idols are fine for when you want to jump off their existing public persona, but they tend to have distractions like acting, not to mention notions like independence and credibility. Either way, if you’re Stock, Aitken and Waterman you can’t very well rely on the likes of Kylie Minogue to be a successful pop star for longer than two, three years tops. You need new blood, fresh faces.
One tack for succession planning is to revert to first principles and core values. Before strip-mining Neighbours, SAW had played Svengali to young unknowns like squeaky-clean Rick Astley and cheeky London lasses Mel and Kim, with back stories such as “Rick the lowly studio tea-boy made good”. This was all a contrivance; you don’t stay unknown with a voice like Rick Astley’s, and he had effectively been apprenticed by SAW to learn the ropes so that he was in situ for possible future use. Likewise, Mel and Kim already had a manager and a record deal before meeting SAW. Still, the Svengali narrative suited SAW and our preconceptions: you were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar, Rick, when we met you. Don’t forget it’s us who put you where you are now, Mel and Kim, and we can put you back down too.
So, Sonia was launched in the summer of 1989 in similar fashion as Stock, Aitken and Waterman’s new discovery: a humble Lancashire girl who had buttonholed Pete Waterman outside a Liverpool disco to ask him for a break, he had a hunch she would be a star, and look how right he was! The alternative version is on Sonia’s own website today: her ‘biog’ tells how she was a stage school girl, had minor parts in soaps, and was already singing on the Liverpool club circuit when the SAW opportunity arose and she took it.
As for the small matter of the music, Sonia was a ready fit for what had served Rick Astley well and what was now SAW’s default setting: synth-ified, hi-NRGised northern soul; time-honoured and shop-worn tales of heartbreak and unrequited love belted out by a loud, large voice. And so we have Sonia’s debut single and smash hit number one, ‘You’ll Never Stop Me Loving You’.
For all her impressive vocal skills and apparent niceness, Sonia wasn’t going to be the new Rick or Kylie. For one thing, after two years of almost incessant low-quality product the SAW brand was pretty rotten; sure enough, ‘You’ll Never Stop Me Loving You’ is so formulaic that even on your first listen it already sounds familiar. Also, Sonia just didn’t have Kylie’s innate star quality, Rick’s initial novelty factor, or Mel and Kim’s cheeky charm to help overcome the limitations of her material. In any sense of the phrase, we weren’t going to fall for Sonia.
Happily, Sonia did have a career after SAW, most notably as the unwitting English enemy defeated by Ireland in the cliffhanging finale to the 1993 Eurovision Song Contest in Millstreet. Ironically, the UK entry she sang that night was called ‘Better The Devil You Know’: right title, wrong song. Turns out Kylie was sticking around into the ’90s, perhaps longer.
