The 100 greatest UK No 1s, No 5: Dead or Alive – You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)

The UK production trio Stock Aitken Waterman (SAW) dubbed their studio the Hit Factory, and with good reason. Not only did it generate hits – Never Gonna Give You Up, Venus, Respectable and dozens of others – but the very sound of their records was industrialised. Instruments like the Linn 9000 drum machine and the Roland Juno-106 synthesiser were manufactured in one factory before being installed in SAW’s, the ersatz brass and strings becoming a new set of raw materials.

Pete Waterman had something of the cigar-chewing industrialist about him, too. “We make records to entertain people for between three to seven minutes, and if they don’t like them they don’t buy them,” he said in 1987. “If they do buy them, they are doing so not because of art but because they like the records.” He would go on fact-finding business trips, visiting France, Germany or Italy to spend hours sitting in his hotel room with pop radio on for inspiration (leading to some notable similarities). And like the car manufacturers of Detroit who influenced Motown, who in turn influenced SAW, each year brought an update of essentially the same thing. Kylie Minogue’s I Should Be So Lucky and Donna Summer’s This Time I Know It’s for Real are as fractionally different as two generations of iPhone, and numerous stars from the SAW stable each recorded the same songs: when music is this pristinely crafted, why mess with the formula? Not only was SAW’s music using the cutting-edge technology of the era, it was also embracing its free-market ethos.

The trio’s factory would upgrade to clean perfection in the second half of the decade – the way their chords chillingly resolve into minor keys is the kind precision engineering innovated by big pharma – but on their first and greatest No 1, you can still smell the grease, and feel the heat of metal on metal.

Dead or Alive had been going with various lineups since 1980, based around the commanding baritone and peacock glamour of frontman Pete Burns. Their only hit had been a cover of KC and the Sunshine Band’s That’s the Way (I Like It) – not a good sign – and the three tracks Burns had brought to SAW in 1984 were middling, according to Waterman. Dead or Alive’s label didn’t like the idea of the group working with SAW, and only allowed a tiny budget to record these three pre-approved songs. But the hitmen played them a new song, inspired in part by Luther Vandross’s I Wanted Your Love, and the sessions were swiftly rejigged to deliver a masterpiece.

You Spin Me Round (Like a Record) was secretly recorded while they were meant to be working on those other three songs. By the end of the 14-day session, Waterman said the band and production unit were “ready to murder” each other. It took a 36-hour cocaine-fuelled marathon to finish the song, and 17 weeks for it to journey from No 79 to No 1. But there’s a merciless, exacting energy to You Spin Me Round that would have got it over the line one way or another: it is taut, alien and utterly majestic.

SAW have said they didn’t want anything in their productions to sound like a recognisable instrument, an effect they achieve here with a dense thicket of synthetic matter. Absorbing influences from US and Italian disco, the new language for pop that Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder invented was now being codified, its vocabulary broadened and enunciated with the clearest diction.

In the video, the group appear tied up, mirroring the backing track: wriggling but rooted to the spot. Darting free is Burns. He is the core of the song’s brilliance, beyond the great technical prowess that makes his long climactic notes so euphoric. “If I!” he exclaims, as if sweeping back a velvet curtain, oozing confidence as he stalks the object of his ardour. “Watch out, here I come,” he declares, his playful flirtation briefly glinting with malevolence – only for that strident composure to crack. “You spin me right round,” he admits, flustered by his obsession but relishing the overwhelming rush (and the seaside postcard double entendre, hinting at deft sexual acrobatics).

Burns was married to a woman until 2006, but his androgynous beauty and gender-fluid clothing meant he read as gay. (He avoided any such identification: “I’m just Pete,” as he would later write in his memoir.) It all adds up to one of the great queer pop anthems, and SAW – all straight – were deliberately pitching it as such. “We make gay records, there’s no question about it and we’re not afraid to say that,” Waterman said in 1986. Their publishing company was called All Boys Music, and at the time their only previous hit was You Think You’re a Man, for the ragged-throated drag queen Divine. But after You Spin Me Round crossed over, its No 1 success ostensibly altered SAW’s ambitions towards the mainstream.

Their hi-NRG disco tempos started to slow, and while they still courted a gay male gaze with Big Fun’s pert jean-clad bottoms and the muscular dancers in Bananarama’s I Heard a Rumour video, now they concentrated on catering to everyone, from the teenage girls swooning at Jason Donovan to their dads quietly noting Kylie from behind a newspaper. Driven by the market’s most basic desire to see attractive people being attractive, SAW began almost exclusively using young, unthreateningly cute stars to front their productions, but crucially dampened down their sexuality. Kylie, Sonia, Rick Astley et al were so clean cut they could have had lucrative sliced bread sponsorships, and knowing SAW, this was probably mooted.

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Conversely, in the You Spin Me Round video, Burns is backcombed, crimped, guyliner-ed and sporting a glittery eyepatch. He hints at all manner of debauchery with a theatrical run of a finger under his nose and a lascivious stare down the camera. If Astley was never gonna give you up, Burns looked likely to discard you straight after you’d fixed him a bacon sandwich the following morning.

Although SAW and Dead or Alive worked together on another album (Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Know in 1986), they never graced the singles Top 10 again. You can never put artists of Burns’s calibre to work in a factory – the hair doesn’t fit in a hard hat, creatively speaking.