There are only two people who have written more – John Lennon (26) and Paul McCartney (32). This summer he co-wrote and co-produced yet another monster – the Weeknd’s Can’t Feel My Face, his 21st US No 1 as a songwriter. Since his era-defining smash for Britney he has barely let up, writing and producing hits for (among others) Katy Perry, Kelly Clarkson, N Sync, Pink, Jessie J, Ariana Grande and Taylor Swift – he has credits on nine tracks on 1989, including all five singles. It was released as … Baby One More Time.Ĭheiron closed in 2000, but its writers and producers proliferated, none more than Martin. The record company’s solution was to remove the words “hit me” from the title. Once again, the words were slightly off – Martin wrote the hook, “Hit me baby, one more time,” thinking that he was employing US teen slang for sending an email, oblivious to the overtones it had to native English speakers.
A Cheiron production, it was written and co-produced by PoP’s protege Martin Sandberg, the former frontman of metal band It’s Alive, whom PoP renamed Max Martin. PoP lived to see the Backstreet Boys attain international success, but died of stomach cancer in August 1998 aged just 35, exactly one month before the release of Britney Spears’s debut single. The Cheiron sound was melodic but hard-edged, fiendishly catchy, packed with drama and somehow sweetly hymnal, with the same total technical precision and happy/sad dynamic as their Swedish forebears Abba. Nobody knew then that PoP, whose real name was Dag Krister Volle (Dagge to his friends), would totally redefine pop worldwide by founding Cheiron studios in Stockholm, recruiting an array of songwriting and producing talent to create a hit factory. We had to credit the writers and publishers too, and it wasn’t long before I started noticing the eccentric name Denniz PoP (printed with two capital P’s), who had been at least partly responsible for such lyrical gems as “Keep it ruthless when I get wet” and “I’ll send the crazy wildin’ static”, to pick two of the oddest lines from We’ve Got it Goin’ On by the Backstreet Boys. Part of my job involved transcribing the lyrics of the hits of the day, which we used to print. A bout 20 years ago I started working at the pop magazine Smash Hits.