Paul was the first child of music mogul Pete Waterman OBE and grew up sharing two of his father’s lifelong passions – trains and pop music. He left his hometown of Coventry at the age of 18 to follow his dad into the music business, and became a key part of the hugely successful music production and song-writing partnership Stock, Aitken and Waterman.
He worked with some of The Hit Factory’s biggest acts: Bananarama, Kylie Minogue, Jason Donovan, Donna Summer, Cliff Richard and Steps. He was struck down with a brain tumour and died in hospital on 3rd January 2005 at the age of 33, just six months after he was diagnosed.
Here's Paul’s story as told by his father, Pete Waterman OBE...
Paul’s mum and I split up when he was very young so we didn’t live together but I would take him out at the weekends. I always asked him what he wanted to do and, somehow, more often than not, we ended up somewhere looking at trains! He loved them as much as I did, and it was something we really bonded over.
As he was growing up, I was working all the hours down in London and Paul’s mum was adamant he couldn’t leave their home in Coventry until he was 17. In actual fact, he was a bit older than that by the time he came down to join me in the business and he was a natural. Paul was a major part of the team and he and my other son Pete were both working with me. It got a bit confusing with three Watermans in the business, so I was Big Fish, Paul was Little Fish, and Pete was Roe, the fish egg! That’s how the joke went in the studios.
We were a very tight team, working six days a week, enjoying every minute, having hits all over the world and then suddenly: boom.
Paul was in his early 30s by then; work was full on and one day I got home, and he wasn’t there, which was unusual. The Sunday before we had been up in Manchester – Paul really ran things up there for us – mixing Donna Summer. I remember there was a strange look in his eye, I couldn’t tell what it was, but something was wrong. It turned out that he’d been taken to hospital in Coventry and then transferred to King’s in London.
At first it was thought that Paul, like his mum, had multiple sclerosis (MS). They even suggested that he had mad cow disease, but the reality was it was neither of those things. Paul knew he had an aggressive and incurable brain tumour, but he never told me and, because he was an adult his medical team had no obligation to tell me either. I know now that he had tried to take his own life, once while he was in Coventry, and another time while he was in hospital in London, but he kept things very private. He wouldn’t have wanted me to be distracted from work, things were really busy; the whole thing with Steps was kicking off, and he would have wanted me to focus on that.
Because of patient/doctor confidentiality I never even knew if Paul had an operation or any treatment. I did make contact with a friend of mine who was a neurosurgeon who said there was very little which could be done, and, in a way, that was reassuring. I know now that it is most likely that Paul had a glioblastoma (GBM), the most commonly diagnosed aggressive brain tumour in adults which has a devastatingly stark prognosis of just 12 to 18 months.
In Paul’s case, he died six months after he was admitted to hospital. It was desperately sad at the end.
They had called me and his mum in, and the doctor was saying we should take him home as there was nothing more they could do. That was never going to happen as his mum was too poorly to look after him – she’d had to travel down by ambulance – and then, suddenly, the alarms were going off. The doctors ran off and it turns out it was Paul who was in trouble, he had choked on a sandwich. After that he was on life support and his mum and I had to make the awful decision about when that would be withdrawn.
It was unbelievable – just two years earlier I had been at the bedside of his brother Pete who had been badly injured in a go karting accident. It was Christmastime and I was told Pete would be lucky to see the New Year. But miraculously he did survive and then there I was, two years later and at the same time of year to the day, sitting at the bedside of my other son, Paul.
It was bittersweet to say the least because I was being awarded an OBE for services to the music industry and it was announced just a few days before Paul died. I’ve never told anyone this before, but I guess it’s OK for me to say now that although I was sworn to secrecy by Buckingham Palace, I told Paul. It was really important to me that he knew because it was as much for him and the rest of the team as it was for me, we all worked so hard.
Paul’s loss still hurts and, in a way, I think that’s a good thing; it’s good to know you are vulnerable, to understand that you can be in good health but then suddenly it’s snapped away from you by a brain tumour which doesn’t discriminate, it takes anybody and for no particular reason.
When it came to the point that it was obvious Paul was near the end of his life, I spent as much time with him as I could. One evening, when we had been told there were still a few days to go, I said goodnight to him and went home and was back at the hospital early the next day. I was stunned to see that his bed was empty.
Paul had died and no-one had called me, not one person had thought to get in touch. That was hard.
Looking back now I can see there were tell-tale signs that there was something wrong. He became neurotic to the extent that we used to call him Pedantic Paul. He would get in the car and then get out again to go round the house and flush all the toilets; he had to check that all the plugs were out before he would get back in the car and then he would need to check again. At the time we thought it was just a phase he was going through but of course, in hindsight, it must have been something deteriorating in his brain.
I have taken on this job as Patron of Brain Tumour Research because nobody should have to go through this. We have seen massive moves forward in medicine and in cancer care; we have modern technology and somehow, we can spend a fortune on bombing each other yet we can’t spend as much as we need to on making the advances we so desperately need in this area. That’s just lunacy.
Pete Waterman
November 2024
One in three people in the UK knows someone affected by a brain tumour. This disease is indiscriminate; it can affect anyone at any age. What’s more, brain tumours continue to kill more children and adults under the age of 40 than any other cancer yet, to date, just 1% of the national spend on cancer research has been allocated to this devastating disease since records began in 2002.
Brain Tumour Research is determined to change this.
If you have been touched by Paul’s story, you may like to make a donation via www.braintumourresearch.org/donate or leave a gift in your will via www.braintumourresearch.org/legacy
Together we will find a cure