Time & Perspective Quote by Pete Waterman

Pete Waterman’s line lands like a backhanded pep talk to the entire pop ecosystem: a blunt admission of imperfection paired with a zero-tolerance policy for self-pity. The first clause is disarming on purpose. By conceding that not every record was “the greatest,” he dodges the myth of the infallible hitmaker and replaces it with something more useful in a studio: accountability. Yet he’s not indulging in confession. “I’d stand by even the bad ones” is a flex disguised as humility, asserting authorship in an industry built on plausible deniability, where flops get blamed on marketing, timing, or the artist.

Then comes the dagger: “Don’t make excuses, make hits.” It’s a slogan, but also a worldview forged in the churn of late-20th-century commercial pop, where Stock Aitken Waterman-style production treated the charts as both scoreboard and laboratory. The subtext is that taste is secondary; results are the argument. That’s why it works rhetorically: Waterman collapses a messy creative process into a moral binary. Excuses signal weakness. Hits signal competence.

There’s also a quiet cultural tell here: pop professionalism as anti-romanticism. Instead of the tortured-genius narrative, he offers craft, repetition, and nerve. Stand by your misses, learn fast, ship anyway. Not because art is disposable, but because the audience is the final editor.