Showing posts with label S Club 7. Show all posts
Showing posts with label S Club 7. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 19, 2023

Reach for the Stars: 1996–2006: Fame, Fallout and Pop’s Final Party by Michael Cragg (Nine Eight Books 2023)




Spoken-word intro

I’m going to start with a confession. As a closeted teenager in the early ’00s I did some things I am ashamed of. I went to see the Libertines. I was a fan of post-Kid A Radiohead. I once went to Ireland to see Travis only to be hit on the head by warm beer and, at one point, an inflatable armchair. For a while, I thought hiding in indie music would help me keep my secret for a bit longer when in fact it just fed my covert obsession; glorious, shiny, ludicrous pop. I’d secretly gorge on the Latin flavours of ‘Spice Up Your Life’ or get a delicious sugar rush from ‘Don’t Stop Movin’’. Later I’d sit with my proudly pop-obsessed uni housemate and listen to ‘hard-edged’ ladband Five and the high street R&B of Blue, before hitting the local indie club. I’d carelessly align myself with the throng of NME readers trying to justify their love of Girls Aloud or the Sugababes via the prism of credibility (‘It’s pretty good for a pop song!!!’), when in fact I owned all their albums and distinctly remember singing along to the former’s pearlescent six-minute epic ‘Untouchable’ in a full-length mirror, willing myself to be who I was.

Perhaps because I only lived this UK pure pop boom – instigated by the Buffalo boot-stomping swagger of the Spice Girls in 1996, which is where this book starts – on the periphery, when I started writing about music as a journalist years later, I immersed myself fully. As pop shifted through the gears over the following two decades, taking in post-ironic synthpop, Lady Gaga, gloom wobble dubstep, drop-obsessed EDM and Billie Eilish-adjacent mope-pop before settling on a sort of generic streaming-friendly dance-pop sound, I often found myself harking back to the weightlessness of, say, Liberty X’s ‘Just a Little’ or Five’s ‘Keep On Movin’’ or A1’s ‘Caught in the Middle’. Like most people, this rose-tinted nostalgia – hey, this book is about the late ’90s and early ’00s, get used to it – ramped up as a pandemic-ravaged world went into lockdown. Gazed upon from a modern world seemingly on fire, this prelapsarian era suddenly represented even more of a refreshing change. A time before the threat of nuclear war, climate crisis, global financial collapse, social media, culture wars, Piers Morgan’s TV career, TikTok and, of course, the pandemic.

Saturday, June 23, 2012

The Next 30 Day Song Challenge - day 23

Day 23 - Your favourite song from 2000-2010

Haters are going to hate but until you provide me with evidence of a better pop song from the noughties than this S Club 7 classic from 2001, then all I can say is very short and not so very sweet: STFU





I bet you played the video all the way to the end.

Friday, October 05, 2007

Friday's Playlist #17

An ongoing series:

  • The Associates, 'Gloomy Sunday' (Sulk)
  • Cilla Black, 'It's For You' (The Best of Cilla Black)
  • Pete Shelley, 'Qu'est-Ce Que C'est Que Ca' (Homosapien)
  • Paul Haig, 'Heaven Help You Now' (The Warp of Pure Fun)
  • Bethnal, 'Nothing New' (Crash Landing)
  • A House, 'More Endless Art'
  • Madness, 'NW5 (I Would Give U Everything)'
  • S Club, 'Love Aint Gonna Wait For You'
  • The 1990s, 'Pollockshields' (Cookies)
  • Simple Minds, 'Film Theme Dub' (Flexi Disc)