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Ever Had A Dream Come True?

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Fraser McAlpine | 12:45 UK time, Wednesday, 21 January 2009

S Club 7

Imagine you are one of the former members of a well-regarded (but no longer with us) pop band. You've had the dream ticket, where some of your hits are still being played and remembered fondly (unlike, say, A1), and you came out of a hit teen TV show, so a lot of people grew up with you, which means you're with them forever, sort of.

But, the pop career has come to an end - either because you were never really solo star material or you've already done reality TV and failed to endear yourself to the public at large (to say the least). So what do you do to pay the bills?

Well, have you thought about getting the band back together? It worked for Take That, after all. And Boyzone. Why wouldn't it work for you?

OK, so there's a slight problem, in that there are so many of you it's a nightmare trying to co-ordinate everyone's schedules (those McDonalds shifts can be a swine to get out of, after all), and your band had a number in its name which corresponds to the amount of people in the band. You can't go back to your last known name - which dispensed with the number - in case people think you're all back for good. So what do you do?

If you are any of the former members of S Club 7 who are not Rachel, Jon, Hannah or Tina, what you do is form a band for gigs only, call it S Club 3, and head out on the road!

That's right, Bradley, Paul and Jo are now S Club 3!

Look, !

Now, the thing you will notice straight away is that there is no point spending huge amounts of money on a flashy website when you are trying to make enough cash to keep the wolf from the door. This is why corners have had to be cut. Expensive things like videos, biographies (theirs are pasted in from Wikipedia), spelling, punctuation and words which are big enough to read have had to be left behind.

See what I mean? No-one in Team S Club can even spell their own catchphrase. Which is fine, really. Everyone makes mistakes. Except it does rather set the tone for whether this venture is going to be an amazing success or not.

So does this line, from their biog/mission statement:

"S Club 3 will not record any new material - they will perform old S Club hits"

It's hard to know whether this is intended as a reassurance, but it reads more like a threat. There again, the hits are beyond criticism - I'm not even being sarcastic - so we'll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Oh, and the final scary concept...there's a concert mentioned in their gig listings, in which Jo O'Meara - the principle voice on almost all of the big hits - is listed as absent.

It happened only three days ago, at Leicester's De Montford Hall. I wasn't there. Neither, probably, were you. But don't you wish you were? Imagine the announcements from the stage...

Bradley: "And now I shall sing part of the first verse to 'Reach', while Paul does the worm..."

And clearly they can't do 'S Club Party', as half of the song lists the members of the band, most of whom are missing. Unless they rework the lyrics in a fairly major way, of course:

"Bradley's doing Tina's dance
Jon's looking for romance (in Los Angeles)
Paul's getting down on the floor
While Hannah's screaming out for more (television work)
Wanna see Bradley swing, wanna see Rachel do her thing?

(Paul: "I'll do it!")

"Then we got Jo, she's got the flow
So she won't be able to join us tonight.
Wanna see Bradley swing again? Please don't hit us!"

I should say at this point that it is not nice to mock the way in which former pop stars choose to make a living. Not unless you've been in their position yourself (and I haven't).

And it's not as if 'real' 'proper' bands don't go through the same situation themselves, as anyone who has paid to see the two-thirds of the Jam who aren't Paul Weller will tell you.

But still, there is something about this whole situation which is upsetting, in the same way it would be upsetting to watch two of the former Teletubbies attempt to recreate the innocent joys of tubby bye-bye, while muttering under their breath about how much better it would be if Tinky Winky's success as a dental surgeon hadn't kept him from joining in.

Consider this a warning from history, the Saturdays...

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