0.2.2 - Who run the world?
If you'd told me a month ago that one of the first things I would do when I embarked on this mission to crush Ian Wang beneath my feet and cast aside everything he holds dear would be to listen to the entirety of the Girls Aloud discography, I would have been surprised. But life has a funny way of creeping up on you, and sometimes my brain takes me down a winding path towards a topic fully worthy of some kind of discussion, though a pretty one-sided one as I am doing all the talking and the eight people reading these blog posts can't respond. So, let's talk about Girls Aloud, a band I am sure most residents outside of the UK have a passing-to-zero familiarity with.
I'll talk more about how I ended up listening to Girls Aloud this week in the Sunday wrap up as its a set of sideways logical leaps that will take its own full article to go into - sufficed to say, I did so because I was thinking about the phenomenon of 'girl bands', and how it relates to today's more modern fixation on K-Pop bands like BLACKPINK (there's that all caps styling rearing its ugly head again) as the kind of universal idealised form of what these late 90' and early 2000's pop bands were doing.
But while without doubt bands like Atomic Kitten and Sugababes and All Saints (and the notable powerhouse absence in my listening, The Spice Girls, who deserve their own article in time) were record company products, constructed from willing and talented young women looking for a musical career, their assembly was conducted behind closed doors, out of sight of the public, appearing as a cohesive unit into the music scene, carefully styled and ready to become stars. Girls Aloud were that most despicable, most disposable of products, a Reality Pop TV Show Winner.
Perhaps the thing that saved them from the use-once-then-recycle career path of so many reality TV singing sensations was that their success came at the very beginning of that slippery slope; Pop Stars, the franchise which spawned them, was less reality TV show and more a behind-the-scenes look at the process of forming a group (or groups, in the case of PopStars: The Rivals, the show which birthed Girls Aloud) - there was no public voting, no audience participation. Instead, you were invited to be a passive viewer as groups of young hopefuls were whittled down week by week, while a panel of middle aged white men decided which of them best represented what the public wanted. Even so, the idea of showing the process of the sausage getting made, then still expecting the public to want it, seemed destined to consign Girls Aloud to the One Hit Wonder mediocrity meatgrinder which had chewed up so many promising musical careers.
PopStars only ran for two seasons, and produced 3 groups, before Pop Idol and then X Factor moved the focus to individuals, audience voting and the trappings of modern reality singing competitions like The Voice which we see today. Three bands - Hear'Say in the first season, and Girls Aloud and One True Voice as the girls and boys bands from the second season. Let's see how everyone is holding up, shall we?
How did they do it? How did a girl band formed from a reality show in 2003 have a decade long music career, produce five studio albums, and win a BRIT award? I don't have all the answers, but I can tell you from listening to these albums this week, one of the biggest reasons is probably that they consistently and unashamedly produced a series of incredibly fun pop songs that glue themselves to the inside of your cerebellum and remain lodged there for all time.
Now I don't want to come out here and deny the hard work, talent and incredible effort of Cheryl, Nadine, Kimberly, Nicola and Sarah, but they definitely got a huge assist from their songwriting/production group Xenomania, who has an mile-long list of successful pop artists they have worked with, and were the driving force for the songwriting and production of most of the Girls Aloud records. The combination of their writing, and the increasingly confident and polished performance of the group was truly a match made in heaven. Now, given what we have learned in the past about successful music producers who made their name providing hit songs for young women, let's give Xenomania their flowers here and then move on before I read something which gets them cancelled.
You could argue, and I will, that Girls Aloud were destined for success from the beginning. Sound of the Underground, released as the single coming out of their season of Pop Stars is just an incredible power pop song, and more importantly, sounds so incredibly different to what existed as pop music in the late 90s and early 2000s that it immediately stood out, and it remains their most played song. I'm gonna go listen to it again right now, you can't stop me, this is my article.
But even with this absolute monster of a debut track, the murky waters of obscurity could have claimed them at any time. Fortunately, the album it gave its name to had two other great original songs (No Good Advice and Life Got Cold) which showed some musical range and that they had more than one bullet in their gun. Their other secret weapon, employed throughout their career, was to reinvigorate and release pop and disco standards from the 1970s and 80s for their new audience, including a faithful (if fairly formula as covers go) version of Jump (For My Love) by the Pointer Sisters, and a version of Girls on Film which I really like.
Sound of the Underground went Platinum in the UK. Spoilers, so did every other studio album they released.
What Will The Neighbours Say? did much of the same thing as the previous album, sticking very much to the formula which had made the last record a hit. Step one, high energy infectious power pop song (Love Machine, still also a bop); Step two; faithful, well performed cover version (I'll Stand By You by The Pretenders this time); Step three, a bunch of album tracks which are fun and light and breezy pop but don't feel empty or meaningless; Also, this album and the one after are lets say more unashamedly adult in subject matter than pop normally is. They're not filthy, this isn't a Prince record, but Thank Me Daddy is a song all about how their Dad(s) should be thankful they don't know about all the sex and drugs and rock & roll adjacent activity they are doing, which exists in a self-defeating concept world shared with the Billie Eilish verse on Bad Guy where she says her Mum likes to sing along to her songs but won't enjoy singing her song about how she likes to domme people during sex.
I didn't own legal copies of either of these albums; the pop hits made their way via various piracy services onto my computer, but I was poor and fine with the morally dubious practice of torrenting music (whereas now I am fine with artists not getting paid for their music as long as a tech company is? Is that right?).
Biology I was given as a Christmas present by an ex partner who found it incredibly amusing and incongruous that I liked Girls Aloud songs but also, say, Radiohead and Slipknot. I think it amused her to buy this for me but honestly, I have such fond memories of this album. The album proper is full of songs I love, and again drives continually down what-worked-before lane with Biology filling the pop banger slot, a heartfelt cover, this time of See The Day by Dee C. Lee, and a second top-3 single in Long Hot Summer. Waiting also includes a verse about how their lovers shouldn't be intimidated by their sex toys, they are only there in case they are unable to satisfy them in the bedroom. Like I said, adult.
The incredible bonus to Chemistry is that it came with a second disc which is essentially a Girls Aloud Christmas album of mixed Christmas standards and a couple of original songs. I didn't listen to it as part of this exercise because its not really part of the main album (despite them being bundled together on Spotify) and because its January and I'm not listening to Christmas music, I'm not a monster.
Tangled Up I wasn't familiar with. The ex who had given me Biology broke up with me unexpectedly, an event which led to a cascade of increasingly miserable life changes in a short period of time which sent me spiralling into depression, breakdown, and lots of therapy (the mental health treatment, not the band). Not much room for Girls Aloud in my life at the time; so the last two albums I listened to for the first time in full this week, but I wasn't shocked to find there were songs on both that I knew incredibly well - I might not have sought them out, but their presence in music at this point was undeniable. I can't tell you where I heard Call The Shots, Can't Speak French or Sexy! No No No... (which, for the record, sounds incredibly like modern pop, vocoder and high bpm dance beat and all - there's a terrible exploitative hip-hop song just waiting to happen sampling something out of the song and I hate myself for willing it into existence). No cover version this time, and more of a dance beat to it than previous albums, but without seeming like a total change in style. It also includes the longest song of any album I've listened to so far, because the record closes with a near 40-minute megamix of every single Girls Aloud song as a kind of dance medley for a really hyper-specific nightclub. Honestly, I have no idea who this is for and what purpose it serves, but I listened to the whole thing so I had to write about it.
Out Of Control was the most distant record for me, both in terms of my emotional investment in it, and what I knew of it already. The Promise is another song that just invaded my musical knowledge unbidden, so when I heard it open this album I was "Oh, of course I know this song", but that was it. Gone are the covers, and to some extent so are the things that made them standout; Pop had caught up to what Girls Aloud were doing by 2008, and their response was to move more into the mainstream, which in turn, made me less interested. It's still incredibly well made, polished pop music; the problem being that I can get that anywhere. Without the quirk, this album stands almost as evidence of what fate might have befallen them if they'd released this first; this is the record that could have doomed them to one-hit-wonder obscurity. Nothing here is bad, and The Promise won them a BRIT award for best single, but it's certainly the only high point in a commercially successful plateau of sound.
Five albums, all Platinum, a run of 12 songs to make the top 3 in the singles charts. Surely this was a ticket to megastardom? Global domination? Seemingly not. For reasons I'll never understand, Girls Aloud weren't considered 'commercially viable' for the US market, so no real attempt was made to bring them to a wider audience. I mean, I don't know anything about the music industry, and specifically the US music pop charts of the mid 2000s, but if you are telling me that Sound of the Underground or Biology or Love Machine wouldn't have made it against whatever competition existed at the time, I'll spit in your face and call you a liar. I read an article which claims they never got promoted over there because their music was "too British" which is a statement as factual as it is meaningless. Despite all their success, I feel like they deserve more.
OK, now for the bummer part. I wish there didn't have to be one of these. CW: for things relating to Cancer here.
In August of 2020, Sarah Harding announced publicly that she had been diagnosed with advanced Breast Cancer; she passed away just over a year later, aged 39. I think about having lived already nearly a decade longer than she did. I've known someone who's life was cut tragically short due to cancer, and the desperate unfairness of it all remains as potent now as it was then.
The last ever Girls Aloud release was a version of I'll Stand By You, using an unused main vocal she recorded back when they were putting together the cover version for What Will The Neighbours Say?, the profits of which went to Breast Cancer charities. It's very nice.
Nostalgia is a powerful force, and the remaining 4 members toured recently for the first time without Sarah, though with some recorded tracks, including performing her version of I'll Stand By You live. Its hard to blame them, and I don't begrudge anyone for making a living. I knew it was happening, but equally thought it wasn't something I wanted to be a part of. The memories of their time at the top of UK pop music are all I need, and their catalogue of incredible pop songs are still coiled up in my subconscious, ready to strike at any time.
While I would never have thought to write about Girls Aloud here, I'm glad I did.
