Reach for the Stars: 1996–2006: Fame, Fallout and Pop’s Final Party: A Times Summer Read 2023

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The rise of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, together with the success of UK garage and grime, would eventually cool the public’s ardour for British bubblegum. Which is funny because he’s done some dodgy things in his career and auditioning for Five isn’t the worst thing he’s done. It still has PR value, though it is less a long-term sales driver than a desired co-sign,” said a publicist for several Brit-winning UK pop acts. It transpired that when I was working as a backing vocalist on The Lily Savage Show, the auditions were happening in the same building.

Reach for the Stars: 1996–2006: Fame, Fallout and Pop’s… Reach for the Stars: 1996–2006: Fame, Fallout and Pop’s…

but there’s compelling evidence here that people did routinely confuse the making of pop songs for rocket science. They influenced so many new bands around that time - All Saints were seen as edgier version, whereas Five were imagined as a male equivalent. It sounds like fun, and it was, but it was genuinely us waking up on a coach and not knowing what continent we were on. Alongside Ian Winwood’s excellent ‘ Bodies’, ‘Reach for the Stars’ acts as a love letter to music and also as a cautionary tale of how the industry consumes, adapts and sets the agenda without any regard for the artists. A book that does justice to an extraordinarily fertile period for British pop - Michael Cragg's assessment of new millennium bubblegum is top rate storytelling.While the book did gloss over some of the deeper dives into reasons for bands splitting and members leaving, this is an absolute must read for anybody who lived this era of music because, frankly, we all need to know that Geri Halliwell locked herself in a car after being informed she wasn't getting to record "Some Girls" (bop).

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And things that you had considered appalling have now been reappraised as cultural milestones by people two decades younger than you. It was a heady, chorus-heavy decade - populated by the likes of Steps, S Club 7, Blue, 5ive, Mis-Teeq, Hear'Say, Billie Piper, All Saints, Busted, Girls Aloud, Will Young, McFly, B*Witched, Craig David and Atomic Kitten, among countless others - yet the music was often dismissed as inauthentic, juvenile, not 'worthy' enough: ultimately, a 'guilty pleasure'. Described in 7 Heaven as “a bit of thinker”, he was often the one who cared about the band’s perception.I had no idea the impact of 9/11 on bands like five, how the music industry “works” and actually just how outstanding and amazing some of the performers were.

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We also discover how Sugababes and Girls Aloud producer Brian Higgins hated the sound of S Club 7 and Steps: “I couldn’t stand it. Oh what a time to be alive, when books are published and reviewed in broadsheet newspapers about music that would get me sneered at by dull boys in trilby hats. According to producer Pete Waterman, the proudly cheesy Steps were supposed to be “Abba on speed”, a claim to which Abba might well take offence: their debut single, 5, 6, 7, 8, was ostensibly a nursery rhyme based around line-dancing. Sean The label were in a rush and they didn’t want to wait, so they convinced the band to use a cardboard cut-out of me [in the video for Let’s Dance].A fascinating look at what was going on behind the scenes from the people that were there, delivering these massive moments of my youth. At the time, Cragg was a "closeted teenager" who hid his love of pop music behind a veneer of indie cool.

Reach for the Stars By Michael Cragg | Used | 9781788707244 Reach for the Stars By Michael Cragg | Used | 9781788707244

Left the Republican Movement at the endorsement of the Good Friday Agreement, and went on to become a journalist. For the majority of their lineup, and for most of the pop stars at the time, landing a place in a pop act was the fulfilment of a childhood dream, or the perfect chance to escape a mundane job. Steps, Westlife, B*Witched, 5ive, S Club 7, Busted and Atomic Kitten topped the charts and sold out arenas with songs that captured the giddy inertia of teenagedom: Don't Stop Movin', Keep On Movin', Rollercoaster, Flying Without Wings. Speaking to me for a book about the pop of the era, former Smash Hits journalist Hannah Verdier told me Cattermole cared more than most of his peers about the industry around the band: “When they did Don’t Stop Movin’, we were at the TV show CD:UK and Paul was telling everyone it was behaving like a No 1 record. So I went out on stage and said, “I am not going to sing Until the Time Is Through until I get my trainer back.An outstanding catalogue of oral testimonies from major and minor players in UK pop in the decade before the financial crash. Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal I relandand finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. I think the mental health situation with those bands was the responsibility of the record labels and the people around them, not the journalists who were trying to sell this fun pop era to fans," Cragg says. I’ve been a journalist for over a decade and have written for the likes of The Guardian, The Observer, Vogue, GQ, The Face, Fader, Q, BBC, Vice, Stylist, Out, i-D, Dazed, Time Out and Billboard. While artists these days are pick’n’mixing the best bits to form their own sounds, we’ll never really go back to those glory days.