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And behind door number nine... some dazzling musical delights
The complete arts guide, for week 9
Cast your mind back to the heady days of 2001. The year of George ‘don’t-call-me W’ Bush succeeded Bill Clinton as President; the year an earthquake in Gujurat, India killed more than 12,000 people; and the year I genuinely wanted to be a pop-star. Genuinely. All three events are particularly tragic, but it is the last of the ‘Big Three’ I feel is the most deserving topic of discussion.
That Hannah, Daisy, Calvin, Jay, Stacey, Rochelle, Frankie and Aaron could inspire such genuine, filthy jealousy in teenage me (and also my much cooler friends) suggests that something has gone horribly wrong for our generation. We, ‘Generation Y’, ‘The Facebook Generation’ or whatever else lame sociologists have come up with, have been tainted. At our most fragile, and formative stage, we have been lured by Simon Cowell’s terrible troop of all-singing all-dancing teens into thinking that we might quite like to be an all-singing all-dancing teen too.
There’s no denying it, our generation is the first to be totally fixated with the idea of fame. More celebrity magazines than ever fly off newsagents’ shelves; talent shows attempt to palm off singers of Leon Jackson’s calibre on to the unsuspecting public; Kate Moss has her own revolting range of clothes, all because of being famous. Certainly not, in most cases, because they are any better than you or I at designing clothes or singing a song. Fame is all that matters. And, peering through the mists of time back to 2001, to a time when I thought Blink 182 were like THE rocking-est band EVER, that’s all that seemed to matter.
At an age when your first period seems as important (and as messy) as the Thames barriers bursting, you would only be seen dead in street-sweeper flares and you look, frankly, disgusting, having these revoltingly perfectly coiffed youths (the S-Club Juniors) thrown at you was nothing short of cruel. At fourteen, I didn’t know anyone as glossy as they, and still don’t. Deep down, you knew they were tame and extremely sad, but for some, now inexplicable, reason you wanted a taste of their celebrity. If they could be that glossy and famous, then surely all of us could have been? They gave us the false hope that our generation is still burdened with today. And to what end?
I don’t quite know why I’m writing this; they seemed such a paragon of all that was good and wholesome (and just sexy enough). But now they are no more. Apart from the two ex-members now in The Saturdays, there just doesn’t seem to be a contemporary equivalent of S Club Juniors. There is no-one as nauseatingly clean today as they were. That bygone age of innocence is now, well, bygone. That age of Amy Studt and the A* Teens has evaporated, leaving only our fragmented dreams and expectations.
Daisy is now a Score Angel for News of the World. (If you have missed this cultural phenomenon then watch this) and is described as a ’32 C beauty’. She is also in a band called From Above who have released a single rather revoltingly called ‘Hummer’. Aged 17, I add. Calvin is allegedly ‘recording an album in LA’, but I’m sceptical. Aaron does panto. However, Stacey did turn on the Lytham Christmas Lights in November followed by a performance in Lytham town centre, so it hasn’t been all doom and gloom for my fallen idols.
All we’ve been left with by this talented eight-piece is (since, let’s face it, they didn’t leave much of a musical legacy, even in our shamefully over-cheesed night-club scene here in York!) a sense that having five number one hit singles by the age of 12 is normal; that you should be recording with Gary Barlow when you’re presumably about five; that you’re a waste of space if you come out of your mother’s womb without a trendy haircut or fetching dance routine.
Sexy teens like Miley Cyrus (who should have braces and chronic acne at her age) with their shiny hair and adult demeanor, when placed next to naff but harmless S Club 8, imply that our damaged generation is the tip of the pre-teen iceberg. Imagine how screwed up ‘Generation Z’ are going to be. And the worst thing of all? The jealousy sticks with you. You can’t shake it. Part of me continued to believe it might still happen for me, against all the odds. I still sort of do. All I want is to be a child star, and I’m 21... How screwed up is that?
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