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

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Simon Jones (former publicist for the TV shows SM:TV and CD:UK) They definitely had fist-fights down at CD:UK. This clear factor, said the BPI’s Sophie Jones, “may point to wider issues around representation in music that need to be addressed”. The X Factor chunk made me feel a bit sick, along with a few other moments mentioned; the music industry needs to sort itself out, but I have a feeling it’s still just as bad as it was then!

My book — Michael Cragg

Cragg craved the more giddy delights of pop and, courtesy of the Spice Girls, Steps, 5ive, Blue and S Club 7, duly got it. Rather than accept that two competing ideas can both offer up positives and negatives, the pop vs indie debate became a war. The Spice Girls made their Brits mark thanks not only to Geri Halliwell’s’s union jack minidress (hastily fashioned from a tea towel) but Mel C offering to fight Liam Gallagher. The late 1990s and early 2000s saw an explosion of sugary, lightweight pop music, as record labels realised there was a market for something other than dreary indie bands with haircuts as dishevelled as their clothes.Most of the acts Cragg covers straddle the years either side of the millennium, and many burst through in 1998: Steps were a five-piece made up of would-be children’s TV presenters with a yen to sound like a Home Counties Abba; the laddy Five were launched on the TV show Neighbours from Hell; the charismatic, 15-year-old Sylvia Young student Billie Piper went straight in at No 1 with Because We Want To, a single that was pure Grange Hill ; Irish four-piece B*witched were formed with the terrible idea of marrying the Spice Girls’ brightness and energy to another contemporary craze, Michael Flatley’s Riverdance. 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.

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

It is to Michael Cragg’s great credit that his new book, a thoroughgoing oral history, focuses on a period until now almost entirely shunned by critics: British millennial bubblegum. As a gay Spanish kid who lived and breathed for the UK pop scene, this brings back so many memories and completes the whole picture with an insight look into an industry full of too many dark moments.Fellow boy band Blue, meanwhile, were tickled to find themselves the favourite band of fashion designer Donatella Versace, who flew them out to Milan on her private jet. Almost every story here tells you how even in the brasher end of music culture, everything is a reaction to what else’s going on (or, brutally, what’s selling). Overnight fame and no security at the house meant we had people pranking us, going through our bins.