S CLUB 7 – "Bring It All Back"

If I remember correctly Miami 7 was in the weekday afternoons at 5.10 spot rather than Saturday mornings, but I may be wrong.

Credit where credit is due Bring It All Back held at bay Beautiful Stranger, one of Madonna’s best singles of the nineties and the only one of a run of three standalone singles for her (two soundtrack tracks and the lead single from a new album) to miss the top. It’s also worth noting that while Bring It All Back itself was relatively quickly forgotten other S Club 7 songs (some bunnied although Reach is not) have proved more enduring.

What a great idea for a new way to sell more records: put a bunch of stage school kids in their own TV show about “being in a band”*, pitch it at an undiscriminating audience, make the songs available for commercial purchase, and watch the hits flood in. I bet nobody ever thought of that before!

BIAB is exactly the kind of thing you might expect from such an enterprise: melodically clunky, lyrically inane and banal, produced cheaply’n’cheerfully, and finished off with a gratuitous key change. It all feels completely superfluous, and the best that can be said for it is that at least it’s also completely (well, almost) inoffensive. FOUR.

*Never mind the awkward question about whether they deserved to be called a “band” or not. The correct answer is, of course, “Get back to your rocking-chair, Grandad, nobody cares about that any more”.

Iconoclast @ 7, have you been commenting in the Grauniad lately?

I’m kicking myself for not remembering “Reach” only got to #2 – one of the reasons this entry is skimpy is that I was holding some commentary over for “Reach”! There will be other places it can go though.

Yes, S Club Party is their best – on the 911 thread I mentioned Party People as another antecedent. Would love to know if there are others in this particular late 90s dayglo party lineage. It would make an outstanding mixtape!

I was surprised to find S Club 7 only issued eleven singles. A later bunny approaches the S Club Party peak, but overall it makes for a really strong collection I reckon.

There’s an interesting discussion to have around S Club and pastiche, which is – does it matter at this remove? I can see how it might annoy in 1999, pop aspiring only to ape thirty-year-old pop – but now that one single’s 15 years old while the other’s 45, I couldn’t care less.

#10, 12 ‘S Club Party’ = ‘White Lines’ I always thought.

Five number twos in addition to their four chart-toppers, so a group that clearly found a good deal of favour with the GBP, and yet didn’t outstay their welcome – three years or so and they were off. Although a reunion of sorts has been attempted recently. And discussion of the ‘Juniors’ can wait for another day I suppose.

Hmm, admin call – in a strange turn of events (I write as someone who has time for “Thou Shalt Always Kill”…) I am being offered the chance to edit Tom’s last comment (#16). The temptation, the thrill, the abuse of power…… I am not logged in, so possibly we share a ISP, talktalk (tho surely not an IP address…)

It’s kids music, obviously, mega-blatantly manufactured but it is kind of good quality as far as it goes – no emotional depths to plunder here, and a fairly shameless key change too. In the spirit of Disney, Grease, etc, (…Rebecca Black….) wholesome, too wholesome, uncomplicated but still fun. I found it profoundly irritating at the time (I distinctly remember it blaring out at full volume at the end of Brighton Pier that summer) – but it has really grown on me. I disagree about “S Club Party” being as good as they got – I’d make the case for another #2 of theirs, “You”, being a lost gem of a song.
6, or maybe even 7. (I’m afraid this will not be the last piece of ultra-cheesy pop from this summer of which I will speak in support, the next will be along soon…)

Yes, it was definitely broadcast in the Grange Hill slot.

Does anyone here think a phenomenon like S Club 7 would actually be possible these days, what with children themselves increasingly turning their backs on TV and adopting the Internet earlier and earlier into their lives?

Sounds like a sound-a-like concocted for an ad with a bunch of session players when the customer was too cheap to spring for the expensive rights to the blissful original (I Want You Back, Satisfaction, Look of Love, London Belongs To Me,…). But, sigh, the kids will never know the difference. Note that BIAB got to #1 in NZ, and S Club would have 2 more #1s in the next six months there. Not sure about TV status there, but I’m guessing that the established Spice marketing channels made that unnecessary.

I recently saw Lucy (2014), whose primitiveness (dialogue-wise, visuals-wise, plot-wise, and the ‘science’ loudly appealed to in the film is beyond idiotic) BIAB reminds me of. Anyhow, it’s absurd to complain about Lucy as I do here: no one who made it was under any illusion that they were making anything good. ‘Good enough to lighten the pockets of consumers worldwide and fatten those in Paris and Hollywood and Seoul’ just is the presiding spirit of the thing. S Club 7, then, is the sort of stuff that triggers in me comparable cynicism about the music business. But BIAB isn’t my childhood:
3

I’m reasonably certain that Luc Besson thought he was making something good when he filmed Lucy – I’m also reasonably certain he was right, a tight flashy high-paced film that takes itself as seriously as it needs to to keep escalating – more Injected with a Poison perhaps than this track.

I found Miami 7 a huge disappointment at the time – I was into plenty of pop music that seemed to be superficially aimed at the pre-teen market, but Aqua/B*witched this was not. I attempted to watch a few episodes, but it was just dull, and the theme tune was worse, a half-arsed sketch of a pop song which wouldn’t have stood a chance of getting on a Spice Girls album. Of course they would redeem themselves a bit later by virtue of bringing some decent songs in – S-Club Party we’ll get to, Reach is one of those instantly memorable songs that would’ve been massive anytime from the thirties to the present day, whoever performed it.

@9: no; why?

@20: Which reminds me that a sentence mysteriously disappeared from my earlier post: “Bubblegum pop for the New Millennium, certainly, but completely lacking the wit and craftsmanship of thirty years previously.”

It may help to compare it to Transcendence, linked by Mr Freeman’s velvety tones 🙂

@andrew f./mark m.. I’m at a slight disadvantage here because once a movie hits a critical mass of badness in my view, I just purge it from my memory – it’s simply not worth retaining what was wrong about it.

That said, and let’s for arguments sake set aside the preposterous science and its sorry exposition by Freeman, Lucy felt desperately underwritten to me, not a single natural or memorable line of dialogue (cynicism alert: dialogue unimportance seemed obviously tied to Lucy‘s international distribution aims), not a single real character to speak of apart from SacrJo’s (incredibly Besson manages to do absolutely *nothing* with S Korean revenge-film icon Choi Min Sik – how is that even possible without imputing a combination of incredible cynicism and laziness to Besson?), the plot barely exists – there’s no real development after ScarJo gets beaten up after she has the drugs implanted (and, amazingly, even that rudimentary plot point was garbled: please, without looking anything up, tell me who the people are who beat ScarJo, and what was their point in doing so?) – editing and visuals were painful/primitive (clip-art-like) for the most part I thought. Truly, the only redeeming feature of the film is ScarJo herself kinda, sorta extending her Black Widow persona fused with a little bit of Under The Skin‘s alien. Lucy was made for just $40 million but has made over $400 million worldwide, and without ScarJo on board I doubt whether L. would have got much of a release. I hope and assume that ScarJo has ended up with a big piece of that gross – she deserves it, she *is* everything that’s good about the film.

Anyhow, ‘mind-expansion’ films have been all over the place the last few years, but Lucy is easily the worst I’ve seen. Limitless, Inception, Her, Transcendence all seem to me to be qualitatively different from and better than Lucy, which, no bones about it, reads like a scam. Lucy is only just over 80 minutes long but one still feels it vamping, padding for time with its vapid cut-aways to early primates . etc.. The movie is *so* slight that you can *feel* (or at least I thought I could feel) Besson trying to get out of Dodge as quickly as possible with customers’ monies.

p.s.. Pete Baran’s columns used to be a good venue for this sort of discussion. Miss them.

That’s a terrible low-res scan of the cover, but an object lesson in ensuring you scan 2x the dpi

Love the idea that the first act to not care about being #1 (for the first time) was a teenpop act but maybe they were just really really tired?

#38 I can’t think of an obvious place! Whatever kept them at Number 2? There’s bound to be an entry that talks about ‘Popjustice Pop’ in some depth, which for better or worse I file RS’ records under.

I always thought Tina was the least stand-out of the girls. Once Channel 4 Teletext were interviewing her and asked for “questions to ask Tina from S Club 7”. My brother suggested “Which one are you?”

Looking forward at their next two singles (neither got to no. 1, but sorry if I’m breaking any rules here):

Bring it all Back – Say Hi to the gang as we all get to sing/here’s our manifesto
S Club Party – Hip-Hop/R&B one
2 in a Million – Slushy ballad/has a number in the title/ tilt at Christmas No. 1

Seem familiar?

Wannabe
Say You’ll be there
2 become 1

S Club were a great manufactured band. All top 5 hits, 3 years of ubiquitous chart dominance, and then out, every single record memorable. This is the worst of their singles by some distance but it was their manifesto (put it to the test-o) – that manifesto being we are 7 seven young people who are wholesome and sexless that your kids can look up to without threat. Compare the raunch of ‘2 become 1’ to ‘2 in a Million’ for a good example.

Being BBC sponsored, I guess they had to be. I remember when the Spice Girls came out they were interviewed in mags like Select and Vox, and even footy mags aimed at adults like 90 Minutes (much missed) where they were frequently off topic and veering into areas perhaps not suitable for their core demographic. Licence fee funded S Club had no such ability and remained trapped in primary colour. primary school purgatory.

On topic, this is the worst of their singles but it was the obvious debut single. It’s catchy as hell and has the message of positivity and protestant work ethic that will stand their fans in good stead for their imminent entry to adolescence and the turmoil that brings. As Tom said, enjoyable without being good. [4]

Well, I can remember the Christmas one to come.

I was blanking on S Club Party on Reach, so I just listened and didn’t remember either (the first – pretty good; the second – it’s their Stop, isn’t it, with bloody awful lyrics).

Reach is massively memorable to people my age because it quickly became a student cheese night staple. It would generally be played between Wake Me Up Before You Go Go and, say, Brown Eyed Girl. I would glance nervously towards the exit, curmudgeon that I was.

Yes, the lyrics are awful. You can’t “climb every mountain higher.” If you climb a mountain, the height you climb is dictated by the height of the mountain.