S CLUB 7 – "Have You Ever"

Yeah. I read an interview with Randy Newman once where he said that “Brown-Eyed Girl” was one of the greatest songs ever, because of “behind the stadium with you” — a detail so specific and so weird that it had to be true, which sold the entire rest of the song as being real.

Could Simon not be arsed to send more than one invite to the recording session? The rest of S Club is only just barely perceptible, Salad dressing on somebody else’s table. By comparison, Blue are all still nommin’ at the same table, grabbing at scraps from the S Club plates when Jo’s not looking. Blue to S Club is like an underwhelming appetizer leading into a blandly inoffensive main course. Fill your pockets with mints, pay the check, and get out. On the way home stock up with several weeks worth of Hot Pockets. You’ll not be going out again for a while…
4 and 5 seems about right for these dishes.

#4 – we will however, much later on mind, meet a couple of the Juniors on another bunny. I did always love ‘New Direction’. Like the lost great ‘Fever’ era Kylie B-side Cathy Dennis forgot to hand onto her.

As for S Club…well it’s undeniable they were at their peak commercially at this time, what with the brilliant “Don’t Stop Movin” being the success it was, going onto win ITV Record of the Year and the BRIT for Best Single the following year. “Have You Ever” was almost guaranteed to sail to the top by proxy. I will concur and say that out of their two Children in Need singles, ‘”Never Had a Dream Come True” was the stronger of the two by far, but this was nonetheless a pleasant effort and Jo O’Meara sang it beautifully. Definitely a 7 for me.

Of course however, this was the S Club party before the rapture, as after they wrapped up their Carnival arena tour in March 2002, Paul Cattermole pulled a Robbie/Geri and left to front his nu metal band Skua (he and Hannah Spearritt were dating by this point also), although he worked his notice up until they performed for the last time as a septet at the Queen’s Golden Jubilee party at Buckingham Palace.

A shame really he left when he did, as this single’s parent album “Sunshine” was a great pop album. The dancier Hannah/Tina led numbers “Dance Dance Dance” and “Stronger” would have been awesome singles, likewise the Rachel led “Show Me Your Colours”. Of course however, down to six instead of seven, simply as S Club (five in some cases when Jo suffered from a slipped disc that rendered her out of action from promotion of their fourth album for a couple of months after filming their movie ‘Seeing Double’) by 2003 the jig was all but up and they had split.

As this is the last time we’ll encounter any of S Club seniors on Popular, I feel it necessary to mention and guide readers towards Rachel Stevens’ brilliant but commercially underappreciated solo career that gave us such gems as “Sweet Dreams My LA Ex” (which Cathy Dennis who wrote this bunny had a hand in), the Richard X helmed “Some Girls” and of course her brilliant “Come & Get It” album from 2005. A lost pop gem if ever there was one.

I once ‘went home with’ a friend of a friend who insisted on playing Some Girls (and Pictures Of You by The Cure) over and over again throughout our liaison. It was some time before I learned to love either song again.

Also re: “Some Girls”. Perhaps the most intriguing tidbit about it was how desperate Geri Halliwell was to record it, to the point of writing a bemused Richard a love letter whilst locking herself in her car outside his studio. Needless to say, thank God she didn’t, but it did however inspire Richard and his co-writer Hannah Robinson to pen “Me Plus One” for Norwegian electronic singer Annie, which was a tongue in cheek affair about Halliwell and the whole saga – even sampling the bark of her Shih-tzu dog Harry!

#8 – ah yes, ‘So Good’ and THOSE gloves, they were infamous. That was a happy time.

I don’t remember either of these & can’t say I feel inspired to (re)discover them now. I wonder if 4 is the worst mark of all – whatever a 4 is like, you just know it’s not going to be interesting.

#8 – I don’t know how Some Girls could be any closer to Strict Machine without actually including the words ‘strict’ and ‘machine’. The videos for that & (especially) So Good look very post-CGYOOMH now, but don’t really bring off Kylie’s weirdly unslutty appeal*; I guess that really was a one-off*.

*or it may just be me

Despite the fact it’s more or less all Jo, odd how Hannah is the most prominent member on the sleeve. Hannah seems to have had the most successful post-S Club career anyway.

I might have mentioned Rachel Stevens’ solo career before because I think Sweet Dreams, Some Girls, Negotiate With Love and, especially, I Said Never Again, are all brilliant records. It was interesting, though, because when she went solo they seemed to try and market her as a pop star for adults, so the album was called Funky Dory and they played up all the Bowie samples. This was the era of a genre I invented called Observer Pop, pioneered by the Observer Music Monthly which was running at the time, who would regularly lavish praise on bands like Lorraine and people like Annie, and thirtysomething men like me would find it all very clever and rush out and buy all their records. But no young person seemed especially interested, certainly in Rachel Stevens’ case, where they re-released the album with a load of disco covers.

It also didn’t help that Rachel Stevens seemed quite a dull pop star, she got short shrift on Popworld because she didn’t engage in any of the silliness, and then failed to join in sufficiently when she appeared on Dick and Dom in Da Bungalow. Which was not on.

If nothing else you have to admire the marketing. By virtue of being the Children In Need single the song gets a commercial boost well in advance of Christmas (and the race for number one) but not so far in advance that the song isn’t still kicking around the top ten in festive week and as a result is prominently displayed in shops as a potential stocking filler.

While I can remember most of S Club 7’s hits I couldn’t tell you how this one goes and I couldn’t be bothered to remind myself via youtube.

An interesting non bunny at number three this week was Riva’s fine dance track Who Do You Love which featured the other Minogue sister on vocals. Given how quickly Dannii’s pop career sank into ridicule she surprised her critics in 1997 with All I Wanna Do, a strong comeback that made number 4, her biggest hit up to that point (and interestingly the year her sister had her commercial nadir with the renamed Impossible Princess album). With the RIVA collaboration she improved one on her previous best and she’d get one better in years to come but the Bunny has yet to award her a top prize.

#13 – controversial opinion alert, but I didn’t subscribe to the school of theory Rachel was supposedly “boring”, specifically in reference to that Popworld interview you mentioned.

I think what you have to remember is that she probably had a harder task than most. Most ex pop band graduates are coming from a band with four or five in their number, as we’ve already seen with all the solo Take That and solo Spice bunnies. Rachel was part of a septet, and whilst press wise during the group she bought a lot of their attention and publicity – the FHM polls, that engagement to whatshisface out of Hollyoaks – personality wise it was immediately tougher for her because, at the heart of it, she was a normal girl from North London who somehow ended up in a quite big pop group. She’s even said so herself in the years following she found it difficult.

But that, for me, was part of her appeal, that she quite liked being a popstar but that it wasn’t be all and end all. The press and music buying public, certainly by the time she came to release her second album, where she was at her critical zenith but commercial plateau, had got rather carried away with the idea that popstars, and female ones especially, had to be gobby and outspoken at all times, the biggest case in point from that year being Charlotte Church, who launched her pop career whilst the gutter press wrote up public “spats” between her and a couple of future bunny holders we’ll meet in due course.

Then, at the other end of the spectrum, you had Lisa Scott-Lee also in that same year strumping about like a spoilt toddler with no shame in that car crash reality show of hers on MTV where she was told “get top 10 with your next single or quit music forever”. I forgot who mentioned it at the last Geri Halliwell bunny we encountered earlier but an unerring desperation for fame doesn’t an attractive popstar make either. Rachel didn’t hit it commercially as a solo artist, true, but she approached it with far more dignity than her peers.

Its funny, some No1’s make it seem we’re getting ever closer to the modern day and age, but things like the last three chart toppers make you think 2001 was a very long time ago.

Re 17: Apathy towards pop stardom is certainly preferable to Geri-style desperation, but S Club seemed to me the most disinterested pop stars of all time. Their reign coincided with Serena Williams treating her tennis career – grand slams aside – as something that was getting in the way of budding acting/fashion careers. At least Serena thought there was something else she’d rather be doing with her time. What else would Rachel Stevens rather be doing than appearing on Popworld? No idea.

As for Have You Ever, is it the first meaninglessly truncated song title we’ve come across so far?* Someone should have reminded Cathy Dennis what brackets are for: Have You Ever (Loved And Lost Somebody)…. ah, that’s better. I think the subject has been brought up elsewhere on Popular, in relation to Gabrielle’s When A Woman, but it does suggest the whole thing was dashed off with minimal care and attention.

*(Nancy & Lee’s Did You Ever is an intriguing comparison, with the half-title left intentionally hanging as innuendo. It would have been a Popular entry in 1971 if the Tams’ Hey Girl Don’t Bother Me hadn’t got in the way).

#21 I’d take desperation over apathy any day of the week personally. My feeling with S Club – and to a lesser extent Steps – was always “Well, if you don’t really care about all this, why the hell should I?”

Sweet Dreams and the Come & Get It album are great, and Rachel seemed like a nice enough girl but the lack of any discernable personality traits made it very difficult to get excited about her. I’d have loved to hear Geri going balls to the wall with Some Girls or I Said Never Again.

…or John Martyn’s “May You Never”.

I must have sold this S Club single in the shop, but had no recall of the song itself, of it being number one, or the single sleeve. A revisit today didn’t ring many bells. What a limp effort. (3)

#28 – I wonder if anyone’s ever done a misty-eyed, heroic retelling of the elephant sweeper joke (and you know what, that little old man was right…). As awful as that would be, there would be a certain emotional truth to it.