GIRLS ALOUD – "Sound Of The Underground"

It is perhaps the greatest example of Trojan horse entryism in all of pop. The conclusion of a year whose most popular artists were now unloaded from a determined conveyor belt, a year when it seemed that the good guys (and girls) had lost, that any fancy concept of pop as something more than “just pop music” – and let it be said here for the record that anyone who belittles pop by referring to it as “just pop music” has never understood pop, either properly or improperly – was a hopeless and somewhat dated utopian dream. Cowell was intent on ripping off the singles chart’s mask of democracy and turning the chart from a semi-monitored free-for-all (even the eighties when the charts were already being mocked as formulaic, provided beds for tenants as diverse as Coldcut and the Sisters of Mercy, Vanessa Paradis and Whitney Houston, Eric B and Rick Astley) into a pitilessly plotted pie chart of anticipated profit margins and preordained Phillips curves of cold rationalist economics whose employees did exactly as they were told, or else; one cannot exactly imagine Gareth Gates as a tea boy in the streamlined, deathlike offices of SYCO “Entertainment.”

By the end of 2002 PopStars had become PopStars: The Rivals, or boyband versus girl group, or Louis Walsh versus Pete Waterman, or possibly death versus life. However many thousand candidates whittled down to five per gender, to form a compulsory pop group with the aim of nailing down the Christmas number one long-term leasehold once and for all; an end to surprises and hiccups, a firm fencing off of the leftfield with guard dogs and barbed wire, a pop where “popular” was all that counted, and whose consumers were to be told exactly whom and what they should make “popular,” offered only a tiny soupçon of front-of-shop samples rather than the galaxy of full options.

The wonder is that Walsh and Waterman ended up on exactly the opposite side that we might have expected from their previous histories. But the slide rule was set; capture the Christmas number one, with the Christmas number two as a consolation prize. In addition there was the token novelty act – a Transylvanian sorority duo named the Cheeky Girls, who thankfully will not be directly troubling Popular (though their punctumised mirror images will be making themselves known very soon) – who pseudo-accidentally managed to bag the Christmas number three slot. The future in theory was looking bleak enough to make one want to abandon the notion of a chart completely.

Waterman’s boys were One True Voice – watching Walsh’s Westlife two or three years too late, Waterman wanted some of that heartfelt static anti-action and set them to work on a soulful, passionate and honest ballad entitled “Sacred Trust” which the lads yowled at melismatic gunpoint. Walsh, meanwhile, was entrusted with the girls, noting rather more astutely the prolonged absence of the Spice Girls, the imminent end of Atomic Kitten, the recent triumphs of Sugababes and a gap in the market waiting to be filled. To this end he engaged the services of the writers and producers of the last Sugababes number one.

And thus did Louis Walsh, of all people – as the Pete Waterman of fifteen years earlier might have done – let in the X-factor of Xenomania, a collective with ideas of their own and clear recollections of what New Pop had meant in the first place. Had Walsh done his homework and listened to the two tracks which Brian Higgins and his team had co-written and produced for Saint Etienne on their then-recently released Finisterre album, “Action” and “Shower Scene,” he would have better realised what he was allowing the Girls to get themselves into. Finisterre is a record whose quality and significance have become steadily more apparent over the intervening years, with its underlying urge to drag pop out of the seabed-bound grave of greyness; and with the above two songs in particular we are seeing a virtual prototype of what Xenomania intended to do with Girls Aloud. At the time it largely passed through the chambers of pop commerce unnoticed – but then that is more often the case than not when it comes to genuine innovation.

Xenomania’s team also had connections with the KLF – most notably keyboardist/arranger Nick Coler, whose history stretches back as far as the Rubettes – and the instant when Girls Aloud first performed “Sound Of The Underground” on the final episode of PopStars: The Rivals, only a few minutes after all the participants had been dragooned to perform a comfy MoR rendition of “Winter Wonderland” which would not have been out of place on The Black And White Minstrel Show circa 1972 (all the better to demonstrate exactly what was planned to be overthrown), indicated a dramatic new start and an inwardly smiling victory.

Away with “soul” and “passion”; Xenomania’s chosen route was the thin but solid neon line from the Shadows to Kraftwerk, the Shirelles to Miss Kittin – thus the channel-panning wave of Duane Eddy guitar (as if to say THIS is where pop begins again) in the intro and the luscious thrust into Lee Morgan’s “Sidewinder” riff. They sing of disco dancing in their own bedroom, neighbours banging on the bathroom wall which they interpret as wanting the bass to be cranked up further, totally and deliriously enticed into the groove, minds screwed by the bassline, the block shaking as tremulously as the one which eventually collapses in Young Marble Giants’ “Eating Noddomix” as the girl happily does herself up in front of the mirror.

The chorus is fortissimo and unsentimental but feline and utterly confident, like Bananarama fed through Art of Noise, but with minor chord augmentations and twists which reveal the song as something which Hatch and Trent would happily have written for Petula (“Water’s running in the wrong direction” is a very Jackie Trentian lyrical observation) but which is unashamedly here and now in the end of 2002 sense. And thus, at the end of the most depressing Popular year yet to be surveyed – and completely at odds with the quality of music happening away from the number one slot during that period – the major disease of the year was turned back on itself and water splashed in the polite boys’ aghast faces by the girls; always the Girls. When Burchill called them the best pop group since the Pistols, it was entirely logical and understandable.

It’s easy to underestimate what a shot of adrenaline this song is. Even if Girls Aloud had stalled after their follow up, this song is so arresting because it bucks the trend of what a reality TV pop song should be. It avoids the familiar trope of imagining the singers had finally realised some hard-won goal after years of setbacks, adversity and missteps (“All This Time”, “That’s My Goal”, “When You Believe”). That wouldn’t have worked for Girls Aloud. They were too young and too immediate to imagine they had in any way struggled to finally capture their moment.

It’s also easy to forget that in 2002, pure pop wasn’t critically accepted (still). Pitchfork didn’t exist back then (a blessing?) but whilst it’s happy to afford the Swifts, Perry’s, and Jepson’s of this world their rightful kudos, would it have done at the turn of the century? By getting the broadsheet music press not just behind them, but occasionally positively salivating (I remember the now defunct Observer Music Monthly being particularly positive), the Girls Aloud/Xenomania project achieved something that previous boy/girl band behemoths (Take That/The Spice Girls) hadn’t previously achieved. And maybe that’s an important point. Girls Aloud were very successful. But they weren’t juggernaut successful. Which probably allowed Xenomania their outlet for experimentation. So although some reality born pop stars were leaning into credibility at this time (Will Young), Girls Aloud fully joined the dots between pop and critical praise in a way that feels natural today.

The experimentation of songs such as “Biology”, “The Show” and – latterly – “Untouchable” is a key characteristic of Girls Aloud’s appeal to the music press, but it disguises the basic alchemy between writer and artist that exists – alchemy that doesn’t always come off. Not everything Girls Aloud and Xenomania did turned to gold. They had a strange predilection for cover versions that, whilst often fun (“Jump”), were often pretty gloopy and uninspired (“I’ll Stand By You”). They famously weren’t that good at ballads – probably because their air of dishevelled, mischievous ‘girls about town’ didn’t lend itself to overly serious emoting. But it’s also key to note that they didn’t have to be experimental to be brilliant. “Call the Shots” is the most obvious example of a structurally straightforward pop song being shimmeringly brilliant, just because it is.

Presumably because it had to be recorded at breakneck speed, there’s a real urgency about “Sound of the Underground” and thankfully, any rough edges were wisely kept from being smoothed over (witness Kimberley’s pure Yorkshire accent in “a mixed up sigggnnnn!”). From the first few seconds of twangy surf guitar onwards, you know exactly where you are with it, what it’s supposed to do, and where it’s going to take you. And it still sounds arresting now.

If I wasn’t so preoccupied with uni, work and numerous other writing projects, I should have prepared a comment that really tries to illustrate why this song is amazing and why Girls Aloud are probably my favourite thing about pop in the 21st century. Much of the commentary thus far does that job well enough though.

At the time, I was a little boy and liking Girls Aloud would have been uncool in primary school; my favourite bands in 2002-04 were Bunsted, McBunny and Good Charlotte, boys with guitars. Never mind that Girls Aloud were a more inventive guitar group than all of them, what with them having hits with intertwined surf rock, skiffle, electric blues and garage punk riffs. But I liked SotU in secret, and even more so No Good Advice. And I used to play Jump on Now 57. And Love Machine I knew was a banger really. And by the time their final bunny came around I was 11 and realised my mistakes, though it took a quite a good few more years for them to become what they are to me now.

Its with this single that Xenomania truly become like Basement Jaxx in terms of what Tom once referred to as the molecular gastronomy of pop. Combining drum & bass and surf rock might seem on paper like a big Goldie meets Tarantino 1995ism, but in execution nothing in all of 2000s Popular screams the reckless adventure of the decade’s most exciting pop acts as much as this.

Nothing’s within spitting distance of being out of place, in particular the dual rumble of the dubby bass and twangalanga guitars, the segues between sections (especially the jungle breakdown melting into the fluid bridge near the end) and and of course the girls themselves, never raising their cooing voices much, carried along by the sway of the music but also very conscious of how cool they’re being.

It’s virtually a 10, but considering the heights GA would reach on their very best songs I might have to go for a 9. A massive shame that they don’t reach the top spot with some of their best songs – The Show in particular might be the greatest almost No. 1 of the 21st century – while the next two times we see them its with covers that are far from top drawer. But Sound of the Underground strikes me as one of the most assured entrances in all of pop, a defining song of 2000s British pop as a whole, or at least the side to 00s British pop that I love the most.

Nah, its a 10

A solid 10, and it’s only their fifth best single in my opinion. A shame none of their better ones made it to the top.

The whole battle for number one seems so much more reflective of the stage of pop music for much of its history. Oh, the boys can do well enough when they want to but it’s always the girls who ultimately win in the pop music game.

This great song really did come from nowhere. I was in the first year of uni when it was released and mentioned in the Darius thread about students’ ironic love of all things pop. Well no-one liked this ironically, but everyone liked it.

There’s always one pop group that everyone seems to like, even those who say they normally wouldn’t. Girls Aloud pretty much picked that baton up from out of the gate with this song, perhaps passing it over to the rebirthed Take That towards the end of the decade. I have never met anyone who said they disliked them and considering they are a girl group launched from a reality TV show that’s quite something.

I don’t think Sound of the Underground is quite as great as others. It’s quite obviously far superior to the dross that precedes and (presumably) follows it on Popular, but in my opinion doesn’t reach the heights of Biology, The Show or Something Kinda Ooh which really perfect a formula that’s still in it’s larval stage here. Still a high enough 7 that I’ll round to an 8.

Stray thoughts:

Having revisited some of their bigger hits on the walk home, Cheryl definitely come across as the most distinctive singer. I almost wrote worst, but that’s probably unfair. Her lines definitely seems to ‘jar’ more than the others, who seem more in sync with each other and indeed the backing tracks.

Following on from that it’s a shame that her rather tepid solo career was the only real one of note post-GA. I have heard good things about both Nicola and Nadine’s output but shamefully have never investigated.

Love Machine is their main critically-acclaimed song I could never get on with. Seems to me like a couple of good ideas that never really get started, let alone go anywhere. Nice bridge though.

it’s a pleasure to see so many contributions and conversation returning to this site – and this song is a suitable stimulus – it blends many different musical genres into a deliciously rich confection. The singers avoid the anonymity of some dance acts without adopting exaggerated personalities such as the Spice Girls. Even for an old timer like me this burst into my consciousness thanks to the enthusiasm of my pupils

The thing that got me at the time was how un-Christmassy this sounded! Like most people I expected the winning act’s first release to be some gloopy ballad. Instead we got the least festive Number One since Pink Floyd..

Still brilliant, though at the time I wrote that brilliance off as a fluke (a reality pop concoction making a decent record? Surely some mistake!) It was No Good Advice that was the game changer for me. I still recall hearing it on CDUK for the first time and my jaw just hitting the floor at how good it was..

Still bewildered by the universal acclaim this gets. It’s great that they didn’t go for a ballad so A for effort there, but for me the result of all the daring experimentation is only OK – it’s not really about anything, you can’t really dance to it, it’s not a huge amount of fun. Later Girls Aloud songs would connect a lot better.

For Observer Music Monthly, see also Popjustice: Freak Like Me and SOTU feel like two crucial singles in that site’s rise to prominence, sharing with OMM an unashamed love of mainstream pop music that shouldn’t have been as rare as it was, previously.

PJ is still going, the forum arguably more vibrant than Peter Robinson’s main site prose; Girls Aloud ranked top 5 in a recent Ultimate Popstar poll of forum members.

Girls Aloud confuse me greatly, because on paper, they should be one of my favourite groups of all time. The descriptions always sound excellent, hitting almost every Why I Love Pop button, and those descriptions are often written by people whose opinions on great records I otherwise always share – indeed, are often written by people who themselves have *made* great records I adore.

But I’ve just never liked them. At best I find them OK. Steps, Kylie, and Saint Etienne’s rejected demos lashed into functional shape, occasionally kind of pretty, maybe verging on catchy. At worst, they’re *terrible*. Jackboot jumping on my toot toot forever.

And I don’t understand. I don’t know if there are many people who really love pop music, but not Girls Aloud, as opposed to just dismissing them categorically (whether the category is pop, reality TV, daytime radio or whatever).

At first I wondered if maybe they became so lauded because, as Tom said, by all expectation and precedent they should have been awful, and the fact they weren’t caused people to mistake competence for brilliance. But I don’t think so. However bored and cold this leaves me, people I respect and trust clearly love it and the group in a genuine way, and so I just feel… Left out? Like there’s something I’m missing that’s stopping me from having a great, shared pop experience.

I think, like Oasis, this is just one of those pop things that I’m just destined never to get or enjoy, even if lots of other people really REALLY do. But I can’t see how the actual records match up to the praise, which is a bugger because I really want to hear the records you’re all apparently hearing. 4.

Friend of a friend WAS in One True Voice. My friend and a few other uni mates got to go backstage at the final and meet the Girls. My mate said, like everyone else, he told Sarah Harding that their song was better but the boys would probably get the Xmas #1 cos “all the little girls will buy it.”

The only other memory I have is him saying that Girls Aloud were squired by grim-faced knuckledraggers, glaring with barely restrained violence at any other man in the vicinity, perhaps aware they were already on borrowed time.

I liked this, probably an 8 for me. I was never that into GA, more through omission than conviction but I was always curious to hear their latest whenever I caught it.

I seem to remember there being a ‘what went wrong’ OTV documentary, on Sky rather than ITV, in remarkably short order – possibly even before the second single appeared?

(Making the charts themselves the competition finale essentially means your ‘real’ final episode is missing, so it makes sense there’d be a demand for such a show, but even then they seem to have been punted into the long grass remarkably quickly.)

In the meantime there’s maybe a discussion to be had on ‘why Liberty X but not OTV?’, when the former were an ‘accidental’ by-product of their show while the latter were part of the plan from day one of theirs. ‘They weren’t interesting and the song was naff’, sure, but then how and why didn’t OTV displace Westlife? Or, indeed, why wasn’t this twofer format repeated?

I wonder if, when we’re talking not about a public vote but a real actual sales battle, the stakes for the loser are simply too high. Nobody outside your fan base cares if you made it to the Cup Final but then lost 6-0, and come August the casual fans who cheered you along have all already moved on. And in pop, you don’t get many chances to shake that ‘losers’ tag.

In any case, it feels like a watershed moment in that while several future runners up in these things will become not only bunnies, or bigger than their erstwhile conquerors, but actual bona fide stars, the days of every wannabe in the final half-dozen banking a hit single just as a prize for going deep into the competition are over.

Once the spell is broken, the model settles down: if you aren’t the winner you won’t automatically get a hit or even a record deal. You *can*, but you’d better be either exceptionally good (essentially letting the record buying public correct the decision of the voting public, obviously not a thing in this particular iteration), or enough of a novelty to stand out from the near-exponentially expanding pool of former reality show contestants now that ‘as seen on TV’ alone won’t cut it. And this, along with a surfeit/glut of similarly formatted shows competing for attention, feels like the start of that.

Or, well, that’s my theory, anyway. It may not stand up to scrutiny with actual facts!

As has been hinted at a couple of times, this joins a list headed by Ghost Town of Dancefloor fillers that prove rather hard to actually dance to once you get there. See also: Can’t get you out of my head.

^ Discovering the context of this from the last big wodge of Populars certainly explains how they became so big so fast, for someone from the other side of the planet. Comments about the paucity of #1s to come make me hope Tom finds interest to comment or maybe Less Popular on some of the other singles along the way.

Lovely to see MC’s prepared comments burst forth from hibernation for the occasion.

“the debut of short lived comedy rock outfit Electric Six with ‘Danger! High Voltage’. It’s possibly their single after that one (‘Gay Bar’) that they are more remembered for, mind. And by remembered, I mean stumbled upon only at instances like these and reminded of how dated they made themselves even at the time.”

NB that “short-lived” here means “now in their 20th year, having released in the last fifteen of those: 16 studio albums, several live and B-side compilation albums, two solo albums by the lead singer/songwriter, and still touring annually and playing better shows than in 2003, not least due to having many more great songs now.”

#4/#27

One great thing Electric Six were responsible for was my favourite radio edit in history. Specifically, the edit of “Gay Bar” for Japanese radio, needed because references to nuclear war were… not exactly a good idea in the only country ever to have actually been on the end of it. That couplet became “let’s do an edit / do a radio edit.”

I have no memory of whether I watched Poststars: The Rivals at all – I had watched a lot of the original Popstars, but very little of Pop Idol. I certainly have no recall of the future Girls Aloud early in the competition, but I was definitely aware of the boys v girls concept. What I do remember is being surprised by what an exciting track Sound Of The Underground was – even at that early stage in history it seemed at odds with reality-game-show pop’s default tendency.

And I haven’t shifted from that initial impression – I think it’s a collection of thrilling noises, the kind of explosive pop moment the young Nik Cohn would have loved.

The thing that intrigues me is how thuggish Cheryl looks in the first few videos, which is not how she looked on the show (I’ve checked) nor how she looked later. She looks a right bruiser, especially in the No Good advice promo. And I don’t think that’s just her subsequent legal difficulties distorting my perception – I think it’s smart work from the stylists to make her look match the music.

At the time, my ears pricked up: this was clearly a cut above the usual already tiresome TV talent-contest fare. Not least, it must be admitted, because the production and the shape and structure of the song – the zigging and zagging, the back and forth – take on a life of their own, and shape its impact; these cut through to the casual listener, perhaps more than the vocals of the performers. In a TV talent show this is positively subversive; in the mainstream pop realm this kind of play is not unknown (“The CIrcus” by Erasure springs immediately to mind as another – if anything even more – incongruous example of very superior construction and performance enthuisastically supported then by Smash Hits, effectively the Pop Stars of its day).

Reading Julie Burchill – a writer and thinker who is always insightful, often deservedly provocative, generally brave and more often than not deeply wise and well-considered in her arguments and worldview, wll beyond her perceived public persona – a few months later – a few months later, in the Guardian (not sure if it was around the time of their second or their third single) was what really turned me on to Girls Aloud, and the notion they would be well worth listening to, they were a far more interesting proposition than they might superficially, initially, have appeared to be. And so it proved (it took a while, and their bunnies don’t entirely reflect this, alas, but this is hardly unprecedented, but for a time, they did get there)

I don’t quite it was quite evident from SOTU that we were witnessing the first steps of probably the finest pure pop act of the decade. But for now this was a very superior Christmas number 1, probably the best since “Always On My Mind”. And indeed formed in a similar slightly subversive and eclectic pop spirit.

Agree with Mae’s comment above. Burchill is utterly ghastly in my opinion. As for Girls Aloud, I admire the energy here, so a 6/10.

Classic. What a song and arrival. Crazy to think this song was first given to flop girl band Girl Thing.

A shot in the arm for pop at the time.