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

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Scott We had to lie and tell anyone that asked that Sean had glandular fever. We knew that he was having a breakdown and he’d left. But the label wanted to make sure that Kingsize was going to sell so they said we couldn’t tell anyone. Ritchie At the time, pop bands had always been five people, so they wanted to do something different and have four people. But they couldn’t decide which one of us to lose, so they kept it as five. Which is one of the reasons we called ourselves Five. An outstanding catalogue of oral testimonies from major and minor players in UK pop in the decade before the financial crash.' -- New Statesman

Gender inequality and outdated voting metrics: are the Brit

Arguably the best possible combination of writer and subject since Jesus wrote the Bible.' -- Stuart Heritage, Guardian writer Ritchie I personally harbour no ill-will to J or Abs. I would want nothing more than to hear that they’re happily getting on with their lives. J was quite a domineering character and he wanted things done his way. He was willing to get that point across in a physical way sometimes. The book begins with the Spice Girls, who changed everything. Their cheeky attitude and catchy tunes made pop music exciting again. They influenced so many new bands around that time - All Saints were seen as edgier version, whereas Five were imagined as a male equivalent. But we also hear from other groups that didn't make quite the same impression - the likes of A1 and Girl Thing. It's fascinating to hear them discuss their reasons for not quite succeeding.

To chat about Reach For The Stars, 1996 – 2006: Fame, Fallout and Pop’s Final Party, journalist Michael Cragg has worn aGirls Aloud T‑shirt for the occasion, from the band’s debut 2003 album. Claire I remember Pete Waterman going crazy and causing a real stink because if it wasn’t us who should have won, Five were in that category, Cleopatra. It was all the new pop of the time. No one could believe it.

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

If you're interested in pop history, I recommend this new book which explores in fascinating detail the dizzy, competitive and lost world of 'manufactured' nineties and noughties pop.' -- Neil Tennant, Pet Shop Boys In short: Great read for anyone interested in the late 90s/ early 2000s pop industry in the UK - whether this is because you're a fan of the music or want to find out more about how the industry worked. (Though I imagine it's a lot less enjoyable if you don't know the bands: LOTS of names.) Ritchie Neville I turned up and it was a media circus. There was press there and a Spice Girls tribute band performing. I was in this queue just going, “What the hell is this?” Jones said the BPI “will review our processes for the next event in 2024, as we always do, to make sure we take on board any learnings and ensure our approach is the right one”. You want the Brits to dance like no one’s watching, and to recapture the chaos that made it a must-watch in the 90s

The book attempts to chart the mainstream pop industry from the days of the Spice Girls through to The XFactor and it features lots of interviews from many of the main players within these bands and the music industry at the time. I particularly enjoyed the sections where the production of the music was discussed as this was new information that I hadn't seen elsewhere and it gave a great insight in to the production of the music and featured interviews with people such as the Xenomania team. Having written for the likes of The Guardian, Vogue and Popjustice (as well as being a few years older than me), Michael Cragg is in the perfect position to deliver an authoritative tome on this period in pop music, as well as making sense of the pitch battles between the poptivists and the real music bores. In the introduction, he makes the case that: In the period covered by his book Reach for the Stars, Cragg said, pop stars wanted to win Brits “because it was a shot at recognition that they weren’t getting elsewhere. It was pop versus indie, and winning offered credibility.” But two decades later, pop is taken seriously by critics and every popstar can reach fans directly online. What is a Brit award worth in 2023?

Reach for the Stars by Michael Cragg review - The Guardian

Oh what a time to be alive, when books are published and reviewed in broadsheet newspapers about music that would get me sneered at by dull boys in trilby hats. This oral history of millennial British pop—interviews edited together as though you’re watching talking heads speaking on 100 Greatest Y2K Music Moments on Channel 5—contains Boston Tea Party levels of spillage, spanning the ten year pop boom between the Spice Girls and the demise of TOTP, Smash Hits and Simon and Miquita’s Popworld. It takes the subject seriously from a poptimist perspective, but is still light, fun and brilliantly gossipy. Ritchie They wanted a band with edge and that’s what they bloody well got. We’re all very strong characters so eventually there’s going to be those eruptions. We were young, we didn’t have that level of maturity.

Why was everyone 16? I swear all these bands (Steps, Spice Girls, Westlife, etc) were two decades or more older than me, not barely a few years. Seriously, even Geri Halliwell is only 12 years older than me! Brian Higgins is the British mega-producer who, along with Miranda Cooper and the rest of his Kent-based pop factory Xenomania, was the brains behind some of the most celebrated, most innovative and frankly best pop tunes of the past two decades: Girls Aloud’s Biology, The Promise and the aforesaid Sound of the Underground; Sugababes’ Round Round and Hole in the Head; Rachel Stevens’ highly underrated album, Come and Get It – acommercial failure, but so good it landed on The Guardian ​ ’s list of 1000 Albums to Hear Before You Die. From Girl Power to Girls Aloud (and all the glorious points in between), the definitive study of British pop music at the turn of the millennium, told by everyone who was there. Cases are regularly made for this or that period of pop history to be recognised as a “golden era”, and random chunks of the 1950s to the 1990s have been widely exalted. 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.