Post by The Curmudgeon on Jan 27, 2009 23:05:43 GMT 2
Never heard of them? There is a God.
Short back-story here; I'd been waiting for this dross to become available on Amazon.com for what seemed like an age so I could review it, and then forgot all about it. It's for the greater good, actually; if I'd written this review when this was first released, it would have been far angrier because, at the time, I thought this may well have been a hit. Now that time has passed and the entire project was a complete failure, it's turned into one of those far more fun to write "point and laugh" reviews. Join me, won't you?
Anyway, if you take a quick look at the CD cover of this atrocity you may notice something, and it's not that the guys are all sucking their guts in for the photo. Recognise any of them? Upper Street, you see, were part of "Totally Boyband", a reality show that took five ex-boyband members (the fifth, Lee Latchford Evans, the talentless gimp from Steps, quit after a few weeks of filming to concentrate on his "rock" band; yeah.. good luck with that) and tried to make a NEW boyband out of them. A bit like taking five pieces of a fairly large turd and trying to make a sandwich. You'll get a sandwich, alright - but no-one will want it.
So, Dane Bowers, he of failed solo career and from R&B non-entities Another Level, Jimmy Constable of the criminally appalling 911, Bradley McIntosh, the joint smoking token black guy from S Club 7 and Mr Ed on two legs Danny Wood from New Kids on the Block. Together at, um, last.
Couple of things that made this show a failure from the start. One, Steps and S Club 7 weren't even boybands (didn't the girls do all the singing in those groups?) and Danny, Jimmy, Bradley and Lee weren't even their mum's favourite members of those groups. So putting all the guys with the least going on in their careers is supposed to be a good thing?
And, of course, it wasn't. Remember, this was the same TV show that spawned Totally Scot-Lee (and it also spawned one of my very own reviews), where they took failed ex-Steps member (what, is that group cursed or something?) Lisa Scott-Lee, who promised that if she didn't crack the top ten from the single taken from that show she would quit pop music forever. She didn't, she did and, somehow, we all managed to get by.
The people behind these shows, unlike, say, Simon Cowell's programs, quite clearly don't CARE about the ultimate goal of the program. The pop music created by these shows is clearly their last priority; stitching up the four clueless, unlucky dorks who signed up for this garbage is obviously their first.
Hey, if Totally Boyband was a GOOD show then fair enough. But it wasn't. It took five guys no-one cared about, ripped the guts out of the pop music machine even more than normal, gave them a below-par r&b ballad that even the most average boyband from 1995 would scoff at, and somehow expected the sales to come rolling in.
They didn't, of course, and Upper Street quickly split up and the boys went back to.. well, what DO ex-boyband members fill their days with, besides "working on new material"? (Horsey from NKOTB would, of course, be given a second stab at his former day job - but that's more horror for another day, true believers).
So yes, the entire project tanked. It could be due to the lack of exposure the show actually received, it could be down to the fact no-one cares about any of the "boys" from the show, or it could be down to the low quality of the finished product itself. Or it could be that, when you show how cynical and calculated the whole pop process is, when you show five desperate, do ANYTHING to be on TV guys being given a song, when you show them practising for the video and learning the words - somehow seeing the video on MTV doesn't exactly set your world on fire.
Remember when pop stars were mysterious? Remember when you actually believed what came out of their mouths? Remember when you didn't see every individual process behind the release of a song? Probably not, and you can blame crass, cheap, exploitive garbage like this.
