An Insatiable Desire for Boy Bands

Sunday 8th June

Not me, I hasten to say.  The general public I mean.  Personally, although in love with The Beatles from the age of twelve or so I don’t think they really qualify as a boy band.  They played their instruments, they wrote their own songs mostly and though they could harmonise they didn’t all sing in harmony all the time.  Also they really rocked at times rather than sing soppy ballads.

Almost everyone has a time when, like Don McLean, they feel that the music has died.  Mine was in the early nineties when after a decade of synthesizer bands and stadium rock we had both the emergence of boy bands and hip hop.  Both left me cold.  I had no point of contact; music had died.  Or chart music anyway; albums still held me entranced.  I particularly loathed Take That and Westlife, interchangeable in their schmaltzy sameness.  I never quite understood the attraction.  And today’s crop of One Direction look-a-likes is just as boring.  Overproduced, overmanaged, overhyped.  But the public has an insatiable desire for them. And Britain’s Got Talent (which I haven’t watched but accidentally caught the very end of the final show) had just thrown up another one.  As Marlene Dietrich once sang “Ven Vill Zey Ever Learn.”