What does a Mel C record sound like? Not an easy question. Her solo singles ask more, in terms of brand loyalty, than any other Spice – she was respected for her voice, and the assumption is you’ll want to follow it through flashy Britrock (”Goin’ Down”), acoustic soft pop (”Northern Star”), twilit R&B (”Never Be The Same Again”) and now muscular pop-trance. And that’s without bringing Bryan Adams into it. There’s something very appealing about this hopscotch approach, but almost none of the songs are strong enough to sell Melanie C as more than a dabbler.
“I Turn To You” comes close, though. At least it does in its original version, a much subtler, lusher thing, co-produced by hardcore dance legend Rob Playford, the producer who’d helped briefly make Goldie into a chart star. I hear something of the ache and restraint of “Inner City Life” in the original mix of “I Turn To You”, and I notice how well Mel C is singing it, too. Lyrics that brushed past me on the single mix – just more trancey rent-a-metaphor – seem fresher and more plainly felt on the album.
For whatever reason – too many relatively slow singles? – that original wasn’t the mix she went with. Wikipedia lists an ear-boggling twenty different remixes, edits, dubs and versions of “I Turn To You”: they wanted this track to be a hit, and were aiming squarely for the clubs. Hex Hector does a job on that front – and picked up a Grammy for it – but it squashes and boxes the song into uncomfortably peppy shape. Mel C’s best Spice contributions were backing vocal interventions that whipped up the energy of a song, but she’s not a belter, and her performance here is about exploring feelings, not declaring them. The remix job hides that, and makes the song more anonymous. The reference point at the time – thanks partly to the video – was Madonna’s “Ray Of Light”, and that gale force chorus proclamation is probably what the remixed “I Turn To You” needs. But what it actually sounds like is a much more recent hit – Sonique’s mellow, grown-up euphoria on “It Feels So Good”. Echoing one of the year’s top sellers is a sensible move, it confirms Melanie C’s admirable range, but like her other records, it doesn’t make a case for her as a star you might care about beyond the flush of post-Spice goodwill.
Score: 5
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New to me. I liked this more than I was expecting – I think the production convinces me and although I’m not sure Mel C’s voice is a great stylistic fit it might be an imperfect stylistic fit in a way that works. It’s not my kind of thing but it doesn’t seem bad: [5]
Good sleeve.
this sounds to me like a fair-to-middling Eurovision entry – vague, earnest lyrics over a boshing beat and a sprinkle of strings for a touch of class. It’s too bland for me to love or hate so 5 seems about right
“co-produced by hardcore dance legend Rob Playford” this is a shocking revelation to me – worst #1 of the millennium up to this Popular point
It always feels like a collective failure of imagination to me when the fourth (or later) single from an album goes to #1. Sheer dumb luck too.
Well that’s a first. I clicked on here to see if their was a new entry, saw that Rock DJ was still featured so decided I may as well refresh my memory of I Turn To You so that I was ready for the next entry. When I clicked off youtube, the I Turn To You piece was here.
In all honesty it felt a bit like a slipstream number one at the time. Melanie C had started with two moderate hits and everybody was surprised when Never Be The Same Again took off as strongly as it did. It also feels a bit cynical, going after a big summer dance hit at just about the right time.
In chart terms there were a few curious things about this. It was Mel C’s tenth number one, making her the second female to break into double figures and putting her in a tie with her former bandmate. It was also her last hit of any real significance. The fact that the follow up only made number 18 can be excused by the fact she released it over Christmas and was already available on a year old album. However she only troubled the top ten twice more with Here It Comes Again (2003, number seven with a 7-16-27 top forty trajectory) and Next Best Superstar (2005, no 10, 10-30). Both of these songs were the lead off from new albums, both were fanbase hits. In 2000 it felt like she only had to turn up to top the charts. In 2015 she is still making music and maintains a modest following but the wider public has long since ceased to take notice.
Finally in the long run of one week wonders we’re currently discussing it’s worth noting that I Turn To You is the only one that wouldn’t have held the top spot if the week after hadn’t seen any big new releases – it dropped to four with Rock DJ still at three.
Clearly a 4 or 5. If they’d got Bryan Adams to join in it might have been a 7.
The light touch of Mr Playford is really not audible in the single mix, Steve. But you can just about hear it in the album version.
It’s no Bombscare that’s for certain.
The album mix has 50% more streams on Spotify than the Hector Hex radio mix does, so Tom’s (and my) preference seems to be quite widely shared. Decent track in that form, though nothing too exciting. 5 seems about right to me.
fifth single (or thereabouts) from the album was always going to need some backing, but I do still really like this.
Didn’t this mean that as far as ‘count’ was concerned, Mel C was now the top number one songwriter (discounting Beatles)N
Generic, not unpleasant dance pop that anyone could have done anytime in the five years preceding this. But, while Mel C’s voice retains its agreeable fragility, the song is kind of insubstantial, decent to dance to in the main single version, but hardly earthshattering, timeless, stuff. (I quite liked the fifth single, “If That Were Me” the fragility and sensitivity of her voice was put to good work there with the song’s subject matter – it was really rather lovely, if kind of slight)
This one is, however, far superior to Christina Aguliera’s hit of the same name from almost exactly the same time. But of all Mel C’s singles, “Northern Star” shines and stands out, way above all the others, in my book. The constant switching between different styles seems peculiarly ill-advised. (5)
#9 At the time of I Turn To You Ulvaeus/ Andersson had at least twelve at a quick count; nine with Abba, one with Elaine Paige/ Barbara Dickson and covers by Erasure and Westlife.
Unlike almost every other post-Spice solo record, I’m actually familiar with this one. It never reached the Hot 100, but it did get some airplay, and also topped Billboard’s dance chart. I like it a bit more than others here: 7/10.
the comment above about having no set style to the singles so far puts me more in mind of Bjork..
Going Down / Army of me
ITTY / Big time sensuality
Never be the same / Venus as a boy
Northern Star / Play Dead
OK I admit I’m struggling now. But.
Funny, the album version’s really listenable. OK, it’s Metalheads-by-the-yard, but better artists than Mel C have done all right with William Orbit-by-the-yard, to name but one. That would have been a definite 7, although presumably it would never have got to #1 in the first place. But I don’t care what the kids on the street say, that Hector The Inspector NB check this mix is just awful – 3 from me.
I’m still not sure which version of this I prefer. Hector’s mix and the album version both scratch different itches – the latter probably more interesting, the former absolutely exciting. Both are all the better for the strings.
Whatever happened to “First Day Of My Life” though? If memory serves it was a hit everywhere in Europe except here, where it didn’t get released as a single. However, it did make it onto the DAB radio station Life, was on heavy rotation, and was the soundtrack to my pre-university summer, the end of an appendix year thrust upon me by family gaslighting – that it was the first song that played when I turned my radio on upon unpacking it in my room in halls made for one of the most powerful musical memories I will ever have. Would’ve been a case of “I really can’t not give it a 10 even if I should really only stretch to an 8” had it been bunnied.
This? I’ll go as far as a 7.
Id totally forgotten ITTY existed, until I reminded myself via YouTube and the chorus kicks in and it’s classic…”oh, THIS one!”. Yeah, I’m falling in with the consensus here and thinking about the number of different hats she was trying on should be no impediment to success. As far as the average pop punter was concerned, Mel C was covering all bases quite ably, without settling into something that suited her Spice persona. Nevertheless, ITTY, while quite agreeable is nothing special and obviously not unique enough to allow me to recall the song without the necessary prompt…waffle, waffle, blah, blah. (5)
I remember hearing the single at the time and not being at all convinced that her voice was suited to (what I thought was) an ill-judged attempt to jump on the trance bandwagon.
Having only now discovered that this wasn’t the original, I looked that up on YouTube. And, yes, it’s a much better fit, even if the song itself isn’t overly outstanding.
I like ‘I Turn to You’ a lot. The album version is gorgeously Ray of Light-ish, with the opportunistically banging Ibiza-ready remix taking it into the chart’s glory-hunting territory. What’s not to like?
In terms of the previous number ones of 2000, the radio edit builds nicely upon the trance-lite stylings of Chicane, Fragma and Sonique, and (save for a 2002 cover version bunny) is the last pop-trance chart-topper until it resurfaces in a house-flecked iteration in 2009 (under the nauseating EDM label).
Melanie performed it at the Spice Girls’ reunion tour in 2007-08, and it was one of the show’s highlights, given the full Gatecrasher strobes and laser treatment and triumphantly culminating the solo section.
The song is reportedly about her relationship with her mum. This interpretation does away with some of the understandable accusations of lyrical genericness – mums aren’t that well-represented in lyrics to number one singles (Mel had gone there in 1997 with the Girls, of course).
9
I remember Radio 1 playing the first track off Northern Star (Ga Ga) without revealing the singer… As if we’d be unable to recognise those foghorn leghorn vocals. It was never released as a single – which seemed a missed opportunity to me at the time, its Garbage-lite popgrunge sound being a perfect fit for Mel’s confrontational persona and raspy delivery.
Time hadn’t kind to the song, though. And, of the other directions Mel tried on for size, this sort of humanised trance fits best. As Tom says, the album mix is better-paced and more involving. But I’d be happy with most of those 20 remixes.
An aside: I’ve always wondered which of the ex-Spices has the most career longevity (excepting Posh, who’s astonishingly well-regarded for her fashion work)? Mel C tours pretty much constantly, Emma is great on Heart radio, Mel B is part of the global X Factor “family” and Geri is… well, forever Geri. But none of them is quite the global draw we’d have expected at this time in Popular history.
See, the main rule for succeeding with solo albums is: Make it much better than anyone could reasonably expect.
This is why MelC, Robbie and Phil Collins succeeded, and why Gary Barlow, Jarvis and Roger Waters didn’t so much: They made those albums everyone expected.
And when it comes to Girls Aloud, lots of “I fancy you” songs with vids wearing not much tends to get nobody excited really. Half the battle is understanding the music you are making. Cheryl gets underestimated with regard to that.
I’m not sure Cheryl gets underestimated. None of her albums fall into the “better than anyone could have expected” category, for sure. I think her fatal flaw is an underwhelming taste in music. She wants to be a smooth-as-silk R&B singer, when her constituency is girl-next-door pop fans.
Now, Nicola Roberts – there’s the real unappreciated genius of The Aloud.
#21 Nicola Roberts – yes, precisely. If only that album had had a bit more spent on it production-wise (marketing-wise, too) ….well (to judge by the quite, quite, brilliant lead single, which did get the cash and a push),… it would still have been largely ignored…unfortunately
Nicola is certainly the most interesting Aloud, her Cinderella’s Eyes album is ambitiously packed to the brim with brilliantly off-centre production and highly personal lyrics, and was probably just a bit too gloriously odd for the core of the Aloud fanbase to latch on. The relative scale of her bandmates’ ambition is intriguing, with Cheryl blithely picking up the bunnies while seeming not to be particularly bothered about popstardom, Sarah going into acting (a St. Trinian’s reboot; has just started filming Corrie) and Nadine opting for that now much-mocked Tesco distribution deal. Kimberley skipped pop altogether (one dance feature aside), with an album of songs from the stage (after a spell in Shrek the Musical), a what-now? move that Melanie C was able to stave off until her sixth album release (following an Olivier-nominated stint in Blood Brothers and a Jesus Christ Superstar arena tour).
Meanwhile, all but one Spices managed a number one single (we’ll talk about the only one who didn’t very soon in the context of her nemesis – and the final one who did when Popular reaches 2001). All but Mel B managed at least one top ten album, with three of the Girls achieving two (Victoria only released one).
Why such a disparity? Better material? More effort? Greater goodwill towards the Spice Girls? Perhaps it is simply the case that in the industry boom of the late ’90s (and following the group’s unprecedentedly global levels of success) the Spice Force Five were all able to strut into album deals and receive the full weight of major label backing for at least one campaign. There was, according to David Sinclair’s superior Spice Girls biography, a private feeling among Virgin executives that the Northern Star album had received a little too much hard work, and that Melanie’s ensuing disassociation from the group was one reason their ironically named Forever ‘era’ was so short-lived. Again, something to chat about in a couple of Popular months.
With a multi-platinum debut album, two number one singles and huge success in Europe – at this point, the prospect that Mel C would ‘do a Robbie’ really looked like a reality.
But while Robbie’s solo career endured, Mel’s commercial fortunes rapidly collapsed – this was her commercial peak, but it was also her last major UK hit of any note.
What went wrong? It doesn’t really matter that fifth single ‘If That Were Me’ missed the top ten, most fifth singles do. But the “I couldn’t live without my phone / But you don’t even have a home” lyrical clunker was roundly mocked and I think any fragile shred of credibility she’d built up (the media was still predominantly hostile to her – from NME savaging her to the tabloid media criticising her weight) took a major hit that might have coloured what happened next.
What did happen next was that the public just seemed to utterly lose interest. Perhaps it was Spice girl fatigue – the group were on haitus but all five solo careers were operating at once from 1999-2001, and there was a *lot* of material being put out, of wildly varying quality.
Perhaps Mel C’s pop narrative had just reached its natural end point. Robbie’s major selling point has always been his personality, and Mel doesn’t have that same level of charisma. (A pop star with Mel’s talent and Geri’s force of personality could be a force to reckon with indeed. Indeed, that’s kind of what Lady Gaga is/was). She was the talented underdog who deserved her moment, and she got it. After that, what did she have to keep the public engaged?
Which brings us to the music, and perhaps the simple answer is that Mel C never made a better album than Northern Star. ‘Reason’ was a complete commercial disaster, selling less than a tenth of Northern Star’s total in the UK and doing even worse on the continent. But it isn’t a Rudebox-esque folly by any means. It’s just – sort of bland. As I mentioned in the NBTSA thread, the curious thing about Mel C is that she never really attempted to replicate her two biggest hits. There’s no RnB or Euro-dance on ‘Reason’, just a lot of her (presumably) preferred genre of soft rock.
Lead single Here It Comes Again is listenable enough, but it’s one of those songs that tries to feel epic without really earning it. It passed people by – as did the Ronan Keating-esque follow-up ‘On The Horizon’ – which for me features one of her most unpleasantly shrill vocal performances. Whatever the public wanted from Mel C, this wasn’t it.
There are nice moments on the album. Third single ‘Melt’ went totally ignored, but is as lovely as anything on Northern Star and should have been released sooner. ‘Water’ and ‘Home’ are also pretty midtempo moments, but the album clearly lacked in hits.
To her credit, while the rest of the girls only seemed interested in making music for as long as the public were interested in buying it, Mel has ploughed on and quietly built up a small but loyal following. She got a big break in Europe when Enrique Iglesias-penned ‘First Day of My Life’ became a huge hit that strangely never got a push here. She did have one more brief top ten appearance with ‘Next Best Superstar’, which is rather bitter lyrically but actually in my opinion one of the post-Northern Star releases that best fits her voice.
In recent years she seems to have had a modest revival in fortunes with a successful run in Jesus Christ Superstar, tours with Jools Holland and even a return to the top 20 in a duet with Matt Cardle. The impression I get is that people broadly like and respect Mel C – which is more than can be said for her bandmates – but ultimately aren’t terribly invested in her as a recording artist.
Still, she’s worked hard and proven to her many detractors that she actually is a musician first. She’s wealthy enough and has enough of a following that she gets to keep doing what she loves. She may not have had Robbie’s career, but on the whole she seems to have survived pop superstardom pretty well, and proven a lot of people wrong in the process. Good for her.
As for I Turn To You itself, the remix is *very* of it’s time. I think I enjoy both versions about equally. The album version is more powerful, but I’m a sucker for a big turn of the century Euro-banger. The video is unintentionally funny for how uncomfortable she looks – notice all the fast cuts to disguise the fact that she really can’t dance at all.
It’s an 8 for me in either form.
It’s amazing that more care wasn’t taken with that second Mel C album. She had a tremendous chance to really establish herself as a solo star. It took four (?) years to come out, which suggests that maybe too much care was taken with it? Was she involved in a lot of other projects between 1999 and 2003?
This sounds like a passable late 90s trance pop song, and has dated much worse than its cool, slinky rnb tinged parent single.
Northern Star was extensively toured, well into 2001. Melanie then took a bit of time out (having not really stopped work since 1996), met the man with whom she would eventually have her daughter and started writing and recording Reason.
She resurfaced publicly to present an award at the MTV EMAs in November 2002, looking very much like the Sporty of yore (long dark hair, svelte – not that she’d been anything above a size 12 when the tabloids were calling her Sumo Spice), at which point the album was essentially ready to go, with a sampler circulating.
A late 2002 release would have been three years since Northern Star, but Virgin were probably wise to avoid the Christmas rush.
Reason eventually came out in the spring of 2003, with one review at the time describing it as sounding ‘focus-grouped into existence’, a slightly mean but not inaccurate assessment. There are plenty of nice songs on the album but it’s an exercise in blandness, with the edges and miscellany of Northern Star sanded off.
The title track, which was at one point mooted as a single, is a highlight.
2011 album The Sea is the return to Northern Star era form, however, with lead single Think About It a Katy Perryesque pop-rock banger and the most obvious smash a Spice Girl had released in at least five years, long since the ship had sailed for them to actually have hits
There is a surface similarity between Robbie and Mel C (who I believe had a brief fling circa 1997) in that both initially courted an indie audience and both scored their biggest solo hits after an initial wobble. What Robbie got right and Mel C didn’t is that Robbie struck while the iron was hot – I’ve Been Expecting You came out just thirteen months after Life Thru A Lens and indeed he was exceptionally prolific, issuing four studio albums, a covers record and a standalone single in just over five years. By contrast Mel C waited over two years before releasing new material and, as #24 noted above, didn’t seem to go after the right audience.
It’s also worth noting that the Spice Girls never formally disbanded, announcing an `indefinite hiatus` at the end of 2000 (obviously on the other side of a bunny). Perhaps this meant that their solo stuff still felt like side projects.
Perhaps the Spice Girls name was kept on the back burner in case the solo stuff had really bombed.
I remember in Q’s* ‘You ask the questions’ someone told Mark E Smith that they had a mate in marketing who reckoned he should very publicly disband The Fall, do low-key solo projects for five years then stage a reunion and sell ten times as many records/gig tickets. MES inevitably disagreed, saying “Most people think we split up years ago, anyway.”
*I always seem to be quoting from Q on here which is odd as I must have bought about half a dozen copies in my life.
Ironically enough when the Spice Girls eventually attempted a reunion, to say it bombed was an understatement.
That’s not strictly fair. The 2007 world tour was a huge success, it’s just the limp single that sank without trace.
And y’know, the Olympics was a pretty big moment…
Indeed, the tour was extended so much in Europe (19 dates at the O2, three in Manchester), and North America that announced dates in South America, Africa, Asia and Australia were postponed indefinitely and then cancelled.
Apparently the reunion was agreed under a strict window of time imposed by band members who wanted to get back to their solo projects (Posh and Sporty spring to mind). This left plenty of time to complete the initial itinerary, but with the excess of demand in England, the U.S. and Canada it made a great deal of sense to milk the opportunity: profits are obviously more generous when travel and set transportation costs are lower, and eventually time ran out to get everywhere to which they’d committed.
The scale of this demand clearly hadn’t been anticipated, and the organisation was a bit of a mess in that respect – the tour ended so promptly that the show wasn’t professionally recorded, missing an obvious opportunity for broadcast and DVD revenue (footage from the big screens was later leaked).
Many fans in the countries who’d been scheduled a visit were pissed off at this broken promise, as by the time the cancellation was announced they didn’t have a chance to organise a trip to Europe or North America (a trip many diehards would certainly have made with proper notice).
So yes, an enormous success, but little comfort to a Spice Girls fan in Sydney or Cape Town.
On the obligatory new content front, ‘Headlines (Friendship Never Ends)’ had a sweet sentiment and some gorgeous vocals from Emma, but lacked a killer chorus. There’s also a rushed sense to it, with the feeling that a second verse is missing: Mel C’s bit, one of the few moments the song comes to life, sounds more like a middle-eight, and Mel B is reduced to one solo line, closing the song. This uneven distribution is probably because only Emma and Geri (who get more lines than anyone, and it’s really not a stellar performance from poor Geri) were involved in the initial creative process with longtime collaborator Biff Stannard (paparazzi shots of the two leaving his Brighton studio all hugs and grins were hugely exciting at the time for fans… until we heard the song).
The video was bizarre too, friendship depicted by the Girls mostly in separate shots in which they moodily model the type of ‘saucy’ lingerie you might see in Victoria’s Secret.
Mere months after the tour ended, Mel C appeared on Never Mind the Buzzcocks and was quick to distance herself from the song, though if it had reached number one instead of no.11 perhaps this wouldn’t have been the case (she also gritted her teeth when recalling that the tour had lasted “Six months. Six. Months.”, hinting at a kernel of truth the rumours of disharmony towards the end of their reunion). It was a notably low charter for a Children in Need single, as well as an enormous flop by the Spice Girls’ own standards, but there wasn’t much promotional activity to speak of.
Anyway, ‘Headlines’ is a minor classic next to Greatest Hits album track ‘Voodoo’, a song for which the term “organised fun” might well have been coined. A limp, lifeless and unconvincing party track set to a weak disco-funk pastiche track.
The Girls’ collaborators have suggested that there are plenty of unreleased gems in the vaults, so why these couldn’t have been repurposed instead is beyond me. Perhaps titles such as ‘C. U. Next Tuesday’ and ‘Feed Your Love’ (from the first album sessions) were still considered too adult for the group’s fanbase in 2007, a time when the youngest would still have been teens.
A tranches of demos from Forever leaked a couple of months ago. Three pretty dire songs and the superior Eliot Kennedy original mix of ‘Right Back at Ya’, which was blanded out by Darkchild for the album.
Curiously, in a climate where leaks, particularly where hacking is involved, are increasingly (and rightly) seen as unethical, Biff spends a lot of time Instagramming photos of DATs labelled “Victoria unreleased”, “Spice unreleased” etc., some even with song titles, which serve only to bait the fans…
We’re perhaps getting a bit ahead of ourselves as I’m itching to discuss the next Spice bunny along. Maybe `bombed` was too harsh an assessment of the comeback tour but by the time 2007 came around it was obvious what the mark for a sensational comeback was and the Spices didn’t really come close.
Yes, and no.
Take That’s chart comeback was absolutely spectacularly played, with great songs, a brilliant rebrand as serious artistes in a Radio 2 mould and superb marketing (I’ll stop there so as not to jump the bunny).
But their resurgent success (touring included) was contained almost exclusively in the UK, Ireland and a handful of mainland European countries. In 1995, at least, they had toured Australia and East Asia.
The Spice Girls, however, were always a global affair: look not only at the box office for the US-Canada dates in 2007-08 (and that dates in every continent were initially planned), but to the fact that their Olympic Closing Ceremony performance was the most tweeted event of the entire 2012 Games, at 116,000 tweets per minute worldwide.
(You’ve probably guessed that I’m one of those diehard fans I refer to in an earlier post, but I promise I’m trying my best to be objective!)
‘Headlines’ was an unmitigated disaster.
The Spice Girls’ Greatest Hits album, which boasted little content most fans wouldn’t already own (two songs, or five for those who hadn’t owned Forever or its singles), is estimated to have shipped 7 million copies worldwide, with 300,000 shipped in the UK. However, it peaked at no.2 in the UK, the second time a Spice Girls album was pipped by a Simon Cowell product.
On the other hand, Take That managed to shift 2.2m copies of their repurposed greatest hits collection Never Forget in the UK alone in 2005, with just one new song (‘Today I’ve Lost You’ – cleverly not released as a single), a live rendition of ‘Pray’ and a dodgy ‘Relight My Fire’ remix. These substitutions made for a few minor hits aside, the CD is identical to 1995’s Greatest Hits, which itself had done over a million.
Then again, there would perhaps be more appeal in a TT hits compilation? Their first three studio albums had sold combined, in the UK, half of the Spices’ first two combined.
So, basically, “Headlines” was more a commercial/infoblip for the reunion/tour rather than a song for the kids to sing with their friends.
We are getting a bit ahead of ourselves but by the time we get to the next Take That bunny we’ll have forgotten this discussion.
I must admit that the impression I got at the time was that the Spice Girls assumed what worked for Take That would work for them. Boyzone also attempted a comeback around the same time and did rather better than the Spices, if rather worse than Take That.
I suppose that in 2006/07 the Spice Girls’ various solo careers were still trundling along. By contrast Take That had two members with faltering solo careers and two who were never likely to have a solo career which made the comeback narrative more remarkable.
Perhaps more critically the Spice Girls’ reunion saw a once estranged member return meekly to the fold. By contrast Take That had a renegade member very much in the limelight and still occasionally flashing two fingers at them – I remember James Masterton noting at the time that the possibility of an eventual five piece reunion gave Take That an ace still to play.
I still think we’re comparing two very different comebacks, or at least comparing the Spice nostalgia reunion to TT’s new material, which came later.
The first Take That reunion tour was, like the Spice Girls’, a greatest hits exercise; the only difference between the two is that the Girls released their new song as a single to limited success and TT kept theirs as an album track where it didn’t have a chance to succeed or fail on its own terms. (‘Today I’ve Lost You’ might well have been a number one of course, but it equally could have been number 11 – at a guess, at least a top 5 would have been probable, but it’s got absolutely nothing on their bunnied hits of 2006, 2007, 2008 or 2014.)
The phenomenal demand of TT’s 2006 tour (11 arena dates across the UK that were extended to 27; five stadium dates added) was the realisation that there was still huge demand for the band, which prompted them to write and record Beautiful World.
This might always have been their plan, but it was never the Spice Girls’, who had made it clear in the press conference announcing the reunion that there wouldn’t be a new album; it was an opportunity to perform for their fans again and get to the places they’d never toured before (that they ended up not doing so was unfortunate; I outlined earlier why this happened).
IIRC Mel C even made clear shortly after the tour that the new material was a contractual obligation in order to make the hits package more appealing. Obvious upon listening to it, you might counter – but not many popstars would admit it.
I think at the time Take That very much tried to play the RW card (or it was played on their behalf), rather than calculating it would be shrewd to play this ace in the future.
It was by no means certain that a TT reunion would be a success, however looking back and taking the music they subsequently brought out into consideration, you don’t really get that impression. I remember the ITV documentary that helped to announce their reunion. It very much presented TT as a 90’s curiosity who were taking the gamble to return. The central plank of the programme was that ‘mega-star’ Robbie Williams might co-operate with the reunion and grace it with his presence. The programme seemed to suggest this was the only way TT would again be a success (as well him once being in the group seeming to be the only reason ITV were making the documentary).
You wouldn’t have guessed at the time that TT would be so successful again while RW’s profile would slide somewhat, to the point where it became a good career move for him to go back to them for an album.
When you consider the other 90’s pop group reunions (East 17, Steps, to name but two), the quality or critical response to the songs is what really makes Take That’s a success. I think their ace was having somebody who actually wrote the songs and therefore was more in control of correlating the tone of the music to their situation. Are their many reunions that are successful where the protagonists don’t write their own material?
I also think it’s worth noting that The Spice Girls very much seemed to assume and act as though it was inevitable that their reunion would be a success. As the BB4 documentary at the weekend noted, TT were very self-deprecating about themselves which seemed to get the press onside.
#38 yes, there is an excruciating scene in the TT documentary where the four arrive one by one at an old country pile to get in a room together, chat about the old days and essentially see if they could stand each other’s company enough to consider a tour (Steps copied this very format in 2011).
Unless it was staged (and who knows), they are waiting for Robbie to drop by – and eventually are told that he won’t be coming, but – hey! – he’s recorded a video message, in which one by one he addresses the ‘lads’. It’s really quite painful to watch.
His contribution to the Ultimate Tour in 2006 was to film a few lines of ‘Could It Be Magic’ in almost comically sombre, torch song style, which were projected as a hologram at the beginning of the encore. At the show I saw this received one of the loudest screams of a rather scream-heavy evening.
The 2010 reunion of the original line-up was filmed for a seriousface b&w documentary Look Back but Don’t Stare, which makes for fascinating viewing: the creative and personal tensions between five men approaching middle age, thrown together at audition 20 years previously, reforging friendships and recording an album entirely secretly – ostensibly to save the surprise of RW rejoining, but presumably also to reduce the pressure of what would have been considerable fan expectation. (I think it a real shame that ‘The Flood’ is unbunnied, incidentally; one of my favourite songs Barlow or Williams have ever done, group or solo)
Just picking up on some of the points above, it’s worth noting that Today I’ve Lost you was an unreleased song rather than a new recording.
By the time the Spice Girls announced their return Take That had two bunnies and a massive selling album under their belts. While it could be argued that the Spice Girls initially stated there wouldn’t be a new album; had Headlines been a massive number one smash and they’d decided to do a new album after all I don’t think anyone would have condemned them for broken promises.
Regarding Take That, Nigel Martin-Smith famously refused to get involved with the comeback tour, saying that nobody would be interested. Robbie Williams was always going to be the elephant in the room but; perhaps at the same time the Take That/ Robbie Williams relationship had always been a parasitic one even during the years when Take That were inactive. Robbie Williams was still referencing his sacking by the band in song as late as 2006 and any Take That comeback was always going to face comparison with Robbie’s stellar career.
If I recall that documentary Robbie Williams was invited to meet up with his old bandmates and, after a bit of would he, wouldn’t he, declined at the last minute – the disappointment on their faces obvious. However he did send a video message wishing them well – who would have thought then that five years later he’d return almost as a supplicant.
#40 that is true; likewise TT probably wouldn’t have pressed ahead with a new album if the reunion hits tour had flopped. I think it obvious that ‘Headlines’ was a contractual afterthought.
‘Today I’ve Lost You’ was both an unreleased song and a new recording. It had been demoed in 1995, but was properly recorded in 2005.
I think we might have to agree to differ slightly as I remain convinced that with Headlines the Spice Girls thought they could (and perhaps would) achieve the same success as second phase Take That. I would also point out that this was not the first time that the Spices attempted to fob off their fans with inferior product but our discussion of the first example isn’t that far off now.
#42 fair, but even if they did think ‘Headlines’ was headed straight for the top (and perhaps they did arrogantly assume so), it would have been a one-off hurrah – no studio album would have followed. During the tour, Simon Fuller’s wheels were well in motion for the first season of Victoria Beckham’s fashion line to launch months after the tour ended; a far more lucrative project than any other solo activities pursued by the group.
As mentioned in #38, for me the key difference between the two reunions and their varying levels of success was TT having an established songwriter in their ranks. Mr. Barlow has recieved a bit of kicking in the comments for his 1996/7 number ones, but for me he is one of the finest pop songwriters Britain has ever produced. Even if the reunion tour had been a middling success, the strength of most of those songs on Beautiful World would have convinced someone to release them in some format.
That 2005 doc is interesting in that it presents Barlow as a bit of a joke, a portly northern joker type, compared with Robbie charming slickness- but then at the end Barlow is shown in a terrifically warm family environment, a sharp contrast to the ‘lonely icon’ Robbie, as witnessed in his ‘Nobody Someday’ doc. Maybe this portrayal of TT as likeable losers helped their comeback, whereas the spices were seen (maybe apart from Emma) as a bit distant and foreign, and the warmth toward them just wasn’t there.
#44 Being a bit pedantic but Gary Barlow wasn’t the songwriter on his 1997 number one. I might be opening a can of worms with this one but phase 2 Take That songs have always been credited to the band plus co-writers making it hard to ascertain who wrote what or how much outside help was needed – this needs to be seen in the context that in the nineties Barlow insisted a Robbie penned rap was struck off a track so he didn’t have to share a royalty.
This probably belongs in discussion of an early 2007 bunny but another interesting point about phase 2 Take That is Mark Owen’s increased role – in the nineties he was almost like Ringo in being allowed to sing one song per album, in the noughties he’s almost a co-vocalist and my personal opinion is that 2008 non bunny aside the band are strongest when he’s in the ascendancy.
Yes Owen’s role is clearly greater in phase 2, the hidden track on ‘Progress’ – ‘Flowerbed’ might be one of the loveliest things they’ve ever done. He moves up from Ringo to George, if you will…
#46 ‘Flowerbed’ is Jason Orange! (and quite wonderful it is too)
Mark’s solo track on Progress is ‘What Do You Want from Me’ (he shares ‘SOS’ with Robbie and ‘Kidz’ with Gary)
Is that the “I still want to have sex with you” song?
uddh…
Yes, it’s about his wife after his affair was revealed. The lyrics are obviously very personal but it’s almost a bit too much: http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/takethat/whatdoyouwantfromme.html
The recording session, in the Look Back but Don’t Stare documentary, is quite hard to watch.
I can’t stand Mark’s vocals a lot of the time, I must confess.
I wouldn’t have had ITTY as a number 1 at all and it’s something I must admit largely passed me by at the time.
Giving it a play now and whilst it’s better than I could have expected it’s perhaps a bit lost on Mel C and could be more memorbale if given to someone more suited to this kind of thing.Can’t help but hear a bit of Cascada in all of this.5 is right for this.
Mel C appeared to be trying on several different hats in search of an identity but she lacked the force of personality that other Spice Girls had. She wasnt tabloid fodder like Geri, fashion/pop culture ice queen like Victoria, the slightly cooler big sister like Mel B so other than the first year of goodwill there wasn’t far for Mel C to go.