British Pop Hit Its Endearingly Crap Peak with Girls Aloud

Somehow 15 years have passed since VICE arrived in London and the editors would have to push piles of magazines around the city asking pubs to please take them. Since then we've grown, conceiving tiny content babies that have grown into leading industry voices (see us, here – Noisey – recklessly tooting our own horn). To mark this anniversary, this week VICE UK is throwing a bunch of events and we're running a series of content about a time in British music that most of us shouldn't, but weirdly do, struggle to remember.

The year is 2001, the show is Irish Popstars, and a 16-year-old from County Derry, Northern Ireland named Nadine Coyle is lying through her teeth. Irish Popstars seeks members for a new pop group via open auditions. According to the show’s rules, you must be at least 18, not 16, to apply. Nadine, therefore, has fucked it.

Having earned a place in the band – which ends up creatively named ‘Six,’ because there are Six members, don't you see – Nadine gives an interview where she states her actual date of birth instead of the one she’s made up on her application forms. When questioned, she puts up a decent fight, faking the sort of incredulity usually reserved for pretending to be shocked that your housemate’s hummus has gone missing when you know you got in drunk and helped yourself the night before, or screaming “I was holding onto them for someone!” when your mum finds your Year 10 cigarettes in your schoolbag. But she is soon trapped, a victim of her own web of lies – a dishonest spider of a human, lost and broken.

The extremely serious narration states: “While the cameras were not rolling, Nadine finally broke down and confessed to Linda that her real date of birth was the 15th of June, 1985.” In an act of acute 2001-ness, Nadine is carted off in a people carrier with blacked-out windows, sobbing. She is no longer One of the Six. In its tragic mundanity it’s like a scene from a disaster movie directed by Ricky Gervais circa The Office – in that moment, she is a mascara-teared butterfly, crushed on the wheel of pop. However, all things considered, this is the best thing that will ever happen to Nadine Elizabeth Louise Coyle.

Irish Popstars wasn’t the first TV talent search. In the UK, Pop Idol and Popstars – which introduced Gareth Gates and Hear’Say respectively – had come the year earlier, ferreting their way into the hearts and wallets of the viewing and music-consuming public (votes cost £1 from a landline, please ask the bill payer’s permission).

Crucially, however, Irish Popstars was a precursor to Popstars: The Rivals, which aired between September and December 2002, and formed two groups – a girl band and a boyband – who Battled It Out for the coveted UK Christmas number 1 chart spot. The age limit for the show was 16, not 18 – and this, of course, allowed a certain Ms Coyle to return, a phoenix from the ashes, if phoenixes were newly 17, and slathered in Collection 2000 lipgloss. She was victorious, and joined the girl band Girls Aloud along with Sarah Harding, Cheryl Tweedy, Nicola Roberts and Kimberly Walsh from Bolton after a public vote. They became, as I’m sure you know, far more successful than Six.

Their competition, the boyband One True Voice (quite Scientology vibes init) was, in the nicest way possible, a washout. Their single was called “Sacred Trust,” and it sounded like a hymn written by a youth pastor named Todd. If I’m honest though, part of me thinks One True Voice were stitched up – the song they had to contend against could never have failed. It was like making a Pomeranian fight a pitbull with an uncanny ear for a hook. Girls Aloud’s first single, 2002’s Christmas number 1, was “Sound of the Underground,” and it was a cultural behemoth.

“Sacred Trust” didn’t have a chance. Along with “Round Round” by the Sugababes, which reached number 1 in August 2002, “Sound of the Underground” was part of the UK production team Xenomania’s hijack of the charts. And while both tracks definitely sounded new and exciting at the time (and for my money, they both still stand up), in context, they didn’t have much to beat, coming as they did during a year dominated by novelty music and Will Young and Gareth Gates’ respective post- Pop Idol warblings.

I was eight years old when “Sound of the Underground” was released, and I was transfixed by it, hypnotised in particular by its music video. It comprised pretty simple stuff – black and pink outfits, a cellar (because it’s underground, OK? Never mind that they’ve just won a major television talent show, never bloody mind that). And of course, it contained some admittedly impressive microphone choreography that will remain burned on my brain until I die, because of the time my friend Declan and I copied it off the TV in his living room with brooms.

And that’s the thing about it really. There’s something about the image of the two of us precociously shimmying round a mop in Declan’s living room – he had MTV, I didn’t – which seems hilariously fitting in the context of what Girls Aloud meant then, and what they’ve come to mean now. It’s just so gloriously banal, and somehow specifically British. The tableau makes sense to me because, looking back, there is something endearingly crap about Girls Aloud. To the credit of their songwriters, and due to their chemistry as a group, they made bangers on bangers, but there’s also something fundamentally ordinary about these five girls from all over the country, four of whom can’t really sing, stood there in a line in their black and pink, as if they're waiting to get into a high street club called Jinx because there’s a good deal on Apple Sourz. What I’m saying is, really, at its heart, Girls Aloud's is a story that could only ever have ended with Sarah Harding going on Celebrity Big Brother in 2017 and doing a ‘version’ of “Hero” by Mariah Carey clutching a wine a bit too tight, isn’t it? Kitsch, camp, low-budget: all values our tiny island holds dear.

Pop stars aren’t really like this anymore, for better or worse. The internet has globalised the music industry; UK groups like Little Mix have found their way into markets like the US in a way Girls Aloud never could have (they didn’t even ever properly release an album in North America). British pop has had to broaden its horizons, and because of that, it’s glossier now, and, on the whole, withstanding a few outliers (“Pure Shores”; Mutya from the Sugababes), it’s better. Groups actually sing harmonies, and British pop stars use their own accents rather than defaulting to Americanisms much more commonly. While Ed Sheeran is a scourge he’s also a very British one – there’s no other country that finds ordinariness so appealing; nowhere but the UK would have made a man who looks like he lives at an open mic night a star.

We like to be comforted, you see. The old guard of this professionally uncool, specifically British pop star who could just as easily be someone you know from work as someone you see on TV is definitely still about, make no mistake. These days, however, it’s now represented mostly by white men, like Robbie Williams and Olly Murs, or all the TV presenters whose albums you keep buying your mum for her birthdays.

Elsewhere, our younger musicians from Stormzy, to Mabel, to Charli XCX, have brought an authenticity to British popular music that was missing in the early 2000s – they’re not simulating coolness; they actually are cool. It’s an interesting transition, and one that has certainly come from changes in the music industry, made possible by the internet, whereby anyone can make music, and if it’s good people will hear it. It’s a far better environment than the one we had when Pop Idol and Popstars began, where people like Pete Waterman sat about in offices and decided what the youth wanted. The people making mainstream music in the UK are, more and more, the actual peers of those who consume it.

All this said, however, I feel a definite warmth towards Girls Aloud and “Sound of the Underground”. They and Popstars: The Rivals in particular represented a necessary transition period in British pop – it was tacky, sure, but it was also delightfully British. It was Davina McCall hopping about on a TV set that looked like you could punch a hole through it; it was Ofcom having to launch an inquiry into the final result of the show because the tabloids kicked up a fuss. And, maybe most of all, it was Nadine Coyle, grimly determined to Be a Popstar no matter how much she had to lie on the telly: silly, far more dramatic than it ever deserved to be, and unbelievably entertaining.

You can find Lauren on Twitter.

This article is part of VICE UK’s 15th anniversary series, presented by VANS