Happy 20th birthday poptimism UK, love Girls Aloud

While American journalists tie themselves up in knots about the whys and wherefores of poptimism, in the UK the tipping point for the critical appreciation of pop music can be dated back to November 2004, when Girls Aloud released their second album, What Will The Neighbours Say.

OK, there were already some hints of a shift in critical thinking before that. Popjustice launched in 2000 bringing humour and sharp cultural analysis to pop music journalism, while Justin Timberlake’s Justified in 2002 and Britney Spears’ In The Zone in 2003 were both critical and commercial hits.

But it was What Will the Neighbours Say that really brought home to British music journalists the idea that pop music was worthy of the same kind of critical respect that rock music had long enjoyed. And — hand wringing aside — Girls Aloud’s second album did it by simply being more interesting, more inventive and damn sight more fun than most rock music out there. For electronic music fans, meanwhile, the record was fascinating for the way it chewed up contemporary trends in dance music and spat them back out, in its own unique way.

You could say that Girls Aloud had poptimism beamed into their core, their whole career being an A/B Test of old pop versus new, sludge versus charm and tried and tested versus originality. The group — Cheryl Tweedy, Nadine Coyle, Sarah Harding, Nicola Roberts and Kimberley Walsh — was formed on the 2002 TV show Pop Stars: The Rivals, which shook up the traditional winner-takes-all format of the TV talent show by producing one boy band — One True Voice — and one girl band — Girls Aloud — who would them compete for the Christmas number one single.

One True Voice lost both the battle and the war, releasing a couple of singles before fading into obscurity, while Girls Aloud recorded five blockbusting albums and have reunited for an arena tour in May.

That One True Voice were so brain-bendingly dull isn’t really their fault. 2002 was not a good time for pop music in the UK, a point that Brian Higgins, leader of the Xenomania production house that would later work with Girls Aloud to such incredible effect, emphasised when I interviewed him for Music Week in 2007. “When we made our breakthrough as producers in 2002, pop music was largely on its arse and the last thing it needed was another formulaic pop song or producer,” he said.

The music that One True Voice were given to record in 2002 was the absolute epitome of the faceless pop that rockism (correctly) railed against. It was all so safe: disco with curved edges and flame-repellant fabrics that couldn’t have caught fire in a foundry.

Girls Aloud were always going to look interesting by comparison. And it helped that they were immediately teamed up with Xenomania, who had enjoyed success with Sugababes’ Round Round earlier that year. The result was Sound of the Underground, Girls Aloud’s sparkling debut single, which welded drum & bass-inspired beats to twanging surf guitar, riding its way to number one in the process.

Sound of the Underground, the album that followed in summer 2003, was promising — No Good Advice is a peach of a track — but was let down somewhat by a number of weak, non-Xenomania tracks. “The first album was this hodgepodge of songs,” Peter Loraine, head of marketing at Girls Aloud’s record label Polydor told The Independent recently. “I would put my neck on the line and say probably only 50% per cent are good enough.”

Sure enough, Girls Aloud’s debut sold just about well enough to lead to a follow up but not so well that Polydor could simply repeat the formula. This, it turned out, was a very good thing, with Xenomania coming in for the entirety of Girls Aloud’s second album.

“Colin Barlow [head of A&R at Polydor] phoned me and said: ‘You’ve got to make this whole album for it to work,’ Higgins told The Independent. “It was a shock to me because we were used to competing with producers from Sweden left, right and centre.”

I’ve mentioned above that you can date the birth of poptimism in the UK to November 2004, when What Will The Neighbours Say was released. But you could, perhaps, go slightly further backwards in time, to September 2004, when Love Machine, the second single from What Will The Neighbours Say, followed The Show, the album’s first single, into the charts.

Between the two of them — plus Wake Me Up, single number four, and Graffiti My Soul, an album track that was written for, and rejected by, Britney Spears — you have pretty much everything that was so great about the Girls Aloud / Xenomania combo.

(Single number three was a cover of The Pretenders’ I’ll Stand By You. You can just ignore Girls Aloud’s covers. They were a necessary evil, whose chart success gave the band more leeway to do whatever the hell they wanted.)

What was it that made Girls Aloud and Xenomania so special? On a very basic level, they had fantastic hooks and melodies, which could lift you up, drop you down, kick out your legs and raise a melancholy sigh. Whatever else they might do, the melody was always key for Xenomania.

“I think that whatever scene is providing the best melodies, they are going to be enjoying the lion’s share of success,” Higgins said, when I interviewed him for Music Week. “Over the last few years that has come through singer-songwriters and bands. Traditional pop had become a fat, bloated, lazy thing and was ready to be taken over.

What Will The Neighbours Say is stuffed full of great melodies. But let me direct you to 17 seconds into The Show where the pre-verse (perhaps?? These things are quite complex, as we will see) comes in and the song immediately drops into a deep blue well of inescapable sadness. It is brilliant.

Allied to this are incredibly sharp lyrics, largely written by another important part of the Xenomania team, Miranda Cooper, who met Higgins in 1997. (Girls Aloud themselves also contributed to the lyric writing, which is very important, as it meant the songs felt right for them.)

There are moments of sweet profundity throughout the Girls Aloud catalogue. In Love Machine, for example, I adore the storytelling power of the lines “I need a squeeze a day, ‘stead of this negligee / What will the neighbours say, this time?”, which seem to tell a whole tale in just 17 words.

The words often have an incredibly rhythm to them, too, which Cooper insisted that the group get just right. “I was obsessed with the ‘shoulda known, shoulda cared, shoulda hung around the kitchen in my underwear’ part [of The Show],” she told The Independent. “I was such a stickler with the diction and the timing on that.”

And you can see why: the rhythm of that line is as important as a drum track. Or how about this, from Love Machine? “Your call’s late, big mistake / You gotta hang about the limo for as long as I take / Next time, read my mind and I’ll be good to you.” The way the second line of the three rattles up the song’s tempo is fantastically exciting.

At times in the Girls Aloud catalogue, these dazzling melodies would be attached to fairly classical song structures — like the Motown-y The Promise from 2008. Often though, they weren’t, as Xenomania rode roughshod over songwriting convention in the name of ever bigger hooks. The Show, for example, is structured something like this: intro, pre-verse, A verse, B verse, chorus, A verse, B verse, chorus, bridge / breakdown, pre-verse, fade. (I would love to see the Switched On Pop team set their sights on Girls Aloud.)

And, rather than each section being merely a precursor to the killer chorus, every single part of the song is immaculate, with the pre-verse being my particular favourite part of the song. This is something that happens again and again with Girls Aloud: your favourite bit of the song might be the chorus, bridge, verse, pre-chorus or whatever, which is a wonderful thing.

“Call The Shots [from Girls Aloud’s fourth album, Tangled Up] is a fairly conventional pop song, with verse, chorus, verse, etc as is Sound Of The Underground,” Higgins told me. “The more complex side has just evolved as we have tried to make better records, but it is not something we feel compelled to do. [Sugababes’] Round Round is very odd, there is a tempo change and few repetitive melodies but that was still an international hit. At the time, we thought, we can do this our way and still be successful.

“If you listen to The Police and Bowie you realise that in a lot of their greatest hits the verse melodies never repeated. Non-traditional structure has been done very successfully before, but you have to genuinely feel it — I do not think you can copy it if you do not think in that way.”

These unique structures were partly a result of the way that Xenomania wrote, as Higgins told me. “We have the desire to make something stand out from the crowd but be totally accessible at the same time,” he said. “I guess we do work in fragments. It can be slightly uncomfortable for artists, but I am always confident that we can make that record work in a final delivery situation. We don’t do demos, as it were, the record and final version of the song are made on the hoof. It’s part of the challenge and completely exciting.”

“The recording process meant that you never heard the song in full until it was done,” Girls Aloud’s Nicola Roberts told the Independent. “Love Machine would have been 18 parts long, and we’d sing it in five different keys.”

“People don’t know that’s how the songs were made,” Roberts added. “Brian sat in his purple chair going, ‘There’s that chorus from that song we wrote eight years ago, let’s see if we can make it work with that pre-chorus we wrote 10 years ago that Cher recorded, or that one Britney did.’”

“It took about six weeks to nail the structure of The Show,” Higgins told The Independent. “All the parts are so odd.”

Not everyone got it. “We were listening to Radio 1 one day and they had a panel of commentators discussing new singles — including The Show,” Higgins continued. “[All Saints’s] Shaznay Lewis was on and she said, ‘I just don’t get that one, it’s like four songs?’”

Xenomania also took inspiration from some pretty weird sources. “With Love Machine, it ended up sounding like The Smiths bumping into The Sweet,” Higgins told me. These were not, it should be said, typical inspirations for pop songwriters in 2004. Nor were drum & bass and surf guitar, which they used on Sound of The Underground. And so on. (Incidentally, if you’re wondering what an Arctic Monkeys cover of Love Machine might sound like, you’re in luck.)

“Our sound is a mish mash of lots of things,” Higgins told me. “As a producer you can either say we are going to make a record just like X, which we have never done, or we can allow our natural influences to bubble up during the process, confident that at some stage the effort will pay off — this is the much more exciting way. Anything that is going on in the charts, we will deliberately avoid.”

Modern electronic music was one of the big inspirations on Xenomania. As mentioned, you can hear the influence of drum & bass on Sound of The Underground and — especially — on Live in the Country, one of my favourite Girls Aloud songs, taken from their fifth album, Out of Control.(The song’s lyrics, about a rich city dweller who decides to go and live in the country, are a hilarious and very sharply observed take on the British obsession with country living, as well as Girls Aloud’s own reputation as party girls.)

Live in the Country starts with a note-perfect impersonation of the creepy / heavy sound of Pendulum etc. that was then the dominant force in drum & bass, including distorted break and eerie synth drone, a fact that I mention not because Xenomania care for that type of authenticity — authenticity to the song is the only kind of authenticity that counts — but because it shows them spreading the inspirational carpet far and wide.

A quivering bass line takes the song off into poppier territory but the sound continues to borrow heavily from drum & bass, right down to the brief Bodyrock-inspired shuffle that was also de rigueur in drum & bass at the time.

Back in 2004, The Show’s bridge / breakdown borrows heavily from the moddish Alan Braxe and Fred Falke French house sound, with an eye-watering synth hook and delicate ‘oohs’ à la Intro. Fred Falke later went on to work extensively with Xenomania, which shows how deep the connection went.

And if you’re after a hard, pumping house beat, then Wake Me Up has an absolute doozy, hitting like one of those relentless New York drum line of the 90s. (Interestingly, the “dance” remixes of Girls Aloud’s music, often done by Xenomania themselves under the nom de plume Tony Lamezma, tend to be far less interesting then the original songs, with remixes typically upping the pump and ironing out the kinks.)

The team there were also expert in putting together these influences in unexpected shapes and oddball juxtapositions. “We don’t want anything to do with what’s already out there,” Higgins told me. “We want to find something that is our own sound or unique to the artist. I think there are often many influences going on in our records but it is the hybrid that creates the originality.”

And boy do Girls Aloud have some fascinating hybrids. Wake Me Up combines that thumping house beat with a garage rock guitar line, a little like Justice avant la lettre, while 2005’s Biology mixes rockabilly guitar with Hi-NRG rush and a chorus that borrows from Motown. 2008’s Rolling Back the Rivers in Time, meanwhile, manages to combine Burt Bacharach-ish songwriting with a New Order bass line in a gorgeous hybrid.

(The love went both ways: New Order were Girls Aloud fans and the group eventually worked with Xenomania, although the results were never released.)

Girls Aloud would go on to make five albums, before going on hiatus in 2009, periodically reforming for gigs ever since. Xenomania, meanwhile, would work with all kinds of glorious pop acts, including Pet Shop Boys Kylie Minogue and Saint Etienne. But they arguably never quite reached the same creative heights as they did with Girls Aloud, a beautiful example of mutual inspiration and creative understanding.

Poptimism, meanwhile, went on to become mainstream critical thinking, to the extent where the new Beyoncé album, Cowboy Carter, is pretty much guaranteed to be album of the year in most 2024 run downs.

For all the justified criticism of poptimist thinking, Beyoncé deserves it. And so, all those years ago, did Girls Aloud, their music full of the brightest of hooks, the twistiest of turns and the weirdest juxtapositions ever to head up the charts. In many ways, Girls Aloud sound very 2000s, their music a reflection of the times they loved in; in others, it feels very relevant to the modern day where genre boundaries have fallen and Beyoncé can make a country / Riverdance / house hybrid and no one bats an eyelid.

Girls Aloud and Xenomania made the case for poptismism in 2004 by simply being better than anyone else; not so much pop optimism, then, as pop realism. They were better than Westlife and their rottingly inoffensive pop mush; better than Pendulum and their godawful heavy metal drum & bass; better than Razorlight and their messianic indie blanditities; better than Interpol and their Joy Division knock offs; better than the Killers and their reheated Britpop; better than Fischerspooner and their empty electroclash; better than endless minimal techno; better than the Ordinary effing boys and…. well, you get the picture.

“The only thing we have wilfully tried to achieve over the last six years is that none of the records would ever repeat themselves,” Higgins concluded, when I spoke to him in 2007. “I accept that you cannot hide your identity from the records you make, but I reject completely the idea that you should roll out a formula sound for each artist you work with — I think that leads to short careers and burn out, or a collection of very dull records. I am determined to try and push for new, exciting ideas whenever possible.”

Which is surely a statement that even the rock-iest rockist would have to agree with.

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