11 January 2003
Girls Aloud are the best pop group of the last twenty years, and the string of ’00s singles they had with the writer-producer team of Xenomania is the most thrilling catalogue of chart hits since ’80s Madonna and Prince. ‘Biology’: the song with four choruses! ‘Call The Shots’ and ‘Can’t Speak French’: worthy of top-tier ABBA! ‘Something Kinda Ooooh’: uproarious fizz! ‘The Show’: sass in a bottle! ‘The Loving Kind’: bittersweet and sumptuous! ‘The Promise’: lush, sparkling neo-Motown! That’s an incredible body of work. It would be silly to dismiss Girls Aloud as TV talent show alumni; if your favourite indie band has a record contract, then they’ve gone through the same music industry machinations and have at least one Pete Best who just didn’t look the part. Likewise, Miranda Cooper and Brian Higgins, the masterminds of Xenomania, are part of the glorious tradition of innovative pop hitmaking teams like the Brill Building partnerships, Holland-Dozier-Holland chez Motown, and even Bacharach and David with their muse Dionne Warwick. Girls Aloud and Xenomania are pop music at its catchy, swaggering, inventive, exciting best.
So, I bet you’re as surprised and disappointed as I am to discover that ‘Sound Of The Underground’ is Girls Aloud’s only Irish number one single. (They didn’t fare much better among the Brits, with just four UK number ones: this, two formulaic cover versions, and only ‘The Promise’ from their imperial phase.) What’s more, this is also Xenomania’s only Irish number one, as their Sugababes bangers didn’t top the charts here either. It’s surprising because Girls Aloud and the Sugababes were the two biggest pop groups of the decade—the Beatles and the Stones of our ’00s charts—and their hits were airplay staples. It’s disappointing because, even though both groups were enormously popular and successful, I get the feeling Girls Aloud are somewhat forgotten now, or at least not being discovered by new fans. Maybe the curse of British pop music in the ’00s becoming British Saturday-night TV light entertainment was that its greatest stars became overexposed.
‘Sound Of The Underground’ isn’t quite at the level of that roll-call above of their later superb hits; Girls Aloud had only got together that same week of recording, and Xenomania essentially got the gig off the back of their recent first UK chart-topper, ‘Round Round’ with the Sugababes. So, there’s understandably a bit of range-finding and getting-to-know-you here. The surf guitar had become a stale post-Pulp Fiction pop culture trope, but combining it with a skittery electro rhythm was at least something different. Where later Xenomania songs are crammed with brilliant standalone lyric lines, here only the chorus image of “out to the electric night” really pops out as intriguing or exciting. The five girls don’t yet sound distinctive, and we know that their prime hits will have a Nadine intro here, a Sarah verse there, a Cheryl wink-to-camera hook-line elsewhere. Also, the Popstars group format was still new and literally uncharted: this could have been a short-lived experiment. Thankfully, it wasn’t.
For all my minor nit-picking above, ‘Sound Of The Underground’ was hugely impressive at the time and still sounds great. We won’t be seeing Girls Aloud or Xenomania here again, but there are greater prizes than a scorecard of mere number ones; Prince never had an Irish number one, nor did The Supremes. You’ll find me on my socials @irishnumberones posting an exultant thread of those fantastic singles: the Girls Aloud and Xenomania revival starts there.
Irish Number Ones 