For the cover of Top of the Pops magazine's December issue in 1996, the editor, Peter Loraine, chose a photograph of five girls pictured piling into the frame, eyes wide, grinning madly. They were members of an all-girl band which was making some headway in the charts. Loraine thought that it was a good cover, just right for the teenage market that his magazine-a spin-off from the BBC television chart show-tried to serve. And yet while he knew it fitted the bill, he didn't consider it anything special.
Today, he calls that cover his "Spice Girls Christmas present." "Suddenly we found 150,000 new readers for the magazine," Loraine says. "We went with the Spice Girls on the cover practically every other month after that." The 150,000 new readers stayed, propelling the magazine's circulation from a respectable 350,000 to a market-leading 500,000. Within a few months Loraine would be named editor of the year in the British Society of Magazine Editors awards. As to the Spice Girls, they would go on to become the biggest pop act on the face of the earth.
In the history of British pop music, special places should be reserved both for Loraine and the Spice Girls. It was Loraine who, after one lunch meeting with the band prior to the release of Wannabe, their first single, coined the nicknames Baby, Sporty, Posh, Scary and Ginger. The monikers would become a central part of the band's marketing strategy. The Spice Girls repaid the favour by opening up a whole new market: where once the youngest buyers of records were ten or 11 years old, now they could be as young as five. For the first time merchandisers began making souvenir T-shirts in small children's sizes. After the arrival of Ginger and Posh, appealing to "the kids" took on a new meaning.
Today, the Spice Girls are on the downward slope of a spectacular four-year career. Simon Fuller, the manager who masterminded their marketing, has been sacked, pocketing ?15m on the way out. Geri Halliwell-Ginger Spice-has left the band to pursue solo projects and work for the UN promoting reproductive health issues. Others have stayed with the band but also have their own solo careers. Two have married and had babies, although not necessarily in that order.
The market they created, however, is stronger than ever. According to the British Phonographic Institute, between 1994 and 1998 sales of pop singles rose from 33.5 per cent of all record sales to 41 per cent. The whole of that rise is accounted for by what the BPI calls "teen pop," which constitutes 15 per cent of singles sold. Defining contemporary music genres has always been a tricky business, the distinctions driven as much by passing fads as aesthetic qualities. Pulp and the Manic Street Preachers are as much part of the pop genre as the Spice Girls. There are even those who argue that Anarchy in the UK by the Sex Pistols was one of the greatest pop songs ever by simple dint of its popularity, even though there was nothing light and frothy about it. If it's popular, so the thinking goes, it's pop, be it the rock anthems of Oasis, the fey guitar jangle of Blur or the nihilistic yell of The Clash.
"Teen pop" can best be described as a glossy brand of Electro music with drum lines nicked from techno and dance music overlaid with lots of tiresomely catchy chorus lines (pace ABBA). It is performed by singer-dancers who do not write their own material or play any instruments and who, frankly, sometimes can't even sing. Vocally, it owes a debt to soul; musically, it could not have existed without Carole King's sense of verse-chorus song structure or Phil Spector's Wall of Sound. It is, however, scarcely comparable with either. As to the "teen" in teen pop, that is less likely to refer to the age of the fans (who are often pre-teen) than to that of the stars, often only 15 or 16.
The sector is driven by sophisticated marketing techniques. Bands are no longer discovered playing in dingy pubs or their mates' garages. They arise as focus-group concepts long before any performers are found to take on the roles. New records aren't just promoted on the radio, but by school tours, with unknowns playing short gigs in the lunch break to fix their names in the minds of their core market, prior to the release of a single. Merchandise represents not only a band or a song or an album, but an entire lifestyle.
Record companies are trying to do on purpose what the Spice Girls did by accident. "There is a science to doing this," says Hugh Goldsmith, managing director of Innocent Records, part of Virgin, who signed up Billie Piper when she was just 15. "And there is definitely a science to doing it well." Goldsmith should know. Billie's first single, Because We Want To, went straight to the top of the charts.
while there is no doubting the importance of the Spice Girls, their novelty must not be overstated: concept bands have been with us for decades. In 1966, NBC television put together three Americans and an Englishman to form the Monkees, a fictional on-screen combo who stepped off the box to have a series of hits. Similarly, David Cassidy found fame and a postbag full of fans' knickers through The Partridge Family. Britain's contribution was the Bay City Rollers. Granted, they were a real-rather than invented-band, but the moment they signed a record deal they were given a conceptual makeover so bizarre that they emerged looking like victims of an accident in a tartan factory. They were given their own television show and became international superstars.
In the 1980s, a former club disc jockey with a nose for a good pop song, called Pete Waterman-who is at the heart of the current boom-began plucking television soap actors off the small screen and turning them into pop singers. Thus Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan, of Neighbours fame, became huge stars.
But the band that had the most influence on the current pop scene in Britain was the American group New Kids on the Block, which was formed, by audition, in 1986. The New Kids combined a shiny pop sound with a pseudo "street" image, which turned a simple pop group of five improbably good-looking young men into a gang which its fans were invited to join. Membership, of course, came through buying records, which sold by the truck load throughout their eight years together.
In 1990, recognising the appeal of the American group, British manager Nigel Martin-Smith used the same methods to create Take That. As explained in court in 1997, during proceedings which followed the group's break-up, they were to be "likeable, young unattached boys who were presentable and clean living. They were the sort of boys that girls could take home to their mums for tea." Again, the formula worked. Take That went on to sell millions worldwide, not only of singles, but of the all-important albums which produce much bigger revenues.
The Spice Girls were founded by Chris Herbert (before he was sacked by the band in favour of Simon Fuller) to be a female answer to Take That. "When the Spice Girls were first being launched everybody was very cynical," says Peter Loraine. "The thinking was that teenage girls only wanted to idolise boys." The thinking was wrong. Armed with the slogan "Girl Power", the band took off. "Spice Girls records drove young people into record shops who had never gone into them before. At Top of The Pops magazine we suddenly found we had six-year-olds writing to us." Once one band was successful, there were bound to be imitators. Thus Take That begat East 17 which begat Boyzone, which begat Five, which begat Westlife, each a minor variation on the previous one. Likewise, the Spice Girls begat All Saints which begat B*Witched which begat Cleopatra which begat the Honeyz.
Today, Peter Loraine is artist development manager at Polydor records. His office looks like a shrine to pop-which is to say, it looks like a ten-year-old girl's bedroom. There are shelves full of sticker books and Spice Girl dolls. There are mugs, coloured pencils, posters and branded cameras dedicated to a dozen different acts. Loraine is 28.
The three new acts Loraine has been working on could stand as samplers for the entire market. The first is Adam Rickitt, a blond, smooth-skinned heart-throb who started out as the love interest on Coronation Street. "I knew that there hadn't been a successful male solo singer since Jason Donovan," Loraine says. "I also knew that Adam could sing. And he looks good." His first single, I Breathe Again, went straight into the charts at No. 5.
The second act, S Club Seven, has already proved itself by achieving a No. 1 with its first single, Bring It All Back. In an echo of the Monkees, the group of four girls and three boys, ranging in age from 16 to 22, were hired to be the stars of a BBC children's television programme. It's about a group of young singers trying to make their way in the music business, who get tricked into working in a run-down hotel in Miami. "What went through my mind the first time I saw them was: yes. I can picture them on the cover of Top of the Pops," Loraine says. "Yes, this is the one the little girls will like. This is the one the older boys will like." It was the perfect pop package: a unified whole, parts of which could be fashioned to appeal to different elements of the market.
But the third act, Lolly, is the most curious. Polydor does not like to say much about Lolly which might fix her in the real world. "She's a young funster from Birmingham who sings about listening to the radio and playing on the internet," Loraine says. So how old is she? "We don't talk about her age. There's no particular reason. It's just to maintain the mystery." Where does she live? "She lives in Lollyland." What's her real name? They won't say. "Lolly will appeal to kids as young as five. The album will be called My First Album and for most of the kids who get it, it will be exactly that." Artists are now working on turning Lolly-an unnerving combination of childish bunches, pierced navel and Lycra sports gear-into a cartoon strip for Girl Talk magazine.
Has Lolly worked? Her first single Viva la Radio got to No. 6 and Loraine is sure that her next release, Mickey, will make the top five. Still, nothing can be certain, save that failure is expensive. "There are big casualties in this business," says Hugh Goldsmith at Innocent Records. "For the three acts a year which succeed, maybe ten or 20 fail. It costs ?250,000 to do an album, ?100,000 for each video and you'll probably need two, another ?150,000 for marketing. By the time you've finished launching an act you can easily have spent the best part of ?1m." So what is it that makes an act a success? For Goldsmith, success is defined by large album sales-and the only way to get those, he says helpfully, "is to make great records."
Of course, defining what makes a record "great" in this market is a difficult business. The nature of teen pop is that all of it, even the good stuff, is trash. It is designed to be throwaway, to match the attention span of the target consumer. And yet some of it does survive. Wannabe, the Spice Girls' first No.1, will not be quickly forgotten. Billie Piper's Because We Want To is likely to remain a theme song for a particular kind of adolescent indignity. Many people dismiss teen pop as an irrelevance at best, an outrage at worst, but staying power must be an indication of a certain type of quality. At the time, ABBA's music was written off as dross, even as it dominated the charts. Today, ABBA's song list is part of pop's canon. Pop is like Coke. Too much of it rots your teeth. It does not have the grace and subtlety of, say, a bottle of Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc. But sometimes-particularly when we're young-Coke is what we want. We grow out of it after a while, but even then we'll still return to it occasionally in search of the taste of our youth.
Pete Waterman is regarded as the ultimate hit maker. He has had dozens of top ten singles-sold a lot of Coke-and is currently enjoying the biggest success of his career with a five-strong band called Steps, which has inherited the Spice Girls' crown to become the most successful pop band in the world today. Steps' songs are little more than re-workings of ABBA hits. Waterman admits as much. "I'm not John Lennon and I'm not Burt Bacharach and I'm not Wagner. But what I do, I do well." He adds: "There's no such thing as a bad No. 1 record. If it got to No. 1 it had to be good." He is intense about his craft, and likes to throw around some grand names. Ask him about song writing and he will talk about Cole Porter, Ivor Novello and Mozart. To write songs for Steps, for example, he says he dissected ABBA's technique. "We realised that a lot of it was based on classical mid-European composers, which meant we had to go back to Mozart."
Building one of the new pre-packaged bands is clearly a highly-skilled operation. To create Five, which has had a number of top ten hits, Chris Herbert (the creator of the Spice Girls) first identified what was missing in the marketplace. It was decided that the band would cull its image from the loose street-style of American funk-hop groups. An advert was placed in the Stage newspaper and auditions held in six cities: 2,000 young men auditioned. "You can't hope five talented people will just meet up and form a pop group," says Simon Cowell, of their record company RCA (blithely consigning The Beatles, Rolling Stones, and so on, to the musical dustbin). The five successful candidates were then moved into a house in Surrey for months on end, while they went through a gruelling course of singing and dancing lessons. Only when they had begun to gel as a unit were they allowed to start promoting the songs that had been written for them. The process took more than a year.
next comes the tour. And increasingly, for these bands, it means going back to school. Last May, a 16-year-old Filipino-American named Billy Crawford-all shiny hair, glossy teeth and mild acne-could be found touring the comprehensive schools of northern England. Crawford is signed to V2 records, which has decided that the best way to make him a star in the US is to break him in Britain first. Hence a lunchtime appointment at Belle Vue Girl's School on the outskirts of Bradford.
Backed by two singer-dancers, Billy performs seven songs to a hall full of shrieking pupils, which is what he has been doing for the previous three weeks. It does not matter that the kids have never heard of Billy. He is a pretty guy, dancing to some funky tunes in the middle of a dull school day, and that makes him worth shrieking at. To add to the unreality of the event it happens that Belle Vue is 98 per cent Muslim; most of the girls are wearing shawls or scarves to cover their heads. Billy goes into his first song, Supernatural and, on cue, they shriek. A few weeks later the song will be released as a single. The hope is that the thousands of kids who have shrieked at Billy over the past few weeks will go out and buy it in large enough numbers to move it up the chart.
Jan Lee, the senior teacher, is responsible for booking acts like Billy into the school. "I didn't have to think too long and hard about it," she says. "Our students are young women. They're interested in music. It's an opportunity most teenagers would jump at." She implies-although she will not say-that this is an experience which, for cultural reasons, these girls would not get except within the controlled environment of a school. "We have to be respectful of the different cultural norms," she says. "We're a school, not an events venue. I have certain criteria. The music must be appropriate and must not be likely to encourage inappropriate behaviour."
Few of those involved in the school tours business see any need to engage in arguments over whether there is something wrong about what they are doing. One pop PR admitted to me that, the first time she went into a school, she felt uncomfortable with the idea. But then, she said, "I realised that was because it was not an experience I had had when I was at school."
Nevertheless, you could be forgiven for feeling that this harnessing of schools to the service of record company interests represents the market run riot. It is true that marketing executives talk of a phenomenon called "Pester Power," whereby children nag their parents into buying a particular record when their pocket money won't stretch that far. But the only thing new here is the product, not the methods. Big companies have been selling products to children for decades-sweets, toys, breakfast cereals. If we are concerned about hard-sell techniques being used on suggestible children, then we have to tackle it on a wider scale. Perhaps it is less of an issue for the marketing executives than for parents who, in the face of the hard-sell, need to impart lessons in delayed gratification.
Steve Andrews, whose company organises school tours, says-apparently without irony-that they are an aid to education. "The national curriculum specifies the teaching of diversity in music. By doing this we are delivering music diversity direct to schools. The school gets an artist for nothing and the artists gets a great audience. The only people who suffer are the record companies, because it costs them money." As to the children, however sophisticated the marketing techniques they cannot simply be bought. "It's a very tough audience," says one record company executive. "If the act is crap they'll see through it, and remember, there's a lot of choice out there."
Indeed there is. Supernatural, by Billy Crawford, released last May, did not do as well as Adam Rickitt or S Club Seven's first single. Despite the school tours and the press interviews and the sharp video, Supernatural didn't even make it into the top 75. Crawford's follow-up, Mary Lopez, was released in August and failed to crack the top 40.
Only a brave person would predict what will happen to Crawford, because in this business nothing is certain. That is the reality with which big record companies have to struggle. The teen pop market created by the Spice Girls is hugely lucrative. But it is also one with a massive flaw: it depends entirely on the whims of children. And children are nothing if not fickle.
