Joined in 2023 
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I will happily devour music books of all sorts as I am fascinated by the music industry and am a music obsessive. The Spice Girls (with whom the book starts) were unavoidable at the time despite my best efforts. I was more interested in indie and the death throes of britpop at the time. And if I wasn’t going to give Spice Girls the time of day, then Steps and S Club 7 had no chance. Rather than accept that two competing ideas can both offer up positives and negatives, the pop vs indie debate became a war. Frankly, in book-form at least, it feels like the indie side has had its say. Part of why I wanted to do this book…was to add some extra weight to a hugely important period of UK music that often felt ignored in the stream of chin-stroking think pieces on Britpop, the post-Strokes UK indie resurgence or the post-MySpace Arctic Monkeys chatter. Nobody buys books. No one's going to read this. No one's going to read these sorts of things. They just don't.' -- Louis Walsh Brian Higgins is the British mega-producer who, along with Miranda Cooper and the rest of his Kent-based pop factory Xenomania, was the brains behind some of the most celebrated, most innovative and frankly best pop tunes of the past two decades: Girls Aloud’s Biology, The Promise and the aforesaid Sound of the Underground; Sugababes’ Round Round and Hole in the Head; Rachel Stevens’ highly underrated album, Come and Get It – acommercial failure, but so good it landed on The Guardian ’s list of 1000 Albums to Hear Before You Die. Most of the acts Cragg covers straddle the years either side of the millennium, and many burst through in 1998: Steps were a five-piece made up of would-be children’s TV presenters with a yen to sound like a Home Counties Abba; the laddy Five were launched on the TV show Neighbours from Hell; the charismatic, 15-year-old Sylvia Young student Billie Piper went straight in at No 1 with Because We Want To, a single that was pure Grange Hill ; Irish four-piece B*witched were formed with the terrible idea of marrying the Spice Girls’ brightness and energy to another contemporary craze, Michael Flatley’s Riverdance. Such was the appetite for bubblicious teen pop that B*witched scored four consecutive No 1s in a matter of seven months. Beneath the shiny exterior is the treatment of S Club 7 as chattels or the racism suffered by Jamelia and Mis-Teeq
stars from the Spice Girls to On cloud nineties! When music stars from the Spice Girls to
Scott It was funny but it was mental. Put five young teenagers in a house with no parents and see what happens. There’s a lot of drinking, but also a lot of work. We worked so hard. Yet that earnestness runs the risk of missing the point, they said. “You want the Brits to effectively dance like no one’s watching, and worry less about getting it wrong than recapturing some of the fun and chaos that made it a must-watch in the 90s. But if you’re nostalgic for what it was, you’re also probably not who the music industry is worried about right now.” The Brit awards: the highs … Having written for the likes of The Guardian, Vogue and Popjustice (as well as being a few years older than me), Michael Cragg is in the perfect position to deliver an authoritative tome on this period in pop music, as well as making sense of the pitch battles between the poptivists and the real music bores. In the introduction, he makes the case that: In the period covered by his book Reach for the Stars, Cragg said, pop stars wanted to win Brits “because it was a shot at recognition that they weren’t getting elsewhere. It was pop versus indie, and winning offered credibility.” But two decades later, pop is taken seriously by critics and every popstar can reach fans directly online. What is a Brit award worth in 2023? I had absolutely no doubt we were going to make it. We found out Simon Cowell was a big deal in the industry, drove up to London really early and jumped out on him singing Wannabe along to our tape.The bastions of '00s pop - armed with buoyant, immaculately crafted, carefree anthems - provided entertainment, escapism and fun for millions. It was a heady, chorus-heavy decade - populated by the likes of Steps, S Club 7, Blue, 5ive, Mis-Teeq, Hear'Say, Busted, Girls Aloud, McFly, Craig David and Atomic Kitten, among countless others - yet the music was often dismissed as inauthentic, juvenile, not 'worthy' enough: ultimately, a 'guilty pleasure'. Now, music writer Michael Cragg aims to redress that balance. This book tells the story of one of music's best, and least appreciated, periods through the voices of the people who were there. The author speaks to everyone imaginable in British pop in the noughties and let's them tell their own side of events we all think we know. Chris Herbert It burned them out. In hindsight, I would never do that again. We took on too much too soon. Scott There would be rows that would break into fights. And J would always be in the middle of that. There were points where a couple of us would be recording and then we’d go and the other three would come in.
Reach for the Stars: The perils of being a 90s pop star - BBC Reach for the Stars: The perils of being a 90s pop star - BBC
Love the idea of a book chatting 00s pop history and a lot of it was very insightful. It could have done with more analysis and input from the author - because the interviews were only conducted with some creatives, managers and members of the groups featured, the book sometimes provided a fairly one-sided narrative which more nuance from the author could have balanced out. More space for the author's words may have made his comments more valid too; although I'm no expert on much of the music featured, having lived and breathed McFly I was disappointed by how brief and inaccurate the author's summary of their career was, and it only made me question the accuracy of the rest of the book.
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I didn’t have a great relationship with them because I said Nadine was the best singer. So, obviously the other four hated me. An outstanding music book. England's Dreaming for people with a working knowledge of 5ive.' -- Fergal Kinney
Reach for the Stars by Michael Cragg review — were we too
Despite enjoying this book my reason for rating this book 3 out of 5 is because at times it felt that if you weren't a band that the author personally liked then you weren't featured or not featured very much, so bands which were very successful like All Saints barely get mentioned in comparison to bands who arguably had less success such as Triple 8 who are featured a lot. Potentially this is because some of their members were contributors to the book. There were also a few disparaging remarks about Westlife so I assume the author isn't a fan of theirs which is fine but they were one of the most successful bands of that period so to skim over them doesn't really give an accurate picture. I enjoyed the last section on the rise of programmes like Pop Idol, Popstars etc and the artists that they created but there was only one passing reference to Fame Academy which was also popular at the time. Chris Herbert I knew the band were exhausted. But they were also becoming hard work as well. I couldn’t recognise whether it was pure exhaustion, whether they were suffering mentally, or whether they were just playing up. It was a combination of all those things. There was also a bit of bullying going on. In 1996, Take That, Britain’s biggest pop act, broke up. This was headline news. It prompted tears, the rending of garments and, according to Michael Cragg, left a vacuum that needed swiftly to be filled. Britpop still reigned, of course, but Britpop “was a bloke-heavy swirl of guitar-led authenticity, coke-sweat and lad mags”. I never wanted to be on TV. I was very naive to television. But I think it helped that I was naive.
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But it wasn’t like I didn’t feel it every time someone was shouting my name in a northern accent. I had to ride the storm and I’m so thankful the second wave of my music happened. If you're interested in pop history, I recommend this new book which explores in fascinating detail the dizzy, competitive and lost world of 'manufactured' nineties and noughties pop.' -- Neil Tennant, Pet Shop Boys
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