I've! got! you! and! you've! got! me! SO!!
a track-by-track review of 7 by S Club 7. going to try and stop me or something? yeah didn't think so
My soft spot for earnest pop music can be traced directly back to the first CD I ever owned: 7 by S Club 7. I remember flicking through the CD booklet and thinking about how desperately cool they were, and dreaming about the day I too would be a cool teen lounging forlornly on a sand dune with my friends.
Never actually watched their TV show, so I was blissfully unaware of the very uncool fact that they were marketed towards kids. There are 14 tracks on the version of 7 that I owned, which looks to have been the UK reissue. The songs are generally one of two pretty distinct genres (retro-styled kiddie pop and lite R&B), and when listened to in order as an album it doesn’t feel super cohesive, something I’m sure they were very concerned about when they made it to soundtrack their CBBC show. Even so, it is a lot of fun to relisten to something you were obsessed with as a kid, and to grasp how it laid the foundation for your current listening habits.1
Reach is a timeless banger that was engineered in a lab to be played at primary school discos. Every single lyric could be written on a mug you’d buy at HomeSense, and I think that’s nice! Plus everyone will instinctively whip out the same choreography for the chorus, and that’s a hallmark of a well-written pop song. I loooove the little bouncy bass groove that underlies the whole song, especially when the piano joins in.2
I remember ALWAYS skipping Natural. I think something about it scared me? That cor anglais is pretty menacing. Listening now, this is a surprisingly good song with a lot of my favourite nineties pop flairs, like a squelchy beat and a robot voice that yells OW BABY BABY at several points. Last name klaxon; this song was produced by a man named Phil Bodger.
If either Bradley or Jo is at the helm the song is usually good, and fortunately Bradley does most of the work on I’ll Keep Waiting. The other members do a pleasantly subdued job on the chorus, politely singing that nice up-and-down melody while Bradley does flirty ad-libs. Bradley’s Wikipedia page claims that he is also known as ‘City Boy’.3 I particularly like the funk-y guitar line that adds a nice element of contrast in the landscape of the song.
Don’t be fooled by the ‘miss the way you touch and tease me’ lyric from I’ll Keep Waiting - this is still an album for children, and songs about partying on a kiddie pop album are disingenuous! So Bring the House Down irks me. There’s also a very buzzy synth that carries on through the whole song, which once I had noticed it was all I could hear. It sounds like the feedback that you get if you turn my fake AirPods up past 60% volume.
Best Friend, a song about how we all need a best friend, is boring. No amount of record scratches and zoomy spaceship-sounding keyboards can save it. Sounds like everyone was a bit tired the day they recorded this. In the second verse, Bradley asks if “you remember the days when we would / kick back, hit that” - a portent of things to come?4
Is this album for children or not? Because All In Love Is Fair, a slightly sleepy R&B number, is about cheating. Jo says the word ASS in the pre-chorus. This album is having an identity crisis about whether it wants to be sexy or not! I really start to get bored around this point. When’s Lately going to come on? Can’t wait for that one.
Even listening to Love Train as a literal child, I remember thinking that this song was juvenile. It’s a weird fit, in the grand scheme of the album. As an opener Reach successfully pulls off the bubblegum Motown pastiche thing, but sandwiched between slinkier songs the same thing on Love Train feels out of the blue.5 We’ve been doing a laid-back R&B thing for the last three or four songs in a row, and now you bring me a guy going ham on cymbals for three minutes straight? I’m simply not in the right headspace for this.
Cross My Heart also scared me. Not as much as Natural, I would actually listen to this one sometimes, but the intro puts me on edge. I quite like it now though! Nice dramatic strings, and it’s always fun when a singer pronounces “baby” as “bay-BAY”. There’s a handful of random electronic-y sound effects chucked into the mix that feel a little misplaced, like somebody sat on a keyboard and just left it in.
What do children like? Colours! And this next song is literally called The Colour of Blue. They’re in their kiddie pop bag here. This song has a great balance of wet ( bloopy keyboard, squelchy drum machine) and dry (crisp strummy guitars) textures. Like a lovely bowl of yogurt and granola! I think it’s my underdog favourite. Last name klaxon; this song was written by a man named Lars Aass.
On I’ll Be There they let a girl besides Jo have a go at singing, and it sort of works! But Jo’s backing vocals are mixed very prominently in a way that to me screams a lack of confidence in Tina’s ability to carry a lead line. It makes me feel safe as a listener knowing that even when Jo’s not at the helm, she’s gonna grace us with an Aguilera-y ‘hweeergghhhhh’ at some point.
Stand by You sounds like a half-hearted Spice Girls castoff.6 I don’t believe that they really do want to stand by me. Can we stop letting girls other than Jo sing lead? Sorry. This one’s really forgettable. Similarly to Love Train, it suffers from the genre whiplash with the tracks that come before and after.
I think I always skipped Spiritual Love because of the vaguely religious title. Not that I was some kind of Reddit atheist child! I was briefly really into the ancient Greek pantheon, and at summer church playgroup (cheaper than non-religious playgroup, apparently) I would pray to Aphrodite instead of Jesus. Anyway, this song isn’t about God even a bit. The drums are a little bit enjoyable, and the sexy-or-not identity crisis continues; “underline the word love, see it ain't about lust”.
Thank god, it’s CITY BOY time again. I fully had no idea that Lately was a Stevie Wonder cover until a few years ago. Explains why it’s lyrically so, so much better than almost everything else on the album. This song is how I learned what the word ‘premonition’ means! I just love that cold echoey beat, and Bradley brings the energy back after three songs in a row of pretty limp vocals, especially on that last chorus. Goodbye my sweet lady baby indeed.7
Bradley had his melodramatic ballad, and now Jo gets hers - Never Had a Dream Come True starts emphatically with a dribbly acoustic guitar and wind chimes. This was the only UK number one on the album! Much like Cross My Heart, it also ticks the boxes for dramatic strings and “baby” sung as “bay-BAY”. Those ABBA-esque rhyming dictionary couplets like “There’s no use looking back or wondering/ Because love is a strange and funny thing” really work for me, and Jo does a lovely snarl when she gets in her zone on the bridge. It’s an excellent closer.
Either nostalgia has clouded my judgement, or there are some genuinely quite fun pop moments on this album! Just like Jo says on the last track, a part of me will always be with you, the album 7 by S Club 7. I do think I’ll go and listen to something pretentious as a palette cleanser now, or it’s going to infect my subconscious and I’m going to start saying embarrassing stuff like S CLUB GET DOWN TONIGHT at inappropriate points of conversation. What’s the diametric opposite of S Club 7? Maybe some Tom Waits.
To conclude, here’s an objective ranking of the members.
City Boy
Jo
Paul (RIP), Tina, Rachel, the other two
I blame S Club 7 for my love for Permission to Dance by BTS. I KNOW it’s not a good song, Butter is objectively much better, but the heart wants what it wants, and I want to listen to Permission to Dance again.
While researching I happened upon this video of a guy doing a Russian classical piano reworking of the song. Looked at his channel, and he’s the Russia editor for BBC News?? His uploads consist of roundups of Russian newspapers, and sporadic piano covers.
He’s got quite a lot on his SoundCloud as City Boy. This one, Bitches, is my favourite. It features the hook “it’s girls like you I just don’t have a name for/ but most fellas would call you bitches.” Before you try to CANCEL my good guy Bradley I implore you to listen to the whole song, because he takes pains to explain in the outro that “this is not about women in general, this is to the bitches, and Imma write another song about ladies and women, real women, and ladies, and not bitches. But ladies, don’t forget that men can be bitches too, so if you find a man that’s on your case, he’s a bitch, he’s a male bitch. Call him BITCH”.
You can see the very scene of the crime in this news report - “just a stone’s throw from Leicester Square”. How brazen.
Having talked all this shit about Love Train, I actually do quite like this live performance of it. I’ve never seen such aggressively rhinestoned outfits. The video has 51 comments, more than half of which have been left by the same user who alternates between leaving condolence messages for Paul and being horny for Tina:
In fact, this was originally recorded by a Danish due called S.O.A.P. I vastly prefer their version, it has much more character.
Bradley had the sauce. Watch this performance of Lately (supposedly live, but I’m pretty sure he’s lipsyncing) and tell me you’ve ever seen anyone sitting on a beanbag have so much charisma.