There is a docÂuÂmentÂary on Channel 4 next week. It's called Fame Asylum and it's about putting together a boyband whose members are four asylum seekers.
Asks the press release:
Here's a clue: no, because these days a new boyband made up of five boys called Gary, Robbie, Jason, Howard and Mark couldn't even cut it in the comÂpetÂitÂive world of pop music.
Why do people in teleÂviÂsion — the people who've brought us shows like Totally Boyband, Boys Will Be Girls and now this — think that
there is anything easy about putting together a boyband?
Well, the truth is that they probably don't think there's anything easy about putting together a boyband with a view to chart success — but they do know that it's easy to get a TV show comÂmisÂsioned by using boybands as a theme into which unlikely stars (boys dressing as girls, boys who used to be in bands, asylum seeking boys) are crowÂbarred, usually for the enterÂtainÂment or amusement of the viewing public.
The whole Fame Asylum thing has been put together by a man called Richard Dedomenici. Here is some informÂaÂtion about Richard from his website. (We think he might have written it himself.)
undermine accepted belief systems and topple existing power strucÂtures. By approachÂing the limits of conÂvenÂtionÂally acceptÂable behaviour, Richard
Dedomenici's poetic acts of low-grade civil disÂobediÂence forcibly ask pertinent questions of society, while his subtle anarcho-surÂrealÂist interventions
create the kind of uncerÂtainty that leads to possibility."
Of the Fame Asylum show, Richard's website also notes:
harÂnessÂing pester-power and the trickle-up theory' to change minds, alter behaviour, shift paradigms, and transform societies."
For someone attemptÂing to shift paradigms, Richard seems bizarrely ignorant of the fact that if you want to appeal to female adolesÂcents only a fucking idiot would think, in 2006, about using the boyband — a pop concept so irrelÂevÂant to most teenage girls that you'd be better off with knitting patterns.
As for the band themÂselves — they're called Status - they can't sing, can't dance, have no stage presence, look dreadful and their song, 'A Guy Like Me', is comÂpletely awful.
HERE IS THE NEWS.
BONG!
There is literally no demand for a new boyband. That does not mean 'there is a gap in the market'. It means 'there are no big boybands simply because nobody
wants a boyband'.
BONG!
Just because Take That are back, selling records to women in their late twenties, it is comÂpletely illogical to think that this has paved the way for
boybands, selling records to girls in the early teens, to succeed on any level.
BONG!
Don't start on the whole 'ooh, pop goes in cycles' business — if this was true we would have seen a skiffle revival by now. Isn't is possibly just the case
that the boyband, in the tradional sense, was a hisÂtorÂical pop anomaly which made sense between 1989 and 2002, and that attemptÂing to revive its fortunes is
just pissing in the wind? And that the only way the concept of the boyband is in any way appealing is as the basis of a TV show?