This is, if nothing else, a feat of scheduling.
This is also 76m combined monthly Spotify listeners.
This is the answer all popstars should give when they are inevitably asked, because they’re always asked aren’t they, who they’d cast in a modern version of Lady Marmalade.
This is a stage school kid whose big break was a telly ad for The X Factor, alongside someone who went to art school and joined a punk band, alongside someone who crashed out of a European version of Pop Idol five years ago, alongside someone who was playing shithole gigs when she was 14, alongside someone who won a Swedish TV show when she was 10.
This is people who’ve pursued success, it’s someone who found herself on the most-streamed song of all time, and it’s one person who’s deliberately swerved chart domination, despite it being theirs for the taking, in pursuit of their own musical vision.
This is three people who didn’t break through with their first album, one person who did, and one who’s TBC.
This is one person smiling like she’s on an 80s pop magazine cover, one person doing that mouth-open thing only popstars can pull off without it looking like they’re in the middle of eating, two people looking like they mean serious business and one person avoiding eye contact all together.
This is, admittedly, not the greatest advert for ethnic diversity in pop.
This is still a hint of what happens when different personalities with different ideas and different experiences and different talents, of different ages, from different backgrounds in different countries, make sense in a room together.
This is a group of people whose ages range from only-just-20 to a-few-months-off-30.
This is five artists nobody who’s currently putting bands together would put in a band together. They’d write their own Number One single and direct their own video.
This is a one-off moment, but why does it need to be?
This is what girlbands could be like in 2018 if the music industry wasn’t such a bag of shit.
