Everyone get the bunting out and organise a street party! The only boyband old enough to remember when VE day happened are getting back together!
Older readers may have a vague recollection of the Backstreet Boys. They were like N’Sync, only dustier and a bit more rubbish. But, hey, they have a new album, Never Gone, coming out in June.
Nick, Kevin, AJ, Howie and Brian are also set to release the first single ‘Incomplete’, a piano-led soft-rock power-ballad tear jerker, in the very near future. hecklerspray
has heard it, and we think that if you were a Backstreet Boys fan back
in the last millenium, then you’ll probably enjoy the new song.
If you hated them, and tried to soil yourself as noisily as possible
everytime you heard them on the radio just to drown out their awful
caterwauling, then maybe Incomplete won’t win you around.
Why are they back? Are they answering the unanswered questions left
by their sudden departure from the pop scene? Or maybe they’ve just
been offered a lot of money?
Usually when a boyband wants to reform, there’s one member who made it so huge that they never want to go back. Take That will probably never resurface in their original lineup because Robbie Williams is too busy desperately trying to sell record in America.
Similarly Boyzone are unlikely to hit the comeback road, as long as Ronan Keating continues to be so confusingly successful. Although there were reports a week ago that Gareth Gates might be taking his place. Maybe that was some weird kind of threat to the world by evil genius Louis Walsh, though.
Oddly, the Backstreet Boys never really managed to have a stand-out solo artist in their ranks. The nearest they got was with Nick Carter, who released Now Or Never in 2002.
It disappeared without a trace in England, although one reviewer for amazon.co.uk fantastically said about it "I
have 225 CD albums, and have a wide range of musical tastes, but out of
all my CD’s Nick Carter – Now or Never would be in the top five".
It would be interesting to see the other 224 albums in their collection. Tin Machine? The Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band movie soundtrack featuring The Bee Gees and Steve Martin? Phil Collins?
Members of the Backstreet Boys also released Christian albums,
Spanish albums, had babies and had drug problems, much to the world’s
indifference.
Perhaps now is their time to rise again. Maybe the planets have
alligned in such a way that makes their mega-success inevitable once
more. Maybe now, maybe now…
No, they’ll still probably sound like crap.
[story by Stuart Heritage]