source :The Age
Guy Blackman January 22, 2006
What happens when a boyband grows up? It just keeps going - and prays the world is still interested. Guy Blackman reports.
If the 1990s will be remembered in musical terms for anything other than grunge rock, it will be for boybands. Cute young men in matching outfits and choreographed dance moves, performing faintly suggestive pop to stadiums full of screaming girls: Nirvana notwithstanding, this could be the defining image of the decade for future music historians.
Of course, the phenomenon had precedents stretching back to the male doo-wop groups of the '50s, and its true prototypes can be found in '80s groups such as New Edition and New Kids on the Block, but the golden period of the boyband really began, and ended, in the '90s.
At the turn of the century, there was a definite downturn in boyband fortunes. Perhaps it was simply that in a post-September 11 world, the simple joys of the genre - dancing, group harmonies and universal songs of love and longing - suddenly seemed a little vapid. They were, perhaps, the trappings of a more innocent time.
"When we were doing what we were doing, people were just listening to great music and great melodies and great songs," says blond '90s pin-up Nick Carter, who was just 13 years old when he joined the nascent Backstreet Boys in 1993. His band went go on to become one of America's biggest groups, the first in US history to sell more than a million records in the first week of release with two consecutive albums.
"People wanted to feel good, they wanted music to take them to another place, and I think our music did that," he recalls wistfully. "I'm not trying to diss urban music or rap music, but a lot of that stuff doesn't necessarily have that type of positive influence. They're talking about their chains, they're talking about the kind of girls they've got. And not just urban music - there's a lot of rock music that's negative too."
Whatever the reason, the past five years have been pretty much a boyband-free zone. Both the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC, their main rival for America's boyband crown, had ground to a halt by 2001, with NSYNC's Justin Timberlake and J.C. Chasez trying their hands at solo careers, and the Backstreet Boys' A.J. McLean entering rehab for drug and alcohol abuse.
Meanwhile in Australia, our main genre contenders, Human Nature, fell silent for three years after their third album in 2001, and Taxiride, their only real local competition, were dropped by Warner Music in 2004.
But in music, everything old eventually becomes new again, and the cycle of heyday, neglect and revival is getting faster and faster every year. So it is that, as we head in to the second half of the decade, boybands are now officially back.
In July last year the Backstreet Boys released the misleadingly titled Never Gone, which was in fact their first album in five years, while Take That, the UK's most popular boyband but defunct since 1996, recently announced a greatest hits package and a reformation tour - albeit without their most famous alumnus, Robbie Williams.
Even boyband pioneers New Kids on the Block have been the subject of recent reunion speculation, with original member Donnie Wahlberg hoping to go through the motions again while he's still, roughly speaking, in his physical prime. "I'm 36 now," he said in October. "I really don't imagine myself dancing around and singing on stage after the age of 40, so if it was gonna happen it would have to happen soon."
What's more, our own Human Nature - brothers Andrew and Michael Tierney, Phil Burton and Toby Allen - are also back, and bigger than ever. Their new album Reach Out - The Motown Record climbed into the No. 1 spot over Christmas and is still riding high in the ARIA top 10. A collection of revisited soul classics, it may not score highly in the risk-taking stakes, but seems to strike a festive chord with Australian audiences, and has already sold more than 200,000 copies nationally.
"With this album doing so well, it's almost as exciting as the first record," says de facto band leader Andrew Tierney, harking back to their multi-platinum 1996 debut Telling Everyone. "There's been a bit of deja vu for us, because we haven't had this much instant success or recognition for an album since then."
In their own distinct ways, both Reach Out and the Backstreet Boys' Never Gone attempt to answer the same difficult question: what does a boyband do when the band members are no longer boys? Nick Carter is still only in his mid-20s but his bandmates are mostly well into their 30s, while Human Nature range in age from 28 (Michael Tierney) to 32 (Toby Allen). These are all grown men, battling expanding waistlines, crows' feet and unwanted body hair in their efforts to remain in the public eye.
For Carter, Never Gone is the first album by a new, mature Backstreet Boys. "We knew, coming back, that we had to do something different, something that would reinvent us in a new light," he says. "We didn't want to just stay the same, because what kind of life is that going to have? We wanted to bring something new to the table for our fans, and I think we achieved that. We took a chance and people are digging it."
The album, which went to No. 3 and has already sold more than a million copies in the US, does take a slightly more serious line than earlier efforts. The track Weird World addresses the changing tenor of the times, while the title track commemorates bandmember Kevin Richardson's father, who died of colon cancer in 1991.
For the most part, though, the changes are merely cosmetic: the goatees sported by Richardson and MacLean and Carter's saggier jowls are more noticeable than any maturation in the band's sound. "We wanted to stay with the same philosophy, but just reinvent it a little, you know," Carter admits, flying somewhat in the face of his earlier rhetoric.
There is one major change in the reformed group, though: their image is no longer quite so clean-cut. It was MacLean's much-publicised battle with cocaine and alcohol that originally tarnished the band's fresh-faced image, and Carter's recent altercations with ex-girlfriend Paris Hilton finished the job. Never again can they claim the wide-eyed innocence that was always such a large part of boyband appeal.
Hilton broke up with Carter in August 2004, three weeks after he'd had her name tattooed on his wrist, and the heiress accused him of physically assaulting her. He was never formally charged, but his reputation was forever besmirched. In the liner notes to Never Gone, Carter lists a series of numbers, which turn out to be a simple code replacing A with 1, B with 2 etc. "It says, 'I didn't do it'," he explains. "A lot of people think I did certain things I didn't do."
Strangely, then, Carter also holds that the key to rehabilitating his image is to be open about his misdeeds. "Yeah look, I'm a human being," he says. "I'm going to make mistakes, but I'm going to be a man and live up to my mistakes. I'm going to say, 'Hey, look, I did it'. Obviously I've had my problems, but the thing is, you're a better person if you can go through that and learn from it. And that's what I'm going to do now, that is my serious goal. I've been behind a lot, and now I'm tired of being behind."
In stark contrast, Human Nature have always been clean cut to the point of excess, maintaining the kind of public decorum befitting a well-behaved boyband. For them, however, Reach Out is a deliberate attempt to distance themselves from the boyband phenomenon as a whole. Always uncomfortable with the tag and its intimations of disposability, they have come up with this trawl through the evergreen Motown canon in the hope that the same timelessness will rub off on them. They deny their faces have been touched up on the black-and-white album cover - "that's just our natural beauty," quips Michael Tierney - but Reach Out is clearly the sound of a group coming to terms with youth's departure.
"This record shows that pop music can be timeless, and ageless," says Phil Burton. "You look at someone like George Michael, maybe he's not as relevant now as he was a few years ago, but he was 40 and still going strong. I don't think age is a problem, I think the main thing is that you keep your appeal up."
When the group first started singing together as high school students way back in 1989, they didn't consider themselves a boyband because at that time the genre hardly existed. They had all grown up on a diet of doo-wop and soul, and their biggest contemporary influence was African-American vocal group Boyz II Men, who have never been called a boyband by anyone.
It was only years later that they realised, to their dismay, that they were somehow part of a growing phenomenon. "It wasn't until we'd released a record that we started to become aware of all these other groups coming up," says Andrew Tierney. "Then, when we went to Europe to release our record, there was a whole boyband explosion. We went around and none of these guys could actually sing, it was a bit of a joke. We tried to sing a capella everywhere, just to set ourselves apart, to show where we'd come from. So that's how we got our hatred for the word 'boyband'."
"I suppose you judge what people mean by who they refer to as a boyband," contributes Allen. "We always thought that when people were talking about boybands it was an easy way to say 'lack of integrity'. But then I've heard people refer to the Bee Gees or the Temptations as boybands. Our whole reason and inspiration were groups we always referred to as vocal groups.
"It's a fine line," he continues, "but it just seems that 'boyband' is used more often as a put down than as just a classification."
The Backstreet Boys play the Rod Laver Arena on February 2 (tel: 132 849); Human Nature begin a national tour in April