In 1997, while the Spice Girls were busy filming their debut cinematic opus Spice World, songwriting and production duo Richard “Biff” Stannard and Matt Rowe were sat in Abbey Road studios in London twiddling their thumbs. In need of ideas for the band’s second album, but with the group themselves away on set, they started to venture outside the world of pure pop. “I’m a massive New Order fan and there’s a frog [sound] on their Low-Life album and I remember thinking: ‘I really want to put frogs on this song’,” Stannard told me when I interviewed him for my book Reach for the Stars, an oral history of 00s pop. Sure enough, odd ribbit sounds are peppered throughout the verses of the band’s disco-tinged Never Give Up On the Good Times.
While Posh, Sporty, Scary, Baby and Ginger were generally involved in their songwriting, and worked in a small creative bubble, the boom that the Spice Girls instigated in UK pop meant that for a while there wasn’t generally much scope to deviate from the era’s dominant sounds: saccharine pastiche (Steps, S Club 7) and clean-cut pop-R&B (Five, Blue). Songwriting teams would often be writing to suit the tastes of powerful A&Rs keen to keep things decidedly mass-market. “We would basically be writing for Simon Cowell rather than the particular artist,” former Westlife and Shayne Ward songwriter Savan Kotecha told me. “He had a very specific pop taste.”
While that pop taste skewed towards big, edge-free, key-change-tastic ballads sung by rollneck-loving Irishmen, or, in the case of Shayne Ward, PG-13 Justin Timberlake bops, not all Y2K pop played it safe. Like Stannard and Rowe, who found themselves with time to think outside the box, a strand of rebellious songwriters and producers, often working with artists whose sounds had yet to be defined, or with their backs to the wall, were attempting to remix pop’s standard formula.
Among them were Swedish duo Bloodshy & Avant, who, alongside songwriter Cathy Dennis, had crafted the taut, deliciously off-kilter Sweet Dreams My LA Ex. Originally conceived for Britney Spears as a playful response to Timberlake’s Cry Me a River (Spears’ team rejected it), it instead became the debut single of recent S Club escapee Rachel Stevens. It quickly set the tone for what was to come from her brief solo career: ear-tweaking pop with an experimental edge. It’s why Stevens’ debut album, 2003’s Funky Dory, featured tracks like Silk (basically Britney’s I’m a Slave 4 U produced by Shep Pettibone), or why 2005’s constantly inventive cult followup Come and Get It dabbled in squelchy glam rock (I Said Never Again (But Here We Are)), Daft Punk-esque electronics (Crazy Boys) and chilly new wave (Funny How). Even on the ballad It’s All About Me, producer Fraser T Smith bolts on a downcast sample of the Cure’s Lullaby, giving it a haunted sheen.
Come and Get It also features production work from two of this era’s biggest agitators, Richard X and Brian Higgins. Keen to do the opposite to everyone else, they set about fraying pop’s edges at a time when indie was making a commercial return and pop was mired in post-Pop Idol balladry. With expectations low, they ramped up the stakes. “I hated the pop sound at the time,” Higgins told me. “It was just so sugar-sweet and so similar to itself … I started to really analyse these records just to hone my dislike of them.” Working alongside chief songwriter Miranda Cooper, and a host of musicians (some of whom had worked with bands such as the KLF) and producers known collectively as Xenomania, Higgins brought in reference points you didn’t typically hear on CD:UK. The pair’s commercial breakthrough, Sugababes’ 2002 No 1 Round Round, for example, was built around a sample of German breakbeat practitioners Dublex Inc’s Tango Forte, a track Higgins and Cooper had discovered while crate-digging in a Paris record shop. Its lyrics, meanwhile, were the result of a trip to Amsterdam and a lot of weed. “The whole thing was quite an abrasive sound, probably because we were quite abrasive people,” Cooper told me.
Round Round was followed four months later by Sound of the Underground, a galloping fusion of drum’n’bass and surf guitars, which set the template for TV talent-show winners Girls Aloud’s rule-breaking sound. Rather than knocking out something featuring three great singles and lots of filler, Higgins and Cooper crafted whole albums packed full of intricate ideas. Higgins’ intense recording technique involved countless lines being sung in different keys by different people, which would then be sutured together later like a glorious tapestry. Indie, rave, new wave, electroclash and even skiffle would all become musical bedfellows, sometimes on the same song, while the turbo-charged choruses matched the band’s bolshy, tabloid-ready personas. With the pure pop boom over, and the band’s talent-show origins lowering expectations, Xenomania were given the space to run wild.
In 2007, at Xenomania’s creative zenith, Higgins and co built a track around a sped-up sample of 70s Scottish rockers Nazareth’s Hair of the Dog. The resulting electropunk freakout, Sexy! No No No… became the lead single from Girls Aloud’s fourth album, Tangled Up, peaking at No 5. You just didn’t get that with Westlife. Lyrically, meanwhile, Cooper would ignore the platitudes and sky’s-the-limit generalities of her contemporaries to explore drunken nights out (Swinging London Town), hangovers (Deadlines & Diets), carefree one night stands (Fling), and bottled-up rebellion (No Good Advice).
For Richard X, a former underground artist who had made a name for himself as electroclash practitioner Girls on Top, pop needed more of this raw edge. When the Sugababes’ A&R heard his mashup of Adina Howard’s Freak Like Me and Gary Numan’s Are “Friends” Electric?, he knew it was the song to build on the band’s similarly cool and roughly hewn debut single, Overload. “I wanted crunchy and horrible,” Richard X told me of his sound. While that was smoothed out somewhat on his later work with the likes of Rachel Stevens and Liberty X, lyrically he kept on jarring with the mainstream. Working with songwriter Hannah Robinson, the pair were keen to take a sideways look at typical tropes. So Stevens’ electroclash-adjacent, chant-like Some Girls (originally conceived with Girls Aloud in mind) could, on the surface, be interpreted as trying to make the best of a bad relationship situation (“the champagne makes it taste so much better”), when in fact it was an exploration of the casting couch, with hints of sexual favours. That it then became a Sport Relief charity single perhaps speaks to how little attention was paid to lyrics by those in decision-making positions back then.
Both Higgins and Richard X, alongside other melodically gifted songwriters with a similarly playful mindset, managed to scuff up 00s pure pop by unstitching it and re-assembling it into odd shapes. That they were eventually pushed to the side by the X Factor juggernaut as the 00s reached its climax was symptomatic of supply and demand. (Interestingly, One Direction did record with Xenomania, but nothing was released.) As more and more acts came off the show’s conveyor belt, more straightforward, risk-free songs with easy-to-relate-to lyrics were needed, and quickly. As with the beginning of the decade, Simon Cowell’s musical taste was dominant again.
• Reach for the Stars: 1996–2006: Fame, Fallout and Pop’s Final Party is published by Nine Eight Books (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
