The pop bubble and how it burst

I don't know who's doing PR for Reach For The Stars, Michael Cragg's new book about late-90s/early-00s pop, but they can't possibly be doing as good a job of selling it as this Quietus review.

Ian Wade identifies that the book's appeal lies principally in what it reveals went on in dressing rooms and shared houses. A squeaky-clean public image was often just that, with the offstage reality rather different. It's sex and drugs - just without the rock 'n' roll.

But the book is also evidently an alarming and eye-opening insight into the way in which pop stars - some of them still teenagers - were seen by cynical svengalis and cash-hungry record labels not as people but merely as products to be exploited, moulded, marketed and sold. And if they didn't sell, they were instantly disposable, binned off without a thought.

Wade's reference to "professional cocktip Russell Brand" - in connection with his failed audition for 5ive - made me snigger, as did the comment about Sugababes having "a national service-style call-up" and the suggestion that Reach For The Stars has something for everyone, even if you're "the sort who replies to the question 'Where do you stand on Blue?' with 'Their throats'"...

Aside perhaps from a brief period around 2000/2001, when I could regularly be found sprawled on a student sofa watching The Box, I was never a paid-up pop fan. Indeed, back in 1996, when the Spice Girls burst onto a music scene "dominated by hod carriers in parkas", my friends and I regarded them as the antithesis of everything we held dear - so the mind still boggles that some of those friends now regularly fraternise with Mel C at festivals. She seems to have been one of the lucky ones who made it through the pop industry mincer with her sanity, dignity and spirit intact.