The Acceptable Faces of Pop?

Happy St. Patrick's Day, everybody. I hope you made more of the festivities than I did. Today, I went to the shop and stocked up on junk food before staging a lock-in in our living room to catch up on a load of work I'd been putting on the long finger.

The soundtrack to my study? I'm not gonna lie. It's been provided by The Saturdays.

British girl-group The Saturdays are a 'manufactured band', the likes of which has almost become extinct. TV programmes like 'Popstars' revealed just how contrived the process of putting groups like The Saturdays together are and I think people have been more reluctant to buy into acts like this as a result.

The Saturdays embody some of the the most deplorable elements of manufactured bands. They're groomed to within an inch of their lives and butcher classic pop songs with the intention of marketing them to a generation unfamiliar with the original (as evidenced by their recent cover of Depeche Mode's 'Just Can't Get Enough'). The girls are each assigned their own individual colour and, Christ, they even count two former members of S Club Juniors among their ranks.

Despite all this, I've developed a major soft-spot for their kitsch bubblegum pop. Aside from the aforementioned Depeche Mode cover, which to be fair was released in aid of charity, their singles have been solid and I'd even venture that 'Up' is one of the best pop songs of recent months. What finally forced me to succumb to The Saturdays' charms, however, was this cover of 'Beggin' by Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons for BBC Radio 1.


[Power Rangers Image: Board Aloud]