Hits 21 - 2010 (5): JLS, BoB & Hayley Williams, Yolanda Be Cool, The Wanted

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/cw/Hits21UKBLUESKY: https://bsky.app/profile/hits21podcast.bsky.socialINSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/hits21uk/We're back! Hits 21 has jumped 11 years into the future from 1999, landing in 2010. Things are different. JLS are interpolating The Sound of Music, Hayley Williams is being stolen away from the alternative world, Rob's going insane under an umbrella at Universal Florida, and The Wanted are jonesing for that Barlow-Martin magic.Rob, Andy, and Ed take their first steps into the 2010s.

Hits 21. Hi there, everyone, and welcome back to Hits21, the 2010s, where me, Rob, me, Andy, and me, Ed, are looking back at every single UK number one of the 2010s. Email us at Hits21 podcast at gmail.com. You can also follow us on Instagram and on Blue Sky, and if you want, you can subscribe to our Patreon page. It's £3 a month.

At the moment up there, we have a review of Spice World, and me and Ed sat down to talk about our favourite albums of 2010. More is on the way. All the links for those pages are in the description. Thank you ever so much for joining us again. We are currently looking back at the year 2010, and this week we'll be covering the period between the 11th of July and the 17th of August. So about five weeks entering the summer holidays.

Andy, the UK album charts. All the kids are off school. And most importantly, I'm turning 18 this week. Not literally, I've not been doing this show since I was 14, but back in the 13th of August 2010 is when I turned 18. And this is what was number one over that period. We begin with Kylie Minogue with Aphrodite, which went platinum and went number one for one week,

which I think is a little bit disappointing, considering there's a few absolute bangers on that album. But anyway, Eminem comes back in at number one then with recovery for three more weeks. That album would go four times platinum, eventually. and then Arcade Fire come in with the Suburbs, their third album which went number one for one week

and went single, Platinum. And we finish off with another week for recovery by Eminem which makes it, I make that six weeks in total over the summer of 2010 and several more to come as well. A big, big hit there. So it's pretty much Eminem's late summer.

In the news, John Venables, one of James Bulger's killers, is sentenced to two years in prison for distributing indecent images of children. The High Court rules that Peter Sutcliffe, better known as the Yorkshire Ripper, is never to be released from jail. And Home Secretary Theresa May

announces plans to scrap Asbo's. In Germany, 21 people are killed in a crowd crush at the Love Parade Music Festival in Deusburg. China overtakes Japan as the world's second biggest economy, and in Ireland, a five-year-old boy who was wrongly accused by a little, of stealing a bag of crisps is paid 7,500 euros in damages. On TV, the BBC broadcasts the first ever episode of Sherlock,

while newsreader Kate Silverton causes dozens of complaints to come in in Scotland after accidentally swearing on live TV. Silverton believed her microphone had been turned off and an apology was issued to viewers shortly afterwards. The films to hit the top of the UK box office were the Twilight saga eclipse before Toy Story 3 begins a run of four weeks at the top. That is a classic summer at the UK box office. Ed, the US charts, how are they looking?

Concise, one might say. Albums-wise, just the one. It's recovery all month for M&M. What's he recovering from? Probably from not sounding like a hard-of-hearing adenoidal robot. because not sounding like a hard of hearing adenoidal robot really blighted those first couple of albums, I feel, don't you? Singles-wise, it's still, Katie Perry,

still with California girls, ending a six-week total run. Then it's the first three weeks of a long stint for Eminem, Rihanna, and Love the Way You Lie, one of the all-time body posture anthems, I feel. Back to you. update on Kate Silverton. I've just been doing some research there. All she said was bloody. She just said, when she thought the cameras

had stopped rolling, she said, right, we need to bloody and then she got cut off. That's all she said. That's pretty underwhelming. And, you know, if you're complaining about that, getting in touch with Offcom, you just you want to get a life, I reckon. That does sound very

meagre, isn't it, as a complaint? Yes, true words have never been said. So, The first of four songs up this week is this. The club is alive with a sound on you. I'm in the spotlight. Ooh, because he turns me. Hey into the club, not looking for love.

Boys just having some fun. Disappeal. Skinning by the bar, just enjoying the view. Shorties all around by to focus on you. I just want to dance floor. You can get up on. DJ I could be the dance floor

You could get up on me Okay this is Okay this is the club is alive By JLS Released as the lead single from their second studio album titled Out of this world The Club is Alive is JLV is JLS.

L.S. is fourth single to chart in the UK and their third to reach number one, and it's not the last time we'll be coming to Jack the Lad's swing during our 2010's coverage. The Club is Alive, went straight in at number one as a brand new entry. It stayed at number one for one week. In its first and only week atop the charts, it sold 84,000 copies beating competition from We Speak No Americano by Yolanda Be Cool and D-Cup. And My First Kiss by 303 and Kesha. After one week at the top, the club is alive, fell six places to number seven. It stayed inside the top 104, 11 weeks.

The single is currently officially certified gold in the UK. As of 2026, gold is a surprise to me because I feel like this has taken up a lot of brain space of mine over the years. But Andy, we will begin with you for the club is alive. Yes, yes, I've been looking forward to this. Not because it's some massive totemic classic. I think it is weirdly a little bit of a classic in a very different way, but this is unusual stuff, this. So it's got this almost avant-garde quality to it

where it makes a really strange chord change in every single chorus and every verse as well, where it goes to with the sound of music that is just such an unexpected place for it to go add to that the bizarre usage of Julie Andrews classic

The Hills are Alive with the Sound of Music from 1964 I think it is so absolutely ancient stuff even then and pairing that with JLS who were doing this with total sincerity and turning it into a stomper none of these things are compliments

like this is awful obviously this is like completely ill-conceived this is like an absolutely disastrous thing to put out there but I do think and I'm very reluctant to say this I don't often say this because I feel like it's an easy get out for us on this show

but I do think this is a song that for me firmly falls into so bad it's good territory because I mean it's definitely not accomplishing anything that it wants to I don't think but there is a genuine entertainment factor to this that is unintended

which is just that it's so bizarre, it's so kind of strange to listen to that it weirdly kind of captures me and I just want to know more about how this song happened, where the idea came from, and why it was written in such a way and why nobody thought, hang on, we need to go back to the drawing board of this.

And I think it's a really fascinating case study because we all know that these bands are in thrall to their management, you know, and they just do what the label tells them. But this is a fantastic case study and just how much you can get a boy band to do without them questioning it. Like, you'd think, they say, right,

what we want to do is this club stomper version of the sound of music. They'd be like, mm, we're four young men. We're covering Julie Andrews. That's, hmm, okay. And just the fact that this happened at all, I think is so fascinating.

And it has stuck around, doesn't it? Everybody remembers this. You know, that it shouldn't be a hook because it's borderline tuneless, but that chorus is very memorable. I think the worst part of it, though, is actually that little note that it hits on the verses where it goes like, and it did, do, do, do, do, do. And it hits this discordant point where it hits, like, an accidental in that scale,

where it is genuinely discordant and painful to listen to. It is really not usually the stuff of pop music, some of the sounds, at some of the cadences that you hear in this. it makes the song reach this kind of atonal quality where I'm not really sure what emotion it's trying to capture where there's a weird tension to this that shouldn't be there. So like I say, it takes on qualities that are not at all intended

and make it just bizarrely fascinating and bizarrely memorable. It is awful. It is awful. But I really enjoyed revisiting this. Just mad. And I remember reading an interview with JLS around the time they split up

where they were looking at, back on their career because they had one of those sort of S Club 7 style breakups where you sort of gave your notice and saw it out your contract before actually sparing up there was no animosity or anything and they did an interview looking back on all of their singles and they were asked well not just

as singles all of their music and they were asked what do you think is the worst song JLS ever did and three of them said songs I'd never heard of that weren't singles that were album tracks that they hated and then one of them said oh the club is alive that's the worst song we ever did and one of them said well hang on hang on hang on that went number

one and that's a gold selling record and we all still remember that now. Like people would know that in the street. So like it's obviously not the worst song we ever did because there's something to that. And that's kind of where I land on this. They're like anything that captured people's attention, even if it's in a bad way, as much as this. You know, it's kind of like an all publicity as good publicity sort of thing that I think this is going on.

So I'm weirdly very fond of this despite it being an absolutely disastrous piece of music. Can't come to a decision on it really. just bonkers. Yeah, right. Yeah, let's not be it around the bush. This is terrible. Like, absolutely spectacularly terrible. We've got horribly dated production choices,

an obvious attempt at their management to make them sound more dangerous than they actually are, and the four JLS lads being thrown into an environment that they simply do not suit being in. And that's not, and that's before you get to the Julie Andrews of it all. It's as if somebody in a boardroom decided

that JLS was like, no, what they need is to sound hard, with a sound of music sample. Go nuts. You know, sorry, not sample, interpolation. And so here we are. You know, this was so easy to hate at the time. Because as I've said before,

I was an alternative kid growing increasingly tired of the pop charts being wall-to-wall club songs that sounded like they were all designed to be played at 11 p.m. on a Friday. I hated the whole aesthetic. Everything had to be enormous. Everything had to be scints and lasers and everything had to sound like it was from a cheap reset.

So imagine being served this or having this served to me at 16. Like I thoroughly, coming back to this, expected to chuck this in the pie hole without thinking about it. I thought I hated this, but sorry to spoil things a bit, but I'm not going to do it. Because to my absolute surprise, I think it's full commitment to being so awful, creates some kind of inversion effect.

It goes so far in one direction that it comes out of the other side with a surprising amount of camp value and quite a considerable degree of charm. This does not spare the horses on its journey to shit. Gender swap this, give it to Kesha, and I think this would be undergoing some critical reappraisal right now. I wouldn't necessarily agree that it deserves that reappraisal, but I could see the argument.

You know, there's something about the complete lack of restraint here that becomes weirdly endearing, like its tyres have come off the road, but it's decided to turn into the crash just to see what happens, and it's happy to be a mangled reference. I think. You know, Ed, you will know what I mean when I say that this to me has the same appeal as Can't Stop Partying. I've written that in my notes, Rob. Yes, exactly. It is a song that stands out so much for so many wrong reasons that eventually the wrongness itself becomes the selling point. It is completely unpretentious. It doesn't have a single second where it seems remotely interested in pulling back or asking whether any of this is a good idea. And after a while, you do kind of just because,

come weak to it. Excepting that it's awful, you could never put this mid-table or upper table for a JLS song ranking. It would always be at the bottom, but with a sort of, but you can't put it at the bottom now, can you, because of X, Y, Z? It hasn't broken my rating system in the way that Boom, Boom, Power did, but I was thinking about Boom, Boom, Power quite a lot while writing these notes, because I think over the years I've become increasingly susceptible to artists going absolutely

full pelt into something so tacky. There's a strange warmth that develops when you realize that something you initially hated isn't actually trying to be clever or tasteful or even ironic. It's just committed to its moment and nothing else. I always come back to the room that the Tommy Wiseau film is the ultimate example where it is zero percent talent but a hundred percent commitment. And that's why it still packs out cinemas around the world. You know, everyone wants to go and see it and shout, oh, hi, Mark, or you're tearing me apart, Lisa. Or I did not hit her. It's not true.

It's bullshit. I did not hit her. I did not. Or everybody betraying me. I fit up with this world. And of course, the most famous line from the film, you could be the DJ. I could be the dance floor.

You could get upon me. That is essentially where I've landed with JLS. I still think this is terrible. But the sheer unadulterated tackiness of it has given it a second life in my head that I never expected it to have. And just as a finishing side note, Jason Derulo, he opened up a song earlier this year in my head by saying,

everybody's looking for love. Oh, ain't that the reason you're at this club? And now JLS have said, came in the club, not looking for love. And well, doesn't that just cover the whole spectrum of humanity? You know, there are two types of people, those who come to the club looking for love and those who come to the club, not looking for love.

Really makes you think. think. So Ed, how about you on JLS? I'm no longer able to review music. Because I quite like this. I thought it would pull the effect of hilarity and joy that met me when I re-listened to this for the first time the other day. I thought that would surely vanish and realize it was complete and utter awfulness. I never wanted to hear again by the time I recorded this. It hasn't happened, right? Yes, it's stupid. Yes, it's abrasive. Yes, it's gimmicky and crass. And did I mention it's stupid? And it has an alarming lack of character for a boy band single. I mean, it just sounds like one robot. What the fuck is happening? But it's really catchy. As in all of it is really catchy. I mean, the, the ends don't. always justify the means, but it makes me smile this one. I'm not sure if it means it at all. I'm not sure if it was deliberate. I'm not sure whether it was something that started seriously,

and then they thought, actually, let's just go for it, just leave into it. Just who cares? Or whether it just got out of control and they didn't know that it was this big fucking wedding cake full of ants and feces. But, you know, it's like the chart-pile. equivalent of crank too in some ways, because it so completely leans into its mad, crude crapness in a way. It's, uh, what's the, um, craptacular. That's the Simpsons phrase, isn't it? I love that expression and it's perfect for this, because it means I get to like the song, but also know that it's a stupid pile of crap at the same time that fails or should fail in so many aesthetic aims. And it does fail to establish a boy band as any sort of semblance of a group with character or identity

beyond the thin chart pop veneer they've had painted on them. But God damn, yeah, every stupid production gimmick possible. One, two, three, four, hey, just shout some shit. And then at the end, we'll just go, it's like, this shouldn't be listenable. It should be obnoxious. And yet somehow it's, I, it makes me smile. In fact, I think I might be underrating this. I'm going mad here. Seriously, this is a perplexing and unique experience, and it should be congratulated and punched to a speck at the same time.

I like that friction between the melody and the minor harmony, because it's so brutal. They use this brutal synth sound. The voice is brutally flatline. This isn't what you do with pop music. what you do with a boy band. This is what you do with dental torture. And yet,

it's so abrasive and in your face, and it doesn't have any simplicity or any grace, that it becomes pure trash, just pure, glorious, emulsifying trash. Oh, no, I'm actually going mad here. I don't even know what I'm talking about anymore. JLS has done that to me more than the week has. But you know what?

I like this. Yeah, that's all I can say with certainty at this time. Oh, dear. All right then. So, the second song of this week is this. Can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky like shooting stars? I can really use a wish right now, wish right now, wish right now. Can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky like shooting stars?

Okay, this is Airplanes by B.O.B. and Haley Williams. Released as the third single from his debut studio album titled The Adventures of Bobby Ray. Airplanes is Bob's third single to chart in the UK and his second to reach number one. And it's not the last time we'll be coming to B.O.B. during our 2010's coverage. This is the first and only UK number one to be credited to Haley Williams. Airplanes first entered the UK charts at number 23, reaching number one during its seventh week. It stayed at number one for one week! In its first and only week atop the charts, it sold 76,000 copies, beating competition from Just Be Good to Green by Professor Green and Lily Allen,

bang, bang, bang by Mark Ronson and Pack Up by Eliza Doolittle. After one week at the top, airplanes fell two places, to number three. It stayed inside the top 100 for 37 weeks. The single is currently officially certified three times platinum in the UK as of 2026. Ed, it seems like you need to be brought down slightly from the mania that has been induced in you by The Club is Alive. And I feel like you are quite certain about how you feel about this one. And I think certainty is what you need. So go ahead. Definitely. This really is an antidote. This is Or too much Valium, actually, for my tastes.

Was this, it feels like this song was something of a big deal, was it? Yes, yeah, absolutely huge. Andy, I don't know if you want to back me up on that. I disagree. I feel like this was something that fans of Haley Williams loved, but it was not particularly, it's a bit of a surprise in number one to me. I guess maybe we're in different circles, because I was a little bit old for Haley Williams at this time.

I don't know. It didn't seem like a big deal to me. I'm quite surprised that this got a number. one to be honest, yeah. A bit old for Haley Williams. I think I've seen her twice in the last couple years. 18-year-olds weren't hair market. Her market was high schoolers, not uni students.

So I was just a little bit out of the target. Yeah, and I realise they changed things up considerably in the 2010s. Look, I'm going to segue into talking about Paramour and a bit, because I really have fuck all to say about this. Because this is one of those songs that I sense it's something that people, people know. I've heard people mention it before, but I can't remember it. As in not even just from being around at the time. I mean, I've heard this four times now for the preparation for this podcast. I can't remember it at all other than the facts have written down. I know that Haley Williams

sings the chorus. Haley Williams, I think is personally, and I think Rob might back me up here, one of the best vocalists of the 21st century so far. I think she's magnificent. But this isn't a logical fit for her, really. I'm not sure why she's here. It feels she does her Paley Williams thing with something that's quite restrictive. It's just not got the avenues of expression or looseness that I would want from one of her vocals. Or you'd think that her fans would want from one of her vocals. So it seems like a bit of stunt casting, really.

The chorus, which sounds like a lot of things, really. I mean, that's what I remember about. It's like, this sounds a bit like everything at the time. And the way the song's laid out with the big sort of melodic chorus and the mid-tier rapping, it's like this sounds like a bunch of stuff at the time. And when B-O-B or Bob or whatever the piss you want to call him comes in with, I could use a dream or a genie or a wish. I'm like, I could instantly tell it's like this is going to be far too long.

Because even compared to what he was doing last time, I'm like, oh, he's phoning this in. he can't be bothered. I mean, you know, he wasn't exactly, you know, rake one in the first place, but fucking hell. It's just,

it can, that's the annoying thing, because he's technically, fine, he's a good rapper. He's not bad. He's not like a, you know,

I'll get the producer to rap or something. He knows what he's doing. And you can just tell in that case when it's like, you just don't give a shit, do you? You're just like, putting down whatever

that can, you can string like a washing line. between the Haley Williams bits. But, yeah, this is just really underwhelming. I'm a little surprised, and it's one of the odd things that when you come back to something that I don't think I was even aware of at the time, and so you're experiencing it for the first time, you don't get the slow exposure and growth from it. So I don't know, and maybe with another seven listens this might get into my head,

but I do not understand why this was a hit other than the stunt casting, really. I think you probably implied, actually, Andy. But that's it. not really got much else to say. Andy, how about you with Bob and Haley? I completely agree with Ed, to be honest. I do remember this being out, and I don't want to sort of overstate,

you know, that, well, understated popularity, I guess, that I remember it being on the radio a fair few times, but it sort of just being one of those songs that was around in the background, and I never understood why it was popular, to be honest. I think there's just a lot in this that's just like, yeah there's a lot of other songs that are kind of doing this better you know if you listen to some of the songs that have been mentioned in the

you know also rams in previous weeks like last week we had love the way you lie and this is just exactly the same like the structure of it is exactly the same and there's so many songs like that around this time you know we've got read all about it and i need a doctor and stuff like that where it's just like this celebrity female vocal refrain that is extremely easy for them to sing that they can do in like one take and then a rapper and that's just like that's just the formula and you're supposed to just follow that chord sequence all the way through occasionally there's a celebrity you know again and i just think it was it was one of the most boring things about music at that time to be honest that there was so so

many of those um and yeah this this isn't really anything different at all really i don't think there's anything remotely special about Haley Williams's bit. I think, like, obviously, you know, I'm sure it was a delight to hear her here and delight for her to have a number one for those who are fans. But like I say, it's an incredibly easy vocal line for her to sing. Easy money for her, to be honest. So all power to her. Well done. And admittedly, I'm not in these circles, because I don't know Paramour or Haley Williams at all. Until last, well, until earlier this year, there were only, I think two Paramour songs had ever heard and one of them was the one they sing in Simlish

on The Sims 2 I really like they completely passed me by like entirely passed me by and most of the ones I know now are because of Robin his wife who have introduced me to them and yeah this would probably be my biggest

exposure to Hayley Williams before then and it's like it's just another one of those it's another one of the love the way he lies another one of the I need a doctor's just it's just fine and we've been over previously how Bob is a bit of a twat and a bit of a cancer, to be honest. So this is just fine.

I remain bemused by its success. Yeah, it's just fine. I think it was pushed along by the Part 2 remix, which had M&M on it, which wasn't the one that necessarily got to look on, but there were two versions of it around at the time, and I think the sales of both contributed to its success. if you know what I mean, kind of like how we get with them, Despacito in a few years where they have the original version, then there's the remix with Justin Bieber on it, and that's the one

that gets really big, but streams of both contribute to the same thing. They were starting to realize that you could game the charts in that way, once streaming became a, you know, and buying MP3s and things like that became, you know, more widespread. As for me, in this essay, I will apologise to Haley Williams. I think I've mentioned on this podcast, Well, I think I've mentioned on this podcast before. And now Andy and Edd, you have both, you know, confirmed it, you know, for everybody that, like, Paramour, one of my favorite bands in the universe. You know, they have been, since I was introduced to them sort of late 2007, early 2008. And, you know, late 2009, early 2010 was probably the absolute peak of my quite intense love for them.

You know, I still love them now, but I felt it very keenly back then because I knew so little about, like, oh, the music. and I was 15, you know, you don't really feel anything the same once you'd become an adult. You know, a brand new eyes had just come out, which was their third album. I'd seen them on that tour around Christmas 2009, and I was listening to the first three albums over and over and over and over again, and I was desperate for them to really hit it in the UK charts. Like, you know, brand new eyes was a number one album in 2009,

but the singles always seemed to languish a bit, you know, like ignorance and misery business, they were only top 20 hits and the only exception kind of stalled in the 30s, and Decode was like, it's a fucking Twilight song, and it didn't even make the top 40s. So I really desperately wanted Paramour, or at least one of them,

to get a UK, number one. But just not like this at the time, I was like, oh, I didn't want it to be this way. You know, I already wasn't that keen on Bob, and then this happened, and it felt like he was stealing Haley from the alternative world, or worse, that she was considering selling out. You know, Paramore were also about to enter a pretty,

turbulent period of their own, with the Farrow brothers both leaving the band and Josh Farrow making a whole series of accusations about Haley and the band's management. You know, there were stories about Haley signing a separate recording contract to the rest of the band, accusations that she was writing lyrics

deliberately to try and break the group up, and then there was a whole business with the intimate photos of Haley ended up on social media, and all of this happened within roughly the same kind of six-month period. And there's a stupid, like, you know, 15-year-old, I did allow it to shake my faith in her artistry.

Because when you're 15, you still think things like, girls are stupid. And when you've spent your childhood hearing quite a lot of, sort of like, you know, misogynistic kind of media narratives about people like Kim Kardashian or Paris Hilton, you know, supposedly, oh, they leaks their sex tapes to get famous and all this stuff. And you could just, you could absorb some like really poisonous ideas without even really realizing it, I think. You just think it's the way that things are and the way they're supposed to be. So I took against this song and the whole, this whole period of Paramour, but for reasons that had very little to do with actual music and weren't actually founded in any

kind of reality. Like, I got myself into such a position that I wasn't even happy when one of my favorite singers got a number one in the UK. I convinced myself that this was a bad thing and that Haley Williams was like going down the Avril Levine best damn thing kind of route with the, because I really, really disliked girlfriend at the time. And or what 90s music fans thought that Liz Fair had turned into, rather than accepting the artist change and thinking like, well, you know, we've got the first three albums and, you know, Haley's doing well for herself.

Like, I just kind of wanted to keep Haley locked in this like alternative box. Like, no, you stay in this place, you know, stay not well. known, that kind of thing. But never mind that when I saw Paramore before Christmas 2009, that I'd seen them in a sold-out arena. I was like, no, no, they're still underground. It doesn't matter that I saw them with 15,000 people on a stadium tour of the UK. Like, they're still this little band, and they're just mine. Total lie. So from like 2011 to 2014, I'd convinced myself that, like, I've grown out of Paramour. Like, I barely heard the song, like airplanes. I didn't listen. Everybody at my school was obsessed with it. But I just kind of went.

and I didn't really listen to their albums anymore. It wasn't until I grew back into the band around 2014 and started to unpick a lot of the beliefs I'd absorbed about women and female celebrities that I properly kind of came back to Paramour and airplanes. And you know what? It's not bad this for me. With Bob, I can only really repeat

what I said about his performance on Nothing on You. He's decent behind the microphone, but he's never going to evoke much in me. You know, he doesn't seem to have much of, you know, what's anything that's particularly original or unique to say. It's just well-performed platitudes, which is fine. You know, it gets the message across. I think it says a lot, really, that he takes up 70% of the song,

but I'm talking about, you know, I don't really have much to say about him, even though he takes up. I know that, you know, I'm biased towards discussing Haley's role in it, but, because she's, you know, one of my favorites, but, like, Bob is still quite, you know, he's still a big deal. You know, he's still in the song for a lot of it. I think that the instrumental is stronger here though than on nothing on you, just kind of directly comparing it. That kind of echoing kind of reverb heavy piano revolves around and has a nostalgic quality these days.

You know, there's militaryist drums which kind of make me think of toy soldiers, you know, the M&M one. And I think you can kind of see that in the comments underneath his two number ones under his name. Because he does have another number one, but it's as a featured spot rather than as the principal artist. where on nothing on you, you get the kind of usual, like, well, at least what the algorithm is showing me. It's like people go, who's here in 2026? Woo! You know, kind of bot comments. But airplanes gets people talking about their life stories, like people talking about hearing it in prison or getting out and getting married and buying a house and people saying that they wish they were adults when they were kids. And now that there were adults, they wish they were kids again. And that sort of

thing, you know, it's lodged itself somewhere quite deep in a lot of people's memories. And thankfully nobody seems to have forgotten the irony though of a flat earther singing about airplanes i'm sure we all had a good laugh about that when that happened um what endures though for me i guess from a biased point of view but also i just think from a you know just listening to a pop song point of view is is haley's part you know i saw that she's actually recently started performing this live again during solo set so she know she looks back on it with some fondness and i can understand why you know her performances is relatively it's relatively plaintive and it's full of her character.

She brings a lot of resonant feeling to quite kind of downtrod and delivery, especially in that little kind of micro hook that, which right now, which is right, that kind of keeps circling around the song. On that, actually, there's a Paramour B-side from 2005, which is called O-Star.

And it was initially recorded for their debut album, but was eventually released on the Summer Tick EP in 2006. And the opening verse from that song is, O-Star, fall down on me. Let me wake up. let me make a wish upon you. Hold on. Let me think. Think of what I'm wishing for. And I was surprised to learn years later that Haley didn't write her chorus part in this song

because of how similar those two bits are. Like I said, by 2014, I was back on the Paramour train. I'd also learned a lot more about the circumstances surrounding some of the stories I'd, like, swallowed as a kid. You know, like how Kim Kardashian's tape with Ray J had actually been sold to a porn company via a third party. there are allegations that have been denied that it was Chris Jenna that sold it, but she's denied those things. So just want to make that clear. And that Paris Hilton had been pressured into doing her tape by Rick Solomon and that after it had been leaked to another third party, Solomon had started distributing the tape himself. And that Haley had meant to send those intimate pictures of herself privately, but it was the early days of social media. Things got mixed up and they ended up being posted publicly by mistake.

Sorry, just the brain. It's like, if someone wants to actually would even choose to sell a sex tape, it's like, who gives this shit? Exactly. Yeah, who cares? I was just literally just about to say that like if Haley had actually meant to post that picture online and then had second thoughts about it 15 minutes later, like we are only just just, America, I should say, not we, America as a society is only just recovering from the Vanessa Hudgens nude scandal at this time as well. And I think those two, I remember probably the last time where, like, America reacted in shock to the sight of nipples. Because I feel like when this happened to Jennifer Lawrence about three years after this or two years after this, there was this big kind of like, there was the initial like, and then, but then there was a, no, wait. She's had her privacy invaded.

Like, she shouldn't be having to apologize for this. Like, someone's hacked into her computer. And also, like, you know, it was meant for private consumption. and even if it wasn't, like, you know, she has her own audience and she can kind of do what she wants because she's a human being and we shouldn't all be frightened of, like I say, frightened of a pair of, sorry, I should say female nipples because America has absolutely no problem with male nipples, but, you know, I'm getting sidetracked. And, you know, I started to understand as well that Haley's increasingly kind of poppy musical direction in the early 2010s. Wasn't some, like, betrayal of Paramour and that, if anything, it worked, you know, we're working towards like bigger producers and embrace.

seem to more pop-friendly sound, help them work towards their self-titled album from 2013, which became, you know, it took some adjusting to initially, but that's my favorite album of theirs. Now, I think it's fucking fantastic. From wall to wall, it's this big, giant pop experience, and I love it. It feels silly, though, to say sorry for something that I felt when I was 15, because, you know, everyone's an idiot when they're 15, you know, everyone would argue and punch their 15-year-old selves, I'm sure. But this is, probably the only time I'll ever get to discuss Haley Williams like this in any capacity. And I hate that in my long life of loving paramour and Haley, there's this weird kind of

three-year period where I sort of didn't. And worse, I didn't love them for reasons that weren't really my own. And it feels ridiculous, like, you know, because Haley doesn't know who I am. She's only once laid eyes on me from 30 yards away. And just kind of just she was waving to a crowd of people as she got into a taxi. You know, that's about it. you know, and, but I just, I don't know, because she eventually, you know, she went on to sing the song that me and my wife did our first dance to, which was still into you from the self-titled album. And I wish I could pretend that that little period between 2010 and 2013 had never happened, but, you know, can't turn it back. Like I say, though, the remix with

Eminem, just to kind of finish off on the song, if you take out Bob's second verse, put Eminem's verse in, just keep it to three minutes. I think it's all right. I don't think it's, I don't think is too bad. So, yeah, I guess that's, you know, my long and complicated thoughts on that one. The song is meh, it's fine. Bob is meh, he's fine. I will never, ever listen to his album. Okay, so, the third song up this week is this.

Okay, this is We Speak No Americano by Yolanda Be Cool and D.Cup. Released as a standalone collaborative single, We Speak No Americano is the first and only single in UK chart history to be credited to Yolanda Be Cool, and therefore they're only number one. This is also the first and only number one in UK chart history for DECUP. We Speak No Americano first entered the UK charts at number five. reaching number one during its third week. It stayed at number one for one week.

In its first and only week atop the charts, it sold 89,000 copies in a week where there were no new entries or climbers in the top 10. After one week at the top, We Speak No Americano dropped one place to number two. It stayed inside the top 100 for 29 weeks. The single is currently officially certified platinum in the UK. as of 2026

Andy, Yolanda be cool Yo, Andy, be cool. Yeah, there you go. No, your Lander be cool. Anyway, so I, at the time, really liked this, and I am going to slightly preemptively go to back for it now because we've had conversations in the past

that indicate that, well, don't know about Ed, but Rob at least, dislikes this quite heavily, and I don't. I feel a little bit sad that it's now sort of got this rewriting history thing attached to it, that like it was made famous by the Inbetweeners movie, or that that's what it's known for, when that was over a year after it was number one. It was not known for that at all.

The Inbetweeners movie used it because it was such a popular song already, so just want to slightly correct the record on that, because that tends to annoy me whenever anyone hears this and they start doing the Inbetweeners dance moves. But anyway, there's a lot of songs like this, again, from that era, just like I said with airplanes, but this is an era of music that is the one I remember the most in my whole life. This is like the absolute peak of my memories in this year.

And there was a lot of stuff that came along like Barbara Streisand, party rock anthem next year, Mr Saxo Beat, loca people. There was so, so many of that type that just had these like annoying little hooks and that was sort of all there was to the song. this was kind of the first of that wave though to be honest or at least the first one that really broke out in that sense so that bim-b-b-b-d-d-d-ram which just felt feels like sort of schlock looking back now at the time it wasn't at the time it was a bit of fun it was something different in the charts and so i just kind of appreciated it for that and it was in my going out days this and it was very fun when you heard this come on like it was a

fun silly little song to dance too not to mention that through and in those little brass swing elements as well kind of give it a little bit of something but I'm not going to go any further than a little bit of something because it is still just essentially a sort of 2010 update of

dupe to some extent so it's never going to be that fantastic to be honest but I think this is fine I think it's just a silly little dance ditty that had its moment that is very outdated now of course but I think it's fun for what it is

and I don't think it deserves a bad rap to be honest and I won't be by holinger I'd say I'm probably more of a thumbs up on this than I am a thumbs down and that 18th party I mentioned last week where I spewed up and turned green this song was on while I was doing those shots that made me spew up until my soul left my body

so I always remember it for that as well so yeah I'm fine with this I don't have much on this when it was out, like, I knew it was novelty and silly, and I didn't hate it for that reason. I just kind of ignored it. I feel like I've had a different experience with this song, Andy, to you, I think me being in my last year of high school and you being in your first year of uni, or just about to go to your first year of uni, may have just switched things up a little bit in terms of, like, what we were exposed to and what felt quite big.

Because I wasn't going out to clubs and none of my friends played it on their phones. I'd kind of stopped listening to the radio at this stage as well. I never grew to hate this or find it irritating at the time. You know, then they used it in the Inbetweeners film and that was when it felt like it took on a second life. It got like a big second window. That was when everybody added. That was when it felt like it entered my orbit in quite a big way.

I understand it had already been number one at this stage. So it was obviously huge, but it just kind of felt like the in-betweeners usage was the thing that kind of nailed it to the notice board, if you know what I mean. and it felt like it never came down from that notice board. It was, you know, it was crystallized as a bit of a meme, and suddenly my friends did find it really funny, and suddenly it was being played at loads of house parties that I went to. And then it was used in the third Madagascar film,

and it became really popular with small children at that moment, who were now 20, for God's sake. And so for about three years, it became kind of inescapable between, like, 2011 and 2014. And this is when I started to turn against it. And then a few years went by, And in 2018, for some reason, I went to see that awful Peter Rabbit film where they got James Corden to voice Peter Rabbit, because fuck it, why not? You know, and they just, that is a horrible film for kids.

It's very, very unnecessarily and shockingly violent in places. And it's got like a PG certificate. I really, not like blood and gore, but it's like people being electrocuted and flung across rooms really hard into walls. And then James Corden's, they're like, ha, yeah, I'm doing my thing from. Gavin and Stacy, but I'm a CGI Robert. Whoa! But then I started to go soft on We Speak No Americano in the late 2010s. Like it was in the past, you know, I have a major aesthetic aversion to electro swing.

We went through this when we did DOOP, but it had faded. You know, it was a cultural relic, and it reminded people of a funny scene in the in-betweeners, and it reminded people of like, you know, pre-Donald Trump times or something like that. And we got all the way to 2024 without me having thought about it, for a really long time, except to sort of be like, no, I actually do kind of find it annoying. Like I say, Andy, we did have conversation about like, I find it very grating, actually. But, you know, I hadn't, when it came up, I was like, no, I don't like it. But when it wasn't, you know, being played or discussed, I just didn't think about it.

And then in March, 2024, I went over to Florida. My wife's uncle and his wife, they both lived out there at the time near Orlando. They've recently put things in place to come back to the UK. But in 2024, me and my wife and my parents, we all went over to Florida for this kind of once in a lifetime holiday. Because, you know, I never thought I'd get to do the whole Disneyland and Universal thing because we just never had the money to do it. So as much as I'm not bothered about Disney or Universal parks, I wanted to do it all the first time we went there. And man, even in March, it's hot in Florida. It was like 30 degrees Celsius in the middle of March.

And so halfway through the day at Universal, we sat down under these umbrellas and had lunch. And we ended up sat there for about 30 to 45 minutes because like available chairs in the shade at Universal on a hot day are like gold dust. Only we sat right down next to the Madagascar bit. And every 10 minutes for five minutes, people dressed as the lemurs from those films would come out from behind this gate and do a funny dance for the children. And they danced to this four times in half an hour. and we couldn't move. We had to watch them do it. We were trapped there by our lunch and by the sunshine.

And every time the drop hit, I just felt a hammer between my ears and that hammer was simultaneously making the noise. The monotony, the odd pitch shift effects, it brought it all back. And the best thing about novelty things is that they pass. They are novelty by definition and description

and they act out being a novelty thing. Like Mayfly. you know, we laugh about them years later in small groups when the wider culture is kind of forgotten about them. You know, everybody loves and remembers Vienna, only half the population remember Shadapy faced, you know? But nobody has forgotten about, we speak no Americano. It has been adopted, I think, into the wider memory box of British popular culture,

which means it's lost that novelty value for me. It's just part of the monoculture. It's a noise I hear more than I would like to. And I always get reminded of how thin it is on ideas. it plays up the same trick over and over and over and expect you to react the same way every time. They switch it up towards the end a bit with the change of the meter where they go

the dida-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-that bit. But the monotony is still there, the lack of feeling is still there. I dig the instrumental punchline once the drop into the silly thing. And then it's just the same joke for another two and a half minutes. And I'm like, right, I'm done.

I was done a long time ago, actually. and I don't hate this as much as I thought I did, but, and, oh, but it's just, yeah, Ed, yeah, I imagine you'll feel similarly, so you can pick up from me if you want. Well, I'm glad you kids all had your fun with this one. Here comes Uncle Music again. I didn't think I'd heard this before until you reminded me of the Inbetweeners movie. I didn't know that's what they were dancing to. I think I probably heard it overdubbed with so many different songs on YouTube that I just had forgotten that. I was sure that if I hadn't seen it in an advert, it must have been made for an advert.

And it wasn't just misremembering the in-between this thing. I could see the product that was selling. And the way the people moved. And it might be that I'm actually remembering an advert from the time that used this as the music, in which case what I'm about to say is a waste of everyone's time. But please, please, give me a chance. Right, okay, picture this, picture the ad. Right.

Right, it's like a sunny, sleepy Mediterranean-looking square. There's a nice little rustic-looking bar with a canopy over it and things. And there's like a couple of young, slightly tanned, very attractive-looking models doing weird body twist dances with a glass, like, bending over and limbo dancing and things with a dip, dip, dip, dip, dip, of course, having a great time with all of this. And then inside the place, it's kind of forgotten whether it's a bar or a club, and it's really dark, and everyone's really sweaty but really happy. So it's got a club atmosphere, but it's also a bar. Everyone's, of course, smiling and perspiring unhealthily.

But there's, you know, lots of matrix, you know, bullet time, cam and speed down and slow up. as I like to put it because I wrote it wrong and of someone cutting lines so it's like and then they're pouring liquid

into a onto a massive stack of glasses on the table and it's all pouring down and going everywhere and it's like yay! Woo!

This is a party now this is a party time and it's called something like Neopolitano a twist of Italy in every glass or something

and it's just some shitty mixer made in Baselden or something. But this is hammer-minded. I'll put it that way. So many things I can say about this

sound the same as the stuff I said about JLS, except I oddly liked that. And this I found insipid and cynical in a very punchable kind of way. Because of course I did. It's like it sounded like it was made for an advert.

And everything's in the first 30 seconds. You've kind of indicated. And after that, it just kind of disintegrates and gradually decays like it was procedurally generated by a very early version of AI that didn't really know song structures yet. It just would start and stop, and there'd be things that sounded like the earlier parts. So, they're not quite, and it gradually became formless and mulchy, but it didn't really matter because they had the 22 seconds they needed to use on their fucking advert for Neopolitan. But, look, we had all of this novelty reduct.

Latin flavour shit in the 90s with Presbrado and Mambo number five. I quite like though, well, I like Mambo number five at least, but this is not, I don't know, this just feels like that with some sort of serious head injury. I kind of despise how thin this is. And the fact that, I mean, I'm doing this to myself. I've envisioned an ad that probably doesn't exist, that this. this was shilling itself for, which it might never have done. But I'm angry about that.

And I reserve my right to be so. And also, just as a stray point, that's very LMFAO, isn't it? Were they already having that kind of influence? Is that their thing? Or did they kind of co-opped that from something that was going on generally, that kind of wobbly groove, if you get me? To me, LMFAO always seemed like when they fully arrived with their own singles, they weren't exactly parodying that kind of thing, but they were messing with the form, which makes me think that it did kind of exist before they arrived. But it is definitely, there's a 2010 development, this kind of monotonous, deliberately discordant, deliberately annoying drop into a dance section with a,

whiny lead that feels silly like a clowns playing a prepared organ, you know, that sort of thing, you know, like the pulling on like, it just sort of sounds like you're playing Bopit, but it's music instead of you playing Bopit, you know, that sort of thing. Right. That's the dream. Yeah. Andy, I don't know if you have the same kind of memory that when LMFAO came along, they were kind of like winking at the thing rather than.

doing the thing? Yeah, definitely. It always felt like they were in on the joke and like sort of welcoming in us to it as well. Definitely, yeah. And that gave them some extra credibility. I think that it felt safe to enjoy LMFIO because they were sort of half-winking at you as well.

I agree on that, yeah. All right, so the fourth and final song this week is this. Pray him won't do it Hates him won't do it Drinking won't do it Fighting won't knock you Of my head Hide it won't hide it

Smiley won't hide it And fail somehow So when you're gonna let me All right, this is all time, out. And if you know, how do you get like me said? What you said. All right, this is All Time Low by The Wanted.

Released as the lead single from the group's debut studio album titled The Wanted. All Time Low is The Wanted's first single to chart in the UK and their first to reach number one. And it's not the last time we'll be coming to The Wanted during our 2010's coverage. All Time Low went. rated at number one as a brand new entry. It stayed at number one for one week. In its first and only week atop the charts, it sold 84,000 copies beating competition from billionaire by a travi McCoy and Bruno Mars. Club Can't Handle Me by Flowrider and David Guetta, won by Swedish House Mafia, and I Need Air by Magnetic Man. I had no idea magnetic man got that big. After one

week at the top, all time low fell four places to number five. It stayed inside the top 100 for 31 weeks. The single is currently officially certified platinum in the UK. As of 2025, so Ed, the wanted. Here they are. How do we feel? Magnetic man. Still pulling in the punters. Anyway, this, it's like Gary Barlow had just listens to Viva Lovita by Coldplay. I don't necessarily mean that in a bad way.

This really sounds like Take That to me. The vocalist sounds a lot like Mark Owen to me, actually, even down to the way his vocals are treated. And it's very hooky in that pleasing way that contemporary take that stuff was. And I'll give them this. There is a bit more grit and gravitas than you will ever get from Gary Barlow in this.

It does sound a bit like it's written from a place of some reflection and some pain rather than somebody who has heard, songs about other songs about romance, which is kind of the Gary Barlow effect. No offence to Gary Barlow. I love to take that. He's a bit alienating without intending to be.

Yeah, it's just, I kind of wish it didn't sound so slick as a result. Could have done with a bit more grit. Everything seems to have been brill-creaned over. The vocals have been very manicured in a way. and I'm like, it needs a bit more bite to it, in my personal opinion. And this is just me, I guess, picking this up. And, you know, of course, there can only me so many bloody melodies in the world. But like last week, it's another song that uses the,

A Look in the Mirror, da-da-da-da-da-da. From The Scientist by Coldplay, speaking for the Coldplay connection, and I'm going to keep on seeing, like, an annoying twat, how many songs in the 2010s use that, whether it's actually a recurring kind of melodic tick that's been taken on as just a standard trope. I don't know. But I don't, it's fine.

I like this. I just wish it had a bit more edge to it because it has the potential to because the lyrics do have a bit of interest and, as I say, what feels like a bit more biographical grunt to it. And it does sound quite effectively like it describes a romantic loss in some places in a very immediate way.

Again, something, take that, we're never really that greater. I mean, all this talk of take that might be completely baffling. But what do you guys think? You know, that, that melody sort of trope, that habit that you've mentioned there, Ed, has got my mind racing. and I have thought of a few, the one that immediately comes to mind there is Pompeii by Bastille. Does it almost feel like

nothing's changed at all? God, that's it. Oh, I'm going to be looking for that everywhere. I planted an infection. I kind of love this, and I kind of always have. And I wouldn't say it's a guilty pleasure, but I do think I've always felt this is genuinely quite good. and they're just like

for people in our age bracket and you know for people who actually bear in mind I was going to study music at this time you know it's not very cool to enjoy the wanted but I just think taking this in context of what it is you know if you look at debut singles of boy bands you've got like I don't even know what boy zones was I'm not going to be bothered to look it up

but you've got swear it again by Westlife what makes you beautiful one direction beat again JLS and even boy band adjacent things, you know, like what I go to school for by Busted and Five Colors in a Hair by McPly. Like these are not, you know, reinvented the wheel, these songs. These are safe songs that just kind of set your stall out as the nice, friendly, you know, kids next door, boy band.

And I'm not going to make out that this is any kind of revolution or completely changes the genre or anything like that. But this is more interesting than your usual debut single from a boy band. There's more going on here. I think the decision to have the strings behind it all the way is, for the time, that was very refreshing. That was quite new. It's not so new these days because so many songs like Rather B is the main one that comes to mind there, have done that, you know, to death now where there's strings going behind it.

But that was pretty kind of striking at the time, especially that it's low strings, that it's not like big sweeping Hollywood strings. It's like your cellos and double basses. Interest and sound to go for. and I really like the constant gradual momentum build through the song but at the time it comes in for that

a low, hello it feels like it's really and a big bump, a big like crash into that final chorus and it doesn't overstay it's welcome it's really quite economical and neat and tidy

in terms of how it goes about things obviously the production is the star from everything that I'm saying it's not so much the band themselves they're pretty non-the-script and it's hard to get too excited about it. But this is at least, you know,

trying to mark yourself out from what is increasingly quite a crowded market for boy bands and girl bands. It's becoming quite sort of 90s-esque again and that there's a lot of them about. And this is, you know, a little bit of a USP. I just wish that they'd done anything as interesting as this ever again

because they default to the most generic boy band ever in the years after this. Perhaps because they'd done the job they needed to and they had the fan base on board because I know I've mentioned this so many times but it was such a lightning rod for 2010 culture and that Radio City Live concert I went to where there was loads and loads of different axe plane

that was on the 14th of August 2010 so that was that while this was number one or like right before this got number one but it was like right on the button the wanted web brand new absolutely brand new and so I sort of thought oh I like that song by the Wanted

but, you know, they're kind of new. The big cheers will come for like Alexander Burke and scouting for girls and the script, et cetera. But when they came on to do All Time Low, which was the only song they did, because it was the only song they had at the time. The noise in that arena was absolutely insane. It felt like, you know, the way people talk about the screams for the Beatles

or the kind of stuff you get at one direction, you know, the noise for the wanted, even at that time when they've been around for about a week in the public consciousness, was insane. I thought like it was going to shatter my ears so I think maybe they thought right we've got people on board now let's give them straight down the line

boy band fair like walks like Rihanna and glad you came and heart vacancy and lightning and stuff like that which is not to my taste at all and I find all their future stuff really boring not my mum though got to mention my mum

because my mum is the world's biggest super fan of the wanted she just adores them Got loads of t-shirts and hoodies and, like, posters and things of The Wanted. She's been to see them several times, including the last show ever that Tom Parker did before he died. And when that happened, she, like, sort of did a sort of Victorian style, took to her bed in grief. And, like, really just, oh, she's just besotted with The Wanted. At a 60th birthday party, she got up impromptu to sing Glad You Came on a microphone, not karaoke, to just sing the song.

along with the recording to the whole crowd there because she loves the wanted so much. I do love my mum, but I don't understand why she loves the wanted so much. I don't know, but that's cute. But yeah, this I think is probably the best song that they ever do. Shame that it's their first, but I really like this. And yeah, I do sort of listen to this sometimes outside of the show. I think it's genuinely quite credible interest in pop music, yeah. I love that your mom is like reliving her teen phase here,

because my mum's obsession with boy bands kind of ended when the Osmans split up, but she still loves the Osmans, but they're of the late 60s and 70s, whereas your mum is having that kind of love that my mum did for like the Bay City Rollers and the Osmans and stuff. But currently, Ed, if you just listen very closely, just for a second, I promise I've not been peering over your shoulder. So, hey, that Viva La Vida by Coldplay, that's a good song, in it.

Anyway, yeah. I was aware of this at the time, but only because it's mere existence, piss me off for a bit. It wasn't the song's fault, because I'd never actually heard it in full. But when I saw it written down on a Radio 1 playlist on their website,

I remember thinking, oh, all time low have made it to Radio 1, and they've got a new single out called The Wanted. This is great. And then I realized I'd read it the wrong way, and I got pissed off the all time low weren't about to start getting UK radio play and that there was another new boy,

band that I kind of had to deal with in my day-to-day life. And beyond that, I had no relationship with the song. The group themselves kind of passed me by. I learned in later years that they were, you know, they were kind of like, you know, my wife when she was 13. She was really into them as well. Like, you know, she, and I think if you're a 13-year-old, 14-year-old girl, like, that's like the perfect age for a group like the wanted. Because they, oh, God, they look the part. God, in the video, they're all made in a lab kind of like, you know, beautiful. kind of, you know, really, really like, you know, soft affectionate faces. Their, their look is actually a little bit proto one direction with the kind of like, you know,

kind of loose topman style, slightly longer hair, kind of borrowing the sort of like alternative hair of the indie scene in the late 2000s, or mid to late 2000s, but kind of repackaging it and putting it on a boy who hasn't started growing a beard yet, like that kind of thing. That's like, that's perfect. That's made in a lab stuff. But then over the years, like I've heard this a bit. Like, I feel like this and Glad You Came maybe walks like Rihanna to a lesser extent.

They seem to be the two of theirs that have like survived time. You know, a few of their hits have kind of been lost by the wayside. But you still hear this and glad you came kind of out in the wild every now and again. And, you know, they didn't strike me as too bad. And then in my job at Metro, I had to write quite a bit about poor Tom Parker from this group. Tom Parker, he died of. brain cancer 12 years after this. He died just as I joined Metro and they were quite interested in him and also his poor widow, Kelsey, who does seem to have been able to move on now. I'm uncomfortable with

how much that kind of played out in the media and the way that Kelsey seemed to be uploading every step of her grieving process and every step of her finding a new boyfriend. And that was after the documentary where they did about Tom slowly coming to terms with the fact that he was going to be dead by the fact by the time he was 35 and you know but you know but at the same time i felt like you know well that's just you know it's the game they've entered it's the game they're being made to play because like their agents will be saying like well you've got to do this because of this and you have an obligation to fulfill and you're a role model and you've got to do this and so if it's valuable to somebody going through the same thing and it increases the chance of like

better research into i think you see how glialostoma tom and so okay better research and funding, cool. And so they've been on my mind more these last few years, like since I've met my wife and since I had to start writing about Kelsey for Metro and stuff. And yeah, coming back to this, I don't, I don't mind it, really. I think it's a bit T-moe of Evil Ovida, but it does exercise, I think, quite a decent level of restraint for this kind of thing. Like, it would be easy for this to rush to the point. But it keeps the drum track firmly out for almost the full half of the song, the full first half, when we do eventually reach the big kind of cathartic festival drop, if you will, it's for a new vocal section, at least.

You know, what we do have, I think, is fairly standard boy bandfare, but it's moodier and it's darker and it has a lot of questions, but it lacks an obvious answer that it's searching for. And it doesn't really bring about a sense of emotional resolution either. It feels kind of straightjacketed and fraught. And that's rare for a boy band hit, really. So I dig all of that. The only bit in the song that makes me tense up and cringe a bit

is that line that standing on the yellow line, waiting at the station, I'm late for work, a vital presentation. They haven't so much brought the rhyme into the harbour so much as they've just crashed an entire cruise liner through the souvenir shop on the seafront, taking out several families who were crabbing at the same time.

But Jesus, a vital presentation. but that's all really. Like, I think this is nice. I think, you know, it's a nice surprise. I'm very happy that this episode has provided three songs that listening back to them now, I either like them more or dislike them less than I did 16 years ago. You know, I don't like being a grumpus about 2010's pop music. I wish I felt good.

I do. I know. I know. Yes. I'm kidding. I don't. Yes. But I don't.

I don't have any. major issues with this. It's not vault material, but it wasn't a million miles away for me, to be honest. I liked the kind of, I did like the fact that it didn't reach any kind of drop until we were about two-thirds of the way through the song, because the big issue I have with the songs that kind of borrowed off Viva LaVida is that everybody thinks that the, oh, oh, oh, oh, that bit, that's a big release in that song because it comes near the end. But everybody thought, what if, right? What if we took? that and just put it at the start. And what if, right, it wasn't even the bridge. That was just the

chorus. And what if, right, we didn't actually have a chorus. And what if, right, what if we just did that same drop three times in a song? And what if, right, we just sold millions doing it. And then everyone in the UK pub, it just kind of went, yeah, sure, I'll do that for the next five years. And it's like, fucking hell. And so listening to this, I was like, I was expecting it to be a bit more like that from the beginning where it was like I was expecting like you know the big kind of festival multi-color fuchsia flare fireworks everywhere kind of drop in the first chorus and I'm like ah no it's waited it's done the thing that vivile Lveda did where you have the big chorus the virile and rind rum and all that and then you go into a new section where everyone's like oh yeah this is

the bit we've been waiting for this is the bit where in the festival everyone starts to move the band might slow down and do an extended live version that has a longer build-up so that then they can go one, two, three, four, you know, so it has all of those things. And I think that maybe if it wasn't for a vital presentation, it would be a little closer to the vault. I still don't think it would have been in. I think you're right, Ed, that like I think it needs a bit more edge. And at the same time, like, it is still what it is. Like, you know, it's not trying to break any ground.

trying to be anything that it's not. And so, you know, I'm, I'm totally comfortable with it. I like it about as much as I did California girls last week. And I liked that a fair bit. And I think we were all happy with that last week. So, yeah, I think a good note to end on. Really good note to end on this week. Ed, I'm going to ask you, JLS, Bob and Haley Williams, Yolanda be cool and the wanted. Where's everything going for you? Now, to be sure, there's no vault for JLS. At least. not just yet, but the club is alive is already concerningly distant from the pie hole. It's not close, actually, for me.

And even I'm a little perturbed by that. But anyway, let's see what time does to my feelings about that. Airplanes, there's nothing actually that individually in this that causes particular displeasure. There are bits of it. I like. I mean, I like Haley Williams' voice. I wish you were singing something else, but that's always pleasant to listen to.

Bobby, he's not a bad rapper. He's talking absolute mince here, but that's fine. It's just, I find this so unobtrusive and uninteresting that I kind of don't like it in principle. It annoys me because there are so many elements that just could be better that are used poorly. And you get Haley Williams in, and a song shouldn't be as flat as this.

It does just sound like stunt casting. Like there was some deal struck or there's a bit of a cross-promotional hybridisation in the background. None of us give a shit about. It's just a waste of ability, a waste of talent. I can recall JLS. That's one thing you can say.

I can recall that. Unfortunately, I am actually going to pie-hole this. It's not like a major crush down to the bottom. But it has added nothing to my life whatsoever, which seems a little bit sinful giving me potential ingredients. I just hope that Haley ejected before flat ball slim crashed into the bloody pie hole. Oh, right, okay, the next one, the, well, yeah, that one, Americano. Oh, how quirky? Wobble, doble do. Why don't you take your fictional little drink and fuck off into the pie hole?

I'm not, I'm not even thirsty. I don't want it. I don't want your fucking drink. that you're fucking not sold ever. Bastards. Anyway, well, I'm taking too much time here. I had a big, long,

hilarious thing for the last one where I was going to sing, I was going to say the lyrics to all time high from Octopussy, which is like everyone's least favorite and least remembered bomb themes.

I'm not even going to bother with that. Yeah, this is good. I think it's solid. I don't love it. I like it. It does remind me of a lot of the things that make take that work,

but because it's going for that useful urge, that bit of, you know, slight scene adjacent grit to it, you know. It's perfectly pitched maybe. It just, it feels too softened for that. No problem with it at all. I'll probably never listen to it again.

Andy, the club is alive, airplanes, we speak no Americano, and all-time low. You're tearing me apart, JLS. I can't decide what score to give you, but you're certainly not going into the pie holes, too memorable and too catchy and too fond for that. staying exactly where you are. Airplanes. Well, I guess my problem with Bob's song here is that it doesn't really go anywhere.

It doesn't really develop or growing momentum. So I guess it's not exactly Bob the builder. So that's just staying exactly where it is as well. We speak no Americano. We vault no songo, but we pie whole no

Yalanda and diCapo. So that's staying exactly where it is as well. And as for all-time low, well, you're quite wrong. I think that for the wanted, this is an all-time high. Stealing Ed's joke slightly. How do you can use it. You can have that for free.

As for me, remarkably, the club is alive has escaped the pie hole. Chain smokers and Halsey will be watching this closely because if this can escape the pie hole, anything's possible. Airplanes, that's going right in the middle. We speak no Americano. That is a piehole for me. Sorry, Yolanda be cool. And I don't know if it's D-Cup or DCUP.

It's probably D-Cup, because of course. All time low, they're just, it's just missing the vault, the wanted. Just missing. I say just, kind of missing more than a just. But still, close enough, closer than I thought, good stuff. So, next time, it's. will be something a little different for you all because Andy you're off gallivanting around Europe. I am led to believe I am also doing a bit of time in Europe and then I've got to go to

Telford. So it means that next week's episode will be a little different but then I think will be better normal the week after that. So yeah, we will see you for it. Bye bye-bye now. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.