The sparkling sound of S Club 7 - SOUNDS FAMILIAR by Baby A. Gil

Lively, smart and perky, the sparkling sound of S Club 7 is the best wake-upper in town these days. This blend of R&B and Europop livens up the mood everywhere that S Club 7 music is played. Theirs are the tunes you can strut to welcome the day, the ones who can keep your spirits up and eager for anything as you weave to traffic. And to unwind at the end of the day, you can dish out a step or more on the dance floor, still to S Club 7 songs.

S Club 7 is a UK group made up of seven, talented members. These are Tina, a dancer, model and actress Rachel, country music singer Jo, aspiring actor and rocker Paul, actress Hannah and teen-heartthrob Brad. They met when a TV production company sent out for a casting call to put together a pop group with members who can act. This is because aside from recording, the members will be required to also appear in a 13-part BBC series called Miami 7, which is about a band trying to make it to the top.

All that happened three years ago but it looks like the audition yielded the right choices for all the seven original members of S Club 7 are still together and the group is doing great. Best proof of this is that there are S Club 7 dolls being sold in the local stores. These came from abroad, of course, but nobody makes dolls of a pop group unless this has a big following who would want to collect them and in this case there are seven dolls.

Another one is the song Never Had a Dream Come True, that is included in the album 7. This one made it to Number 10 in Billboards’s Hot 100 list in the US of A. Take note that it is not at all easy for foreign acts to make the US hit charts. Truth to tell, even a lot of the big ones never do. Ask Boyzone or Westlife and many others. But S Club 7 made the grade with this special recording.

Never Had a Dream Come True, which incidentally also made number one in the UK for 17 weeks, was a charity single originally recorded for the Children in Need broadcast of BBC radio. Feedback was so good that S Club 7 used it in the soundtrack of their TV show S Club 7 Go Wild and performed it again in the Miss World Beauty Pageant that was seen by more than 1.8 billion viewers all over the world. All these however still failed to curb the appetite of S Club 7 fans. They wanted their own copies of the song and it was later decided to reissue the album 7 with an additional 13th cut which is Never Had a Dream Come True.

Enjoy the latest S Club 7 hit in 7 alongside the soulful All in Love is Fair, the lively and infectious Reach plus Natural, I’ll Keep Waiting, Bring the House Down, Best Friend, Love Train, Cross My Heart, The Color of Blue, I’ll Be There, Two in a Million and Lately.

Still on Europop. You doubtless remember A Teens. This is the young quartet from Sweden, who made a killing in the hit charts three years ago with their covers of ABBA songs. ABBA brought awareness of Swedish pop music savvy to the world during the ’70s and there has been remarkable interest in Scandinavian pop acts ever since. Hence, public reaction to A Teens was very positive. Not only was it a young talented and good-looking group, they were also singing ABBA songs. And you have to admit that ABBA knew all the right moves to get into the charts and left behind a treasure trove of hits.

Despite the success of The ABBA Generation album though, A Teens had no intention of staying an ABBA clone forever. After a successful US tour with ‘N Sync and Britney Spears last summer, Marie, Amit, Sara and Dhani went off to record their first non-ABBA album. Titled Teen Spirit and made up of 13 originals, it is every bit as young, as lush, as bubbly in sound and spirit as we have come to expect from those teen groups from Europe. Check this one out. Best cuts are To the Music, Upside Down and Halfway Around the World.