“Are you ready to party, Newcastle?” asks S Club’s Bradley McIntosh, adding: “Oggy! Oggy! Oggy!” The almost entirely female audience, wearing pink cowboy hats, fancy dress and giant foam hands to help them reach for the stars, responds: “Oi! Oi! Oi!”
It’s been 12 years since the multimillion-selling pop group put together by former Spice Girls manager Simon Fuller went on tour, and in the meantime their solo outings have demonstrated that some people really are better together. Hannah Spearritt’s movie career highlight was Agent Cody Banks 2, while a Tina Barrett solo single charted at No 195. Jo O’Meara was implicated in the Shilpa Shetty Celebrity Big Brother bullying scandal and Rachel Stevens made an album about vegetables. Most bizarrely, Paul Cattermole quit to play nu-metal, and now carries the mildly bemused expression of someone who expected to be singing about Satan, not ascending on a platform to gyrate to S Club Party.
Still, time (or a punishing gym regime) has been kind to the reunited sextet. They were so young when they started that they still seem fairly youthful, with bare midriffs and muscles and tightly choreographed dancers on hand for the trickier physical manoeuvres. Their music hasn’t fared as well, and the lack of a live band and some audibly canned singing make their most overprocessed numbers sound like one great big karaoke machine.
Although You’re My Number One answers the eternal question of what Abba might have sounded like had they been produced by Stock, Aitken and Waterman, S Club never had the songwriting quality of a Take That or Boyzone. This lack is most cruelly exposed during solo sections in which Rachel Stevens appears to mime her own solo hit Sweet Dreams My LA Ex, while the likable McIntosh’s DJ slot seems to have been practiced in the school disco. Still, the slightly older O’Meara can really sing and her post-S Club travails and bankruptcy have left emotional scars: her duet with Jon Lee on Hello Friend is peculiarly touching.
Alas, a tinny cover of Uptown Funk provides another low point, before Reach and Don’t Stop Movin’ get the party started: cheery, aspirational pop songs which are presumably already being shortlisted for the next Labour conference.
This is a decent short pop show, somehow padded out to a marathon two hours. Still, there’s enough cheering at the end to suggest that if you’re waving a foam hand, there really ain’t no party like an S Club Party.
• At Motorpoint Arena, Cardiff, 12 May. Box office: 02920 224 488. Then touring.
