Turn off the lights and I'll glow," he promised in the only song that most recall, "Ice Ice Baby". What happened: Robert van Winkle burst on the scene with a flat-top as sharp as his cheekbones, and trousers as baggy as his lyrics: "Will it ever stop? I don't know. The sell: "The Great White Hope of Hip-Hop, bro" Where are they now? Frontman Cliff Jones is a music journalist and lectures at the Bristol Institute of Modern Music and Bath Spa University. Then things started to get out of control, and as rapidly as we went up we came down again." According to Jones: "We got shot out of the cannon. Two albums later, Gay Dad were back in the closet. Their debut single "To Earth with Love" wasn't the saviour of British rock. They were the first band to play Top of the Pops without a record to its name. What happened: Britpop wasn't looking too clever by 1998, and the media settled on ex-style journalist Cliff Jones and his rockers as the next big thing. The sell: "Britpop is dead! Long live Britpop!" Where are they now? All five carved out lucrative careers and will remind us of that when they reunite for the Diamond Jubilee.
Not even their break-up four years later and their less-than-thrilling solo careers can quite dim their fizzy memory. For a dizzying couple of years, the Girls' peppy music, cutely defined personalities and sort-of feminist slogan (Girl Power!) defied cynicism, and, let's be honest, took over the world. What happened: Impresario Simon Fuller and his five charges thought they could break the boy-band strangle- hold – and the release in July 1996 of the Spice Girls' first single, "Wannabe", proved them quite right. Talks of a Sex Pistols reunion have been largely thwarted. Where are they now? Aside from frontman Jonny Rotten, the surviving members have lain low largely as session musicians in London. Where are they now? Some members defected to The Bible while others disappeared into the wilderness. Drummer Dave Larcombe said: "We did everything right. Only one hitch: they had not one song of substance. A bidding war erupted, and CBS signed the band for £150,000. A bunch of suitably dressed Oxbridge graduates were wise to this. What happened: When Simon Le Bon and Co started selling yacht-loads of records, every label wanted a New Romantic act on the roster. Where are they now? After spells abroad, James has recently released a new album, aptly entitled: I Came Here to Blow Minds. What happened: Lead singer Wendy James was a self-publicist without equal: she graced the cover of The Face magazine wearing just a pair of diamanté nipple studs, and wondered aloud: "Imagine the controversy when I'm more famous than Madonna." A couple of punk-lite singles, "Baby, I Don't Care" and "I Want Your Love", went Top Five in the UK, but the Vamp split in 1992 and James went solo. All of this on the strength of a beautifully arranged but lone song, which has to date amassed more than 20 million views online.īut now the meteoric rise has provoked a furious debate: is Lana Del Rey really to be taken at face value, "a gangster Nancy Sinatra", as she styled herself, who had emerged fully formed into the digital limelight or was is she merely the alluring front of a songwriting-marketing machine? A debut UK tour was announced, sold out, and was then postponed while bigger venues were found. Celebrities from Fearne Cotton, to Jessica Alba and The Kooks' Luke Pritchard accelerated the speed of its appeal. Two million people saw it in the first few weeks. The track, "Video Games", instantly touched a nerve, clocking up thousands of hits in the first few hours and spreading virally.
When Elizabeth Grant, a singer from New York, uploaded a melancholy music video on YouTube last August she set in place a remarkable series of events that would catapult her from relative obscurity into international stardom.