Why I’ll always love boy bands

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By Louise Burt

It all started with Westlife. Those five, fresh-faced Irish boys in long jackets with a love for smoke machines and sitting on stools.

I was seven when I received my first – and even more embarrassingly, only – Valentines Day card that wasn’t from my Mum. This card was from Shane, Kian, Mark, Brian and Nicky from Westlife, and at seven years old I believed the printed signatures on the back were the real deal. I was also impressed by their skills of finding out where I live – I was unaware at the time that my Mum had signed me up to the Westlife fan club.

13 years have passed since this moment, and although I’m now less inclined to sign myself up to similar fan clubs and newsletters dedicated to boy bands (we’ll ignore the fact that aged 14, I paid to join the Jonas Brothers exclusive members website) I still have Westlife’s music on my iPod.

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After Westlife, when I became cooler and edgier, Busted were the band for me. I’d lie on my bed listening to my Walkman, innocently singing along to songs about wanting to make love to with teachers and airhostesses. I saw no problem with a British boy band singing with heavy American accents. Of course, McFly followed suit, and here I admit that I still follow their career – I’ve seen them perform live five times. This band is the only band to have seen me through junior school, high school, sixth form, and now university. I remember my Year Six Leavers Disco, where I premiered a head of heavily crimped hair, and brand new white sketchers trainers, jumping up and down on a bench at the back of the school hall with ‘The Gang’ (as we referred to ourselves back then). We were screaming to the lyrics of ‘Five Colours in Her Hair’, and weirdly enough, on a Friday night out at the Students Union in university, this song is still being played. However, my hairstyles are tamer and shoes a lot taller.

Of course, I couldn’t write this and not reference my deepest obsessions with a boy band.

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Yes, I was addicted to the Jonas Brothers. If you read that sentence quickly, it may not sound as lame, and then you can just as quickly forget I ever mentioned it.

I feel stupid for even writing it. I loved a band, a band that had very little impact on the UK music charts, yet one I craved. During my last years in high school I loved the Jonas Brothers, yet when I think about it now, I cringe. Sometimes it haunts me just as I’m about to fall asleep, especially when I remember the days of writing Facebook statuses about how I would one day marry Joe Jonas. Oh, the horror.

But as I’ve matured, I’m hoping I can accept that these bands were a part of my childhood, and that thankfully, they haven’t shaped the rest of my music taste. I am aware that these bands never set out to change the world with their lyrics – “I messed my pants, as we flew over France” is just one example from Busted – but I can acknowledge why myself and others loved them as much as we did.

Boy bands have a great way of making you feel like you’re the girl of their dreams. That you’re perfect, and that together you can leave town and show the world how strong your love is – because when you’re 14, and unsure of whether you want to be seen as a cool popular kid, or a mysterious girl with lots of black eyeliner and wristbands, or pretend that you don’t love reading as much as everyone thinks you do, it’s nice to be told by some attractive young lads that actually, you’re doing okay.

It’s always been boy bands for me, and although I grew up when the Spice Girls were still big and during the rise of Girls Aloud, I never connected with these groups much. Perhaps at nine years old, I didn’t feel that I had to be liberated by girls in metallic mini-skirts and crop-tops. At that, age gender equality was something that just didn’t concern me. Oh, how times have changed…

So, thank you to my favourite boy bands, for letting me believe that I was the girl for you, that I didn’t have to change, that you wanted a girl with five colours in her hair, and that maybe you’d want me too. I know it’s all generic, created to please every type of girl, mass-produced, lacking feeling and emotion, but those songs made me feel good.

I switched on my TV the other day and came across Five Seconds of Summer. The hairstyles, the songs, the Australian accents made me groan out loud, as I knew it was all going to happen again. Here I am, a 20 year-old getting attached to yet another boy band.