Meet The Saturdays

“Meet The Saturdays – Rochelle, Vanessa, Una, Frankie and Mollie. They’re the new girls on the block and on a mission to bring pop back to the charts! It’s not gone unnoticed that music’s needed a bloody good kick up the arse for some time now. Indie and R&B are all well and good, but what the hell are we supposed to dance to? Well wonder no more, because The Saturdays are about to throw themselves headfirst into your consciousness like a five-woman whirlwind, and bring back some much-needed, shameless fun to the charts.”


Hot from the factories of identikit moptop pop bands come 'The Saturdays', a group of sassy young women who in no way haven’t had their entire lives redesigned and dictated to them by marketers in order to catch the eye of young girls. Nope, this band are fresh and new and “on the block”, and they use the word 'bloody' to describe their attitude because they have something no female band have ever had before: girl power! Oh, wait.

They’re being marketed to us as a throwaway pop band, but is that any excuse for the poor music they’re making? I mean, let’s just take a look at their music video for the first single they’re releasing, ‘If This Is Love’. It takes many of the clichés about female bands and… continues them.

Here’s their video.




And here are ten things we noted.

1: The first thing we see are the band being primped and dressed up. During these opening few seconds, we are subjected to around eleven or twelve different smug poses of the girls admiring themselves in the mirror. The worst offender is the girl who sings the first part, who is so taken with herself that she can’t help but smile at how pretty she is. Twice.

2: Time taken until the producers activated the robotic voice-modulators: 22 seconds.

3: People are dancing in front of the window that the girls are due to appear in, before the girls actually appear. So their music is so powerful and funky that it will make strangers dance in the street? You have a powerful gift, girls - and we hope you use it for good instead of evil. Just imagine how dangerous your abilities would be if they fell into the wrong hands…

4: The chair that the girl dressed in purple is writhing across looks like a very painful chair to try and writhe across. Of course, it can’t help that she isn’t allowed to do anything more than lightly spasm, lest the band lose their child friendly appeal in the face of sexual dance manoeuvrings. Expect the slutty dancing to kick in with the next video, if they get to make one.

5: “You think I’m crazy/I’m not, I’m your baby” – yes, this does not sound stalkerish and wrong. We have now gathered that this song is about deluding yourself, which is gleefully ironic… although we’re not sure what ironic really means, so it might not be.

6: Does anyone else find it disturbing how the two ethnic members of the group have been painted white using makeup? “Don’t worry black/asian girls! We have a black and an asian girl in our band!/I know how you hate to see black and asian girls in your girl groups, white girls… so don’t worry, we’ve turned them into white and black/asian minstrels for you, so if you squint they don’t look so ethnic anymore.”

7: The girl dressed in blue gets a phone number from a guy! Wow! But of course, because she is so female and grr! girl power and independent and strong, she refuses to accept it or read it. Because you don’t need a man in your life, girls. Not while you’ve got your four best friends who don’t look like they hate you during choreographed music video shoots, you’ll be fine.

8: The sight of five women making ‘o’ faces as they pretend to sing a song which is obviously being piped over their miming is apparently enough to stall a small crowd of young people who suddenly proclaim the band to be their favourite and the best band of all time… Well alright, we’ll give you credit for realism there.

9: They leave before their performance is over, but the music keeps playing, thus revealing their miming to the entire crowd.

10: They go off and sign autographs at the end. How modest! They are obviously just like us, despite being locked away from the general public for the entirety of their mimed show. Why put in the autograph section anyway? They break off finishing the song to go sign things for fans, so are they really that needy for attention that they can’t finish a performance due to their craven need for acceptance? And to do so when they aren’t even a famous band yet? You can actually feel the marketers breathing down your neck whenever you watch that part of the video.


So which one is your favourite? Up-herself Saturday (in yellow), coy Saturday (blue), bendy Saturday (green), stoned Saturday (orange), or hopelessly lost in the deluded belief that her career with this band is going to last two songs Saturday (pink)? We should mention at this point that the background of the song is a sample from Yazoo, and that you can also find a hilariously off-key version of this song recorded live on Youtube.


Needless to say, we totally support the band in their endeavour to save us all from poor pop music.