S Club 7 is a British teen-pop group that could have been grown in a laboratory: Brought together by a lengthy audition process led by Spice
Girls Svengali Simon Fuller, the seven good-looking,
fresh-scrubbed actors and models are already huge in Britain, where their TV show S Club 7 In Miami propelled them to stardom last year. Now on the Fox Family Channel here, S Club 7 is looking to
break big in
America, catering to the same mixture of pubescents and pervs who've latched onto Spears. If it succeeds, God help us all: S Club 7 makes Spears and The Backstreet Boys sound like Coal Chamber. Every word of S Club is a horrific cliché: "Bring It All Back" recalls the false uplift of Up With
People ("Don't stop / Never give up / Hold your head high and reach the
top"), "Viva
La Fiesta" is a stunningly inept stab at Latin flavor, "S Club Party" unironically includes repetition of the
words, "Ain't no party like an S Club party," and so on. If you think teenybopper pop has reached its nadir with Spears, 'N Sync, and the others, you have no idea how much worse it can get. —Stephen Thompson