Song 47: Don't Wanna Let You Go

Don't Wanna Let You Go - 5ive

There was an awful lot to love and admire about turn-of-the-millennium boy band 5ive, not least the boldness of the name, which refused to allow for any mishaps or fallings out. We are 5ive, there are 5ive of us, it said. Keeping those kind of numbers together can be a hard task even for a band who doesn't, in an interview with 'The O-Zone' talking about their debut single 'Slam Dunk (Da Funk)', claim proudly that "slam dunk" is a boxing term.

But they managed it for a considerable time, until, for both their recent comebacks (neither of which has been successful enough to get a record company interested) 5ive became four, though they were still 5ive rather than 4our.

The first 5iver to be a skiver was one Sean Conlon, undoubtedly my favourite boybander in history. Lovely, lovely Sean, the man who wasn't there. Do you remember 5ive at all? Do you remember their appearances on CDUK and TOTP and the O-Zone and all the shows we used to love? If you do, you may recall that one of them quite often seemed barely to be dancing, or singing, or involved at all, except to look like a thorougly miserable rabbit in the headlights. That was Sean. I noted his unease early on, and it turned out my suspicions were right - Sean hated 5ive, hated being in 5ive, got out as soon as he possibly could, it was no act.

He was actually quite a talented young musician with a nice, unexceptional voice who probably thought he was signing up for a whole different kind of boy band, only to discover 5ive were to be a "bad boy" band and he had the bandmates from hell - Scott, who looked like nothing but a bloated extra in The Only Way is Essex, Abs, the one who was best at the street hand moves that Sean just couldn't muster, Richie, who was the "H from Steps" of the band, who seemed like he was permanently on cocaine and who was "going out" with Billie Piper in the same way that his colleague J Brown was "going out" with Mel C, just like stars used to "go out" with each other in 50s Hollywood. J was the adult of the band, the one who looked like he spent his weekends in the Territorial Army and whose hilarious Warrington-via-Brooklyn raps really have 5ive such a spiffing urban edge.

J is the one who is giving the latest reunion a miss. Indeed he seems a little miffed about it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J_Brown
J is now 73, so fair enough.
But you'll have picked up that, tragically, Sean has not been able to hold out and seems to have got himself in the latest farrago. He's been trying to make it in his own right for a decade, and this culminated in an appearance on BBC show 'The Voice' where he sang Coldplay's 'Trouble' nicely but blandly (is there any other way to sing it) and didn't make it to the next round. So back to 5ive and his three hellspawn former nemeses it is for Sean. Oh Sean.

Mocking though I've been, 5ive actually had a decent streak of hellishly catchy pop songs [they were kind of the missing link between East 17 and Blue, but without the standout mentalists those two bands had] at the turn of the century, like 'Got the Feeling' and 'Keep on Movin''.

But 'Don't Wanna Let You Go' was something else. It is in the great tradition of utterly mental, disturbing, stalkerish, pop music being sold to our kids as good clean fun. Lines like "we're coming after you so don't make a sound" and "you'll see our faces everytime you turn your head around" really didn't go down so well with their teenage girls fans, and the single stalled at Number 9.

Still, I've never forgotten it. Sometimes all pop is dismissed as bland, bowdlerised nonsense, but there are often oddities and mentalness bubbling underneath, 5ive won't go down in the history books, but they certainly brought a little bit of amusement to my life.