It’s early evening in Glasgow, and the forecourt of the SECC complex is lined with young women intent on getting a glimpse of the stars arriving for tonight’s Mobo awards. N-Dubz and Tinchy Stryder are duly squealed at as they make their way up the red carpet – but the real excitement is being held in check. Then, as the last scrap of daylight disappears, the crowd get what they’re waiting for. Four Lotus sports cars – red, blue, green and yellow – chug up from around the side of the building, and a member of JLS pokes his head out of each car. The fans erupt into screams.
This is why they’ve have been hanging around for hours on this chilly day – to see the X Factor runners-up, whose 15 minutes of fame has turned into something more substantial than anyone had anticipated. Oritsé Williams, JB Gill, Marvin Humes and cherubic Aston Merrygold (whose name is wailed most frequently by the fans behind the crash barriers) lever themselves out of the Lotuses and start their slow progress up the carpet. They’re stopped every few inches by TV and radio crews, who repeatedly pose one question: how does it feel for a reality-TV band to have the kudos of two Mobo nominations (for best newcomers and best song)? It feels, JLS patiently say, fantastic.
“Aston! Aston!” Merrygold, the smallest and prettiest, turns his attention to the fans, some of whom seem close to tears. As he signs scraps of paper, Mr Hudson and Lemar slip past, unnoticed by the kids poking cameras into Merrygold’s face. Another few signatures and Aston and his bandmates are shepherded into the building, leaving a cloud of aftershave in their wake.
If you asked the current batch of X Factor contestants what they imagine fame to be like, their description would probably come very close to that. JLS (it stands for Jack the Lad Swing, a name that conflates their British identity and love of new jack swing, the dominant US R&B genre of the late 1980s and early 90s) are a genuine teen phenomenon: the London quartet aren’t simply the first new boyband in years to reach No 1 in the UK singles chart, but the very first successful black British boyband. Until now, this country has never produced an equivalent of America’s 1990s titans Jodeci and Boyz II Men, and while it would be premature to predict that JLS will match their sales, they’ve hit the ground running. Their first single, the Mobo-nominated Beat Again, has sold nearly 400,000 copies and Epic records is serious about breaking them, sinking “in excess of £1m” into the task, according to label MD Nick Raphael. The Mobo nod further solidifies the perception that they’re more than just reality-TV flotsam.
“They’re a 100% priority for us,” Raphael says on the phone a few days later. “A band like JLS does not get released by Epic on a whim. These are the opportunities you wait for as a record executive – this is not a short-term opportunity. There hasn’t been a brilliant boy band in the UK since Blue, and we understand the value of a frontline boyband; they can sell for many albums.”
Simon Cowell – who inexplicably declined to sign JLS to his Syco label, an offshoot of Sony BMG, when they came second to Alexandra Burke in last year’s X Factor – must be kicking himself. Not only have JLS maintained their popularity since last December’s final – their first tour, next February, sold out almost as soon as tickets went on sale – but their slick urban pop is leagues cooler than anything mustered by the rest of the X Factor stable. And that’s not damning with faint praise: though Beat Again hardly breaks new sonic ground, it’s a gem of a modern R&B song, effortlessly meshing swagger and elegant harmonies. In fact, it raises the question of why a band of their ability bothered putting themselves through the grind of The X Factor when they would probably have been successful under their own steam.
“It’s very hard in this current climate to launch a new [boy] band,” Gill says a week or so later, midway through a day of interviews in London. “We’ve had a huge boost from The X Factor.” That’s certainly so – but they must also be grateful that Cowell didn’t sign them. Rumour had it that he’d considered it, with a view to turning them into a black Westlife, so they must feel they’ve had a lucky escape. “It would have been a different direction if he’d signed us,” Aston admits diplomatically. “Epic gave us the chance to go into the studio and write with people.” Working with top-flight pop/R&B songwriters such as Taio Cruz and Steve Mac, they co-wrote nine of the 13 tracks on next month’s self-titled debut album.
Having said that, the dismaying news is that they actually admire Westlife, whose beige ballads represent the nadir of the boyband genre. “When Oritsé put the band together, we thought of [being] an amalgam of all the great boybands,” says Humes, a pop veteran; his previous group, VS, scraped into the album chart at No 142 in 2005. “Westlife, Boyz II Men, Take That, ‘N Sync, Backstreet [Boys] – we wanted to take elements from all those guys.”
Cripes. Why would four young men find insipid family entertainers like Westlife inspiring? Weren’t they more motivated by the music they heard while growing up in the capital (or Peterborough, in Merrygold’s case)? Williams, to whom the other three often seem to defer, calmly disagrees. “We’re not grime MCs. It’s not what we do. We sing love songs to girls.” Merrygold is nodding. “We were lucky to find each other. When I was young, my friends liked rappers and I liked ‘N Sync.”
It appears that JLS are under no illusions about who they are, noting that, unlike Dizzee Rascal and Tinchy Stryder, who rose through pirate radio, “we come from commercial culture, from The X Factor.” Recalling their pre-fame days of entering local urban-music talent searches, Williams says: “We used to see Dizzee and Roll Deep headlining shows where we were competing, and we worked as hard as, or even harder than, any rappers.”
Hard work, ambition, determination: the words come up again and again. Williams, who founded the band in 2007, did so because he “spotted a gap and realised there were no boybands, literally none,” which persuaded him to abandon attempts to become a solo R&B artist. He recruited the others through friends’ recommendations, but before finalising the lineup, he first put their photos side-by-side on his computer to ensure they looked right together. “Every element, from styling to sound to vocals, we did it with ambition, determination and dedication. We became an unshakable force from the beginning,” Merrygold says matter-of-factly. Humes is nodding. “This had to work for us – we left home, broke up with long-term girlfriends, spent our last money on rehearsals.” (Indeed, Humes’s ex-girlfriend, Jaime Jay, is about to release a track as a “response” to Beat Again, titled Cheat Again.)
They self-managed the band, and were soon playing paid gigs around London. Sensible to the last, they had back-up plans – as they built JLS, Gill was also studying theology, Humes was a property developer and Williams was taking an events management course, revising for exams while in the X Factor boot camp. But their plan Bs have now been shelved, and they’re devoting body and soul to JLS. “You all have to be on the same page,” notes Gill. “People who buy music are much more clued-up now. You can’t put out anything and expect people to buy it just because the boys are pretty.”
Their businesslike attitude must be manna from heaven to Epic’s Raphael, who praises their “ambition and focus”. But even as he outlines plans for “a plot that goes into Christmas” (otherwise known as their album and second single, Everybody in Love), he puts his finger on the quality they possess that money can’t buy: credibility. “They feel very passionate about music, and their credibility makes it easier for radio to play them,” he says, sounding very happy.
Back at the SECC, JLS are whiling away time before the ceremony by browsing in what’s known as “the gifting room”. This is a little perk that has recently become established at award shows: nominees are led to a backstage area crammed with brand-name clothes and gadgets and told to take whatever they fancy. It’s the adult equivalent of letting kids loose in a candy store: JLS cruise the room, choosing jeans, trainers and shirts, which are popped into shopping bags carried for them by young female gifting-hosts. “Can I have this?” Williams asks, pointing to a chunky silver Marc Ecko watch. “Sure,” says the Ecko representative, and £185 of watch is dropped into his bag. “This is great, a beautiful young lady carrying my bag,” Humes marvels. “To be fair, it was like that before,” Merrygold banters back.
JLS win both the newcomer and best song categories. “Shout-out to Mr Simon Cowell!” says Gill as they receive the newcomer trophy. The scene in their dressing room afterwards is peculiarly British: hoisting bottles of Budweiser, the quartet drink a sedate toast, then change out of their stage clothes. There’s a lot of toned, hairless bareness in the room. Determinedly focusing on his face, I ask Humes if he’d expected to win. “Not at all!” He sounds dazed. “We’ve only had one song out!” says Gill. Give JLS this much: they’re realistic about the amount of slog that lies ahead before they’ll be able to say with conviction that they’ve arrived. It seems a reasonably safe bet, though, that they’ll put the effort in.
• The single Everybody in Love is released on Epic on Monday, followed by the album JLS on 9 November
Source: Guardian
think she’s singing about me’.
JLS smoothie Aston Merrygold, 21, is a bit of a one when it comes to the ladies.
X Factor 2008 runners-up JLS have said that they do not want to change anything about their lives. The boyband’s first single “Beat Again” debuted at number one in July 2009.