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Fivestar
Singer/dancers wanted for girl group...it all began with an ad in the paper. It's the early 1990s and girl bands and reality TV are new and exciting. The girls land a record deal, top the charts in Australia, then the UK, then on to America.
561 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 1, 2018
Fivestar has taken a bit of creative liberties with the Spice Girls back story and turned it into a semi satirical novel. A nerdy Australian with a bit of recording equipment in his studio apartment has a dream to fill the niche market that is calling out for pop sensations.
The book tracks the search for the perfect 5 women for the group, their teething issues as they search for popularity, and the after effects of fame.
It's exactly what you'd expect from a book of this ilk - it's poppy and ridiculous and utterly enjoyable if you are old enough to remember the Spice Girls and their meteoric rise to fame. Take a trip down pop memory lane!!
The book tracks the search for the perfect 5 women for the group, their teething issues as they search for popularity, and the after effects of fame.
It's exactly what you'd expect from a book of this ilk - it's poppy and ridiculous and utterly enjoyable if you are old enough to remember the Spice Girls and their meteoric rise to fame. Take a trip down pop memory lane!!
December 27, 2011
This book started out with a fab premise - five girls wanted for a band - and the writing style was very polished. However, I had a major issue with the author spending too much time in a character's head, building them up and getting the reader care about them, only to ditch that character and never mention them again. Also, KILLING OFF a major character - the only one I really liked, BTW. Most of the other girls didn't come across as sympathetic at all and the total bitch in the band, Claudia, never gets redeemed at all. Also there's a lot of pre-fame build up, what the characters are doing, how they're struggling, etc, then suddenly, in the space of a sentence, the band is completely world famous.
The whole story felt a little bit too disjointed to me and I couldn't help but draw the uncomfortable comparison to The Spice Girls: not sure if that was deliberate or not.
The whole story felt a little bit too disjointed to me and I couldn't help but draw the uncomfortable comparison to The Spice Girls: not sure if that was deliberate or not.
October 5, 2015
I bought this last year in a seaside op-shop on a minibreak with friends, and never got to read it. I decided to read it this long weekend because I felt sad that I wasn't going away, and thought maybe reading this 'beach read' would be the next best thing.
This was basically Valley of the Dolls set in the 1990s pop scene, with the requisite drugs and backstabbing and tragic deaths, people discarded on the road to fame and men of varying degrees of lovelessness.
I found its referents quite frustratingly unclear. Fivestar the girl group seem obviously modelled on the Spice Girls in terms of persona and level of global fame, yet Australia has never produced anything as big, and indeed they begin in a reality TV show like 'Popstars', so are they meant to be more like Bardot?
But there's a level of cultural novelty and naivety that McConnochie attributes to the time period that didn't ring true to me. Girlfriend were big before the fictional Fivestar were even dreamed of, and I even dreamed of manufacturing my own girl group in 1990, aged 13. Mercifully I can't remember the name but I made my friends be in the group and they still sometimes tease me by singing our first single 'Girl Next Door' ("hey everybody, I'm the girl next door/who knows what I'm waiting for/maybe tomorrow I could be a star/but just for today I'm just the girl next door"). Why were we never super-famous? An eternal mystery.
But I found this book quite shrewd and observant about our cultural fascination with celebrity and material status. I felt sorry for the characters, trapped like the Valley of the Dolls characters between their own yearning for success and validation, and the brutally limited options left open to them by the paths they chose.
However, the characters were quite broadly drawn (the psychopathic beauty; the OCD freak; the bovine suburbanite; the earnest muso; the slutty, drug-fucked exhibitionist; their yuppie sleazeball manager), and the action tended to make weird lurches in focus and implausible leaps in the tempo of the characters' lives.
The authorial voice also felt quite contemptuous of the characters' desires, and of the entire fame-industrial complex; this reached a nadir for me in a really grotesque scene in which a very fat talent agent eats a lot of food, drinks a lot of wine, and spills plenty of it on herself. What was this meant to communicate? That fat people are greedy and slovenly? This is a very cynical book, but it is sort of sympathetic to the few decent people caught in the celebrity machine.
This was basically Valley of the Dolls set in the 1990s pop scene, with the requisite drugs and backstabbing and tragic deaths, people discarded on the road to fame and men of varying degrees of lovelessness.
I found its referents quite frustratingly unclear. Fivestar the girl group seem obviously modelled on the Spice Girls in terms of persona and level of global fame, yet Australia has never produced anything as big, and indeed they begin in a reality TV show like 'Popstars', so are they meant to be more like Bardot?
But there's a level of cultural novelty and naivety that McConnochie attributes to the time period that didn't ring true to me. Girlfriend were big before the fictional Fivestar were even dreamed of, and I even dreamed of manufacturing my own girl group in 1990, aged 13. Mercifully I can't remember the name but I made my friends be in the group and they still sometimes tease me by singing our first single 'Girl Next Door' ("hey everybody, I'm the girl next door/who knows what I'm waiting for/maybe tomorrow I could be a star/but just for today I'm just the girl next door"). Why were we never super-famous? An eternal mystery.
But I found this book quite shrewd and observant about our cultural fascination with celebrity and material status. I felt sorry for the characters, trapped like the Valley of the Dolls characters between their own yearning for success and validation, and the brutally limited options left open to them by the paths they chose.
However, the characters were quite broadly drawn (the psychopathic beauty; the OCD freak; the bovine suburbanite; the earnest muso; the slutty, drug-fucked exhibitionist; their yuppie sleazeball manager), and the action tended to make weird lurches in focus and implausible leaps in the tempo of the characters' lives.
The authorial voice also felt quite contemptuous of the characters' desires, and of the entire fame-industrial complex; this reached a nadir for me in a really grotesque scene in which a very fat talent agent eats a lot of food, drinks a lot of wine, and spills plenty of it on herself. What was this meant to communicate? That fat people are greedy and slovenly? This is a very cynical book, but it is sort of sympathetic to the few decent people caught in the celebrity machine.
April 29, 2015
Interesting book, but it did feel like it dragged on for quite awhile in most parts.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews