Westlife : Bop Bop Baby

Only a cretin slags off ‘manufactured’ pop nowadays - chiefly because we all know the pocket money wooed from the purses of little girls by blandly attractive teen dreamboats props up the career of all your floundering indie faves. All the same, there’s something spectrally chilling about the unshakable sway that Westlife have over our nation’s youth.

Make no mistake, this band are the absolute nadir of the pop genre and music as a whole. And however many times you wade through the utterly meritless saccharine slurry of ‘Bop Bop Baby’, you still get that terrifying sensation of staring into the void, and having the void stare blankly back at you, then calling for security to maim you for staring at it. Even All Tomorrow’s Parties had more tunes than this.

Louis Pattison