YOU hated them at the time, and now you hate them even more for popping up all bloated and wrinkled and reminding you of your own mortality. You’ll skip these comebacks:
Peter Andre, aged 52
When Mysterious Girl was a hit in 1996 you were young, out most nights, moderately sexually successful and, above all, contemptuous of Peter’s shitty music. Now he’s a living reminder that those days are gone for both of you though the central event of both of your very different lives was a girl with humongous norks.
Wet Wet Wet, aged 44 to 69
They couldn’t just go away. Decades after despising cloying, saccharine songs like Sweet Little Mystery, the band are still playing prestigious venues like Butlin’s. Marti Pellow’s gone and been replaced by a guy from Liberty X who has somehow still managed to be 44, but they remain the sound of a school disco where you couldn’t pull.
The Vengaboys, aged 46 to 50
The unwanted soundtrack to the late 90s while you listened to Lauryn Hill or Smashing Pumpkins. But a quarter of a century later the Vengaboys are still going, as if taunting you with a time when you stupidly believed the future held more than flatpack furniture and worrying about how many hairs you lose per shower.
Matt Goss, aged 56
Even worse than when they look old is when they don’t. Matt is currently on his ‘The Hits & More’ tour, reminding you of your principled, indie hatred of Bros, bringing back teenage memories of vomiting four cans of Skol into a flowerbed. And he’s still so much better looking than you that it doesn’t matter how much you know about The Cure.
Boyzlife, aged 44 and 50
A Frankensteinian abomination of sewn-together lumps of rotten flesh, Boyzlife are half-Boyzone half-Westlife, specifically Keith Duffy and Brian McFadden. Both bands were crap if you weren’t a 12-year-old girl in the 90s and Boyzlife only serve to remind you 25 years have passed since a time you still think of as relatively recent.
Tiffany, aged 53
It wasn’t that you abhorred winsome denim-clad 19-year-old Tiffany Darwish in 1987, and I Think We’re Alone Now is decent enough. It’s just that you hadn’t seen her since then and thought of her as unchanged, so seeing her somewhat more substantial frame now is like looking in a mirror for the first time in 38 years and realising what you’ve become.
Robbie Williams, aged 51
In your erudite opinion, Take That were crap and Robbie Williams’s solo career an annoyance. So why does he keep popping up, grey-haired, reminding you of the inexorable passage of time and your lost youth? Will you, in 30 years time, be hearing Angels at every other funeral? Yes. And you’ll be glad of the outing.
