The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Poptastic! Steps ,Blue and Aqua
Slessor Gardens, Dundee, June 22
“It’s not how it used to be 20 years ago,” says Claire Richards of Steps, taking a moment to relax on the phone having just dropped her kids off on the school run. “We flit in and out of pop star life now, we make it work.”
She says her children – a boy and a girl – will be able to experience much more of the outdoor concert dates which Steps are performing this summer, including one at Dundee’s Slessor Gardens next week, because of school holidays and the fact that most of the concerts are at weekends, unlike last autumn’s hugely successful 20th anniversary tour.
“They love it and they really do want to come, which is nice for me! I don’t think what I do is alien to them, it’s normal to me and they treat it the same way.”
Steps are a group whose resurgence in their third decade of existence is as unlikely as the career they managed to carve for themselves in the first place. Founded, essentially, as a one-hit gimmick group based on the 1997 single 5, 6, 7, 8, which cashed in on the linedancing craze of the time, the quintet – Richards, Lisa Scott-Lee, Faye Tozer, Lee Latchford-Evans and Ian ‘H’ Watkins – somehow spun their career out to three hit albums and 14 more top 10 singles by the beginning of the next decade.
They split in 2001 and staged a modest 15th anniversary reunion in 2012 but it was last year’s 20th anniversary return which made them arguably the biggest 1990s pop comeback since Take That. The album Tears on the Dancefloor was only kept off the top spot by Ed Sheeran, while the accompanying tour was so successful that these summer dates were rapidly booked.
“Do you know what, I don’t think anyone could have predicted we would still be here after 21 years,” says Richards.
“People seem to love the music and love coming to see us as much as they did in 2001, which is incredible to me. Although I don’t feel old enough (to have been working for so long), and I don’t
know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing for me – who knows, maybe I’m overstretching myself! When you’re 19 being 40 seems a lifetime away, but now I’m here it feels like only yesterday we were in Spain filming the video for 5, 6, 7, 8.”
For all that the group became a runaway success in their early years and earned a hugely loyal fanbase, Richards says the high point of her time with Steps has been the manner of their comeback last year, with a sell-out tour of 22 arenas taking the group as much by surprise as anyone else.
“There’s nothing in our career that I dwell on, though,” she says. “I think everything happens for a reason, and even when we split (in 2001) it was a horrible time, but sometimes in life you have to go through things like that to come out the other side stronger. The band is all five of us and we feel very confident in what we can do together and keen to move forward. We’ve got each other’s backs, basically.”
This event is something of a nostalgia package, with two support groups who are remembered almost as fondly as Steps, even if they don’t have the same level of comeback success in this decade. Formed in 2000, boyband Blue – Anthony Costa, Duncan James, Lee Ryan and Simon Webbe – managed three number one albums and three number one singles, working with Elton John and Stevie Wonder in the process, while they also represented the UK in the 2011 Eurovision Song Contest.
Denmark’s Aqua are another group who started out with one-hit novelty success, much like Steps, before spinning it into an enduring career. Singers Lene Nystrom and Rene Dif and keyboard player Soren Rasted first achieved huge sales with 1997’s aggravatingly catchy Europop hit Barbie Girl, and while their major success was over in a couple of years – with their first two albums having sold nearly 20 million copies – they’ve managed to maintain an ongoing prominence in their home country.
The band is all five of us and we feel very confident in what we can do together