1 EAGLETON NOTES: Success

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Friday 7 May 2021

Success

A few days ago I had BBC Breakfast on in the background waiting for the local news when I heard a statement that the most successful band in British History was on. It is called 'Little Mix'. I, for one, had never heard of the band. Okay so they obviously make the sort of music that I don't listen to now but if they were the most successful band ever I'd have expected to have heard some mention of them at some stage.

I was brought up in Liverpool in The Sixties so I was, of course, very aware of groups such as The Beatles,  The Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys, The Hollies,  Herman's Hermits, The Searchers, Credence Clearwater Revival, Gerry and The Pacemakers, Led Zeppelin, Simon and Garfunkle, Pink Floyd, Manfred Mann, The Monkees, The Mamas and the Papas, The Moody Blues, Procol Harem, The Everly Brothers, The Shadows, Deep Purple and doubtless many more. 

I suppose we all tend to remember the groups of our youth more than those of later years (although perhaps I'm wrong in that supposition). However since the Sixties and Seventies I've only been aware of a relatively small number of groups that have made the Really Big Time.

40 comments:

  1. Neither have I. Sounds like the BBC very little fact or news but plenty of opinion.

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  2. I think I lost interest in most popular music bands after the Seventies so have no idea who is who after that period. Dinosaur? Me??

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  3. I guess the real test of their success is whether the youth in a couple of generations time recognize their name or their music. I reckon some of the bands you named from our youth would still be recognized by youth today.

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    1. Tigger, I guess that I will just have to leave a note for my grandchildren to send me a message in 30 years time. I'm sure by then they will be able to communicate with the 'dead'.

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  4. Graham, all the band names you have mentioned here are familiar to me - except for Little Mix. I grew up with my parents playing The Beatles just as much as Bach, Abba as well as opera. It gave my sister and me the chance to get to know a wide range of music and shape our own taste from a broad basis.
    Like many people, once I was past my teens and in my early twenties, I stopped caring about most of what was popular, and now I find I rarely come across something new that interests me enough to want to listen to it repeatedly.

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    1. Meike, you made me wonder about 'groups' from my parents' young days. From what I can recall of all their records they were mostly individual singers for the pop songs. There were some jazz bands and so on too but not 'groups' as we know them. I'm discounting 'classical' music because much of that is timeless.

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  5. Never heard of Little Mix, and here I thought we Americans knew all things British.
    Groups, yes, remember them all. Stevie Wonder in the 1960s was a group all on his own.

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    1. Maywyn, I certainly remember Stevie Wonder.

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  6. I never heard of Little Mix either, but all the names in your 2nd paragraph are familiar, even if not all of them were my personal favourites. The Monkees were one of my "first loves", though - I remember watching their TV show, which would have been when I was 11... A few years later, Simon & Garfunkel were No 1 for me, and they have remained so for me every since :) I agree about remembering the groups of my youth best. Besides coming first in one's own experience, I'm also thinking that back then one didn't have access to as many sources of music as now. Mostly the radio. I had a very limited collection of vinyl records of my own, but those that I had, I played over and over again. In later years, I've added very few new favourites (and they usually remind me of others that I loved in the past!)

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    1. Monica, I do have some popular music CDs but the vast majority of my collection is 'classical'. I tended to rely on the radio when I was younger for most of my music.

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  7. Any one, and all of the groups you've mentioned, in my opinion, beat Little Mix hands down every spin of the turntable!

    Again, in my opinion, the music of our generation will outlast the majority of today's "music". I would bet London to a brick the music of our era will be still playing...and loved...for generations to come. There's nothing much around these days that grabs my interest.

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    1. Lee, not having heard any of Little Mix's music I can't legitimately pass a comment on it. However the very fact that I've never heard it says something.

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  8. I think Little Mix were a 'manufactured group'; put together by someone hoping to make money, which I expect they did. Don't ask me to name any of their 'smash hits', but I do know the name.

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    1. Cro, your knowledge base is very much wider than mine.

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  9. Never heard of them. I'm with JayCee

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  10. Must say, I have never heard of that band either but did recognize all the other names you mentioned. I had to Google Little Mix - only to find that they don't sound like a great band anyway. Maybe I'm getting old LOL

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    1. Perhaps, Margaret, we are all getting old but I bet that when today's youngsters are our age they won't remember may of the "Little Mixes".

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  11. I'm with you on all the well-remembered groups from the Sixties/Seventies. Never heard of Little Mix. But then I would fail any test on current cultural icons from TV, cinema or radio as I don't watch TV, go to movies or listen to the radio except when driving--and even then, the stations are set to capture my familiar favorites.

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    1. Mary, I am very like you in that respect although I do watch TV (though my viewing is very narrowly limited) and my radio is often on when I'm at home but almost always Radio 3 and often repeats of the morning Essential Classics because they explore lots of pieces I've never heard before.

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  12. From the comments it appears that one needs to be my generation or younger to know Little Mix. They are indeed incredibly successful, but they have certainly not outsold the Beatles when it comes to number of records. I wonder how BBC Breakfast were measuring success.

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    1. Helen, you would appear to have hit the nail on the head. I think the thing about The Beatles and their era is that everyone had heard of them regardless of musical taste.

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  13. Never heard of that group - I know, I know, I'm from NY - but The Monkees (specifically Davey Jones, of course) were among my first loves, right along with Shaun Cassidy, and Donny Osmond. I nearly met Davey Jones in person once, back when I was a flight attendant... I got to the plane I was working, and my crewmates told me Davey Jones had just been and left... he was on the wrong plane! I wanted to strangle them all for telling him he was on the wrong plane BEFORE I got there! Gahhhhhh! Ah, well.

    As far as "bands" go, I like 'em BIG: Glenn Miller Orchestra, the Dorsey brothers Tommy and Jimmy and their respective orchestras, Count Basie Orchestra, Vaughn Monroe, and the list goes on... yeah, my body was born in 1966 but my heart was born in the 1940s.

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    1. Marcheline, I, too, was a big band fan and I also enjoyed trad jazz (Jackie Teagarden - wonderful) but they were quite different in appeal to 'groups' which I associate purely with pop music. My body was definitely born in the '40s!

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  14. I thought that "Little Mix" was what you got when you only wanted a small bag of sweeties from Woolworths.

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    1. YP, it's a thought that many of the people who listen to Little Mix may never have heard of Woolworths.

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    2. Eh? How could they miss Woolworths! The shop is in every high street.

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    3. YP, Woolworths went bust in the UK sometime in the early part of this century. It's still in New Zealand and Australia as a supermarket I think.

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    4. Woolworths in Australia and New Zealand has no connection with F W Woolworth of the UK and never has had.

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    5. Didn't it originally come from the same one as the British one? I don't understand how these things work.

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    6. Well unless they pinched the name, no.

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  15. I have heard of Little Mix but didn't realise they were so big. Maybe they should be called Big Little Mix.... I think that the music we listen to as teenagers is often a sort of tribal thing, to do with being that age and liking the same things as others in our age group - so that nobody confuses us with either adults or mere children! Perhaps when we get older we start listening to music that we like for its own sake a bit more. What do you think?

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    1. Jenny, I certainly go along with the tribal element of what we listen to as youngsters. In fact it had a lot to do with all sorts of behavioural things as youngsters.

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    2. Both good and bad, methinks!

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  16. I've heard of that band but I don't listen to alot of modern stuff, I'm still stuck on stuff from the 1960s until the 1980s. In fact the first record I ever listened to was one I borrowed off an uncle which was the kinks greatest hits.

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  17. I looked them up. One of the videos by Little Mix is called Sweet Melody. NOT an accurate title. It had something like 88 million views so the world has gone crazy, I believe.

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