La belle époque

Call me a softie if you want: a sucker, a dupe, kitty-whipped, a pushover. Brand me a traitor, a turncoat. Take me outside, beat me like a gimp and colour me Judas. But I don’t care, ‘cos only an old curmudgeon could fail to be charmed and disarmed by Bellefire, these four young women seated around a conference room table in the Virgin offices devouring pizza and answering my questions with such eagerness, such unspoiled appetite for the process.

I came here loaded with hardball questions, ready to play bad cop/bad cop about everything from Bellefire’s origins at an audition for a Steps type act to their four-part harmonyfied Corrs-meets-William Orbit take on U2’s ‘All I Want Is You’ to being part of Louis Walsh’s stable of pre-fab pop moppets to their bigness in Japan (125,000-plus sales of the forthcoming Irish debut album After The Rain).

But it was no good. Within moments of sitting down to talk, Tara, Kelly, Cathy and Ciara (no last names please, we’re pop stars) made me roll over and purr. They did this not by dint of any sophisti-cat media savvy or strenuously argued aesthetic, but by being hopelessly likable.

Forget payola, forget the Puerto Rican dancing girls, the champagne, cocaine, canapés and fire-eating hermaphrodites – this is all it takes to buy off a sceptical hack: good manners and a Goldgrain chocolate biscuit.

Okay, sure, a lot of what Bellefire had to say I’d heard before from other boy or girl groups. True, they gave me a tape full of diplomacies and displayed a wily refusal to badmouth their contemporaries or comment on their mentor’s on-air contretemps with Ronan Collins the other week. But the quartet came across as so into what they’re doing, so excited to be here, they made my dour carpings about the irredeemable shiteness of Westlife, Hearsay etc seem like toxic bus fumes on a spring day.

Conversation Sample #1:

What about all this hand-me-down Corrs business?

Cathy: “We realise people out there are going to compare us to different acts but we’re confident in ourselves and we don’t compare ourselves to anyone and we know that we’ve got a lot to prove and we just want to get out there and people will see what we’re really like.”

I know, I know – hardly going to singe the front page off The Sunday World now is it? But when delivered in a soft and sincere Sligo accent, it sure makes you feel cheap for asking. And later, when I put it to the group that going by standard rules of pop obsolescence, it could be all over for them in five years, I felt like I just told my kids I’d murdered Santa Claus.

Sample #2:

Do you honestly think the record label will tolerate it if you don’t have a string of hits straight off?

Ciara: “They signed us on an album basis. We’re signed to Virgin UK who had The Verve, David Bowie, they’re kind of more an albums record label. They were more about the music all along.”

Thing is, I don’t believe Bellefire are so naïve as to think Virgin will continue to indulge them if the three lemons don’t start showing up on the one arm bandit pretty sharpish. But note how, within the space of a two-line answer, they managed to deflect a question about the harsh realities of pop life and redirect it in such a way as to align themselves with some pretty credible acts. Smooth.

And when I started firing off questions about whether or not Bellefire had attended schools for interview diplomacy and pop deportment, I felt the words turn to chalk in my mouth, suddenly seeing myself from their point of view – a dork with a dictaphone who’s taking the whole thing far too seriously.

Sample #3:

Have you ever been prepped for interviews?

Kelly: “Everyone thinks that! We actually never did. I think one thing we always did is when we did an interview on telly we’d watch it back ourselves and go, ‘Right, we’re talking over each other there, we shouldn’t do that’. And then after a while we just got used to listening to each other in interviews. It’s kind of more cop-on than anything. The other one is, ‘Do you get groomed by Louis, does he pick out your clothes?’ It’s like, we’d be walking around with a sports jacket, turn-up jeans and a stripey shirt with a t-shirt underneath!”

So have you spoken to Louis about the Ronan Collins/Six debacle?

Cathy: “We don’t want to bring it up! I think he’s been asked enough questions about it. (Coughs) Excuse me, I’ve got pizza stuck in my epiglottis.”

Don’t take me the wrong way. I still think the pop idol game is rigged, evil and depraved; two notches up from a child prostitution racket, and one in which I am complicit by the very act of writing this article. I still think that the charts are at an all time low and that the last five years have seen the mainstream music industry hit an absolute nadir, degenerating into an advertising and sales convention with a soundtrack; a scam racket weighed down with several billion employees surplus to requirements, people who have about as much interest in music as I have in demographics and pie-charts.

I still think nine-tenths of the acts on Louis Walsh’s books produce musical McDonalds: homogenous monosodium glutamate that sells by the shitload.

But by God, I’ll eat pizza with Bellefire

anytime.