Our 5th (!) boyband of the year is, fittingly, Five. And of the seven boyband number ones so far in 1999 (eight, if we include solo Ronan Keating) ‘Keep on Movin’ is, for my money, the best.
Keep on Movin’, by Five (their 1st of three #1s)
1 week, from 31st October – 7th November 1999
Late-nineties boybands, or their management, had a clear choice to make: ballads, or bad boys? We know what direction Boyzone and Westlife went in, but Five took the opposite path. (And yes, I know that Five were styled as 5ive, but it’s something that I’ve always thought looked stupid. I will be referring to them as Five throughout, just as Pink will never be ‘P!nk’, nor Kesha ‘Ke$ha’.)
Of course, East 17 (bad boys) took ‘Stay Another Day’ (a classic ballad) to Christmas number one, but bear with my theory. Five played into a faux hip-hop, street fashions look, more like a young NKOTB than any of their British counterparts. Their debut single was, for example, the basketball referencing ‘Slam Dunk (Da Funk)’. In addition, all five looked like they could handle themselves in a pub brawl (Jay in particular, with the Desperate Dan jaw and the eyebrow ring, always looked like he’d gotten lost on the way from home from his shift at a building site). Even the cute ones, Abs and Ritchie, gave the impression that they’d gleefully steal a member of Westlife’s lunch money.
Not that ‘Keep on Movin’ is at all street, or hard-edged though. It’s a mid-tempo, perky pop tune about always looking on the bright side of life. Get on up, When you’re down, Baby take a good look around… No overwrought declarations of love, or grand statements about flying without wings. When the rainy days are dyin’, Gotta keep on tryin’, When the bees and birds are flyin’… Not lyrics to trouble the Nobel Prize committee, but still kind of sweet.
Musically it’s got a couple of interesting touches, in the verses that must have been influenced by Blur’s ‘Coffee and TV’, which had been a hit a few months earlier, and in the ear-catching, sitar-sounding riff. It sounds very modern for the late-nineties, both in the music and the down-to-earth, positive sentiment, like something One Direction might have put out a decade or more later.
It was also quite the departure from some of Five’s earlier hits, which were much more ‘90s R&B, Backstreet Boys influenced – tunes like ‘When the Lights Go Out’, ‘If Ya Getting Down’, and the Joan Jett sampling ‘Everybody Get Up’. Maybe this shift to a more mature, family-friendly sound is why they managed a belated number one single, but can we just take a moment to bemoan that none of those fun songs listed above made #1, unlike every turgid ballad Westlife ever crapped out.
Speaking of the Backstreet Boys, and by association Max Martin, we should mention the production credit here for his British equivalent, Steve Mac: a man who was putting his name on the third of what is now thirty UK chart-toppers. I should also mention that as much as I think this is a decent pop song, and Five a generally fun boyband, their next chart-topper is, shall we say, polarising…
The UK Number Ones Blog 
Wait, is that a sitar in a teen pop song? Huh, interesting. I’ve never heard this song before but few listens and this is an absolute banger. Extremely fun song. My problem with a lot of British pop at this time is that it’s either cheery or too banal. This is not banal or too cheery. It’s upbeat but it has some edge and force to it. This is how you do a teen pop song. It even has a silly white boy rap.
This blows all of previous Westlife’s No. 1s – except for “If I Let You Go” which has really grown on me – out the water. Better than all of Boyzone’s No. 1s combined. I’ll even go as far to say it’s better than all of Take That’s No. 1s outside of “Back for Good”.
Bold statements! I do really like this, but kind of prefer Five’s earlier, much more in your face teen-pop hits. You should check them out. A bit like if the BSBs had grown up on a council estate in south London.
I remember a quote about 5ive compared to Westlife that, paraphrasing, they looked like at the end of the night they’d um, eff you up against the garage door behind your council house.
Ha! Yep, that pretty much sums them up
Great pop record. I rated Five by and large, they didnt look like a homogenous boy band, and they didn’t come over as one either. The credentials on this one are impeccable – Steve Mac! And TBH One Direction could only dream of being half this good a decade later. They still had an even better chart-topper to come, and also one that gave the top spot to a song that should have topped the charts in 1977 if EMI had been savvy enough to make it a double A – that was certainly the side I preferred at the time, and it was one in the USA. So I’d review that one and briefly mention May Taylor had a lapse of reason – but at least the song deserved it. 🙂
Yes I always thought Five came over as a band, not one formed by a mogul (even though they were). As much as I like this, it did signal a shift in their sound away from the hip-hop, BSBs wannabe hits that I have a soft spot for. I’m interested to hear the Queen one again, too. I remember not hating it, and it’s a song that would work well with Five’s sound (much like I Love Rock n Roll).
It was always funny when Richie gurned with one of those headset microphone thingies, bless them.
I can’t believe all of the boy bands Stewart…it’s almost comical how many there were.
It’s amazing that there was an audience for all of them! So much competition
I wasn’t even being sarcastic…it’s just one after another.