Our 5th singing contest chart-topper in just over a year. The X Factor Age is well underway…
Just a Little, by Liberty X (their 1st and only #1)
1 week, from 19th – 26th May 2002
And of the five, this is definitely the best so far. I might go so far as to say that it remains one of the best. It’s upbeat, modern, and fun – a world away from Will Young and Gareth Gates’s syrupy attempts, and Hear’Say’s dated efforts. Its opening line – Sexy, Everything about you so sexy… really seemed to enter the public consciousness (or at least my school playground consciousness), while the chanted chorus enters the brain and remains there for some time.
Musically it’s nothing too out the box – in claiming it’s the ‘best’ reality TV #1 so far we have to remember how low the bar is – with lots of early-noughties pop touches, but keeping a great pop sensibility in the chorus and the middle-eight. It’s a bridge between S Club’s bubblegum and the Britney Spears’ classics of the era. And is it too much to suggest that Britney’s songwriters were listening when they came up with something that sounded quite similar, lyrically and melodically, to gimme just a little bit more… a few years later?
Liberty X were made up of contestants who had been rejected during the auditions for Popstars winners Hear’Say. It is perhaps this distance, and the fact that they were picked up by a record label not under the whip of Simon Cowell, which gave them the freedom to release something not beholden to reality TV schmaltz. Their first two singles, including their #5 debut ‘Thinking it Over’, had been released under the name Liberty, but after a legal challenge from a ‘90s R&B band of the same name they were forced to add the ‘X’. It did them no harm, as their first release as Liberty X brought them this huge smash, the 8th biggest seller of the year.
There’s an argument to be made for not winning TV singing contests if you want to have lasting musical success. Plenty of non-winners have gone on to massive popularity, One Direction being the ones that spring to mind first. Liberty X never managed 1D levels of success, but they were regulars in the British charts between 2001 and 2005, with eight Top 10 hits in that time, stats that Hear’Say could only dream of.
They split in 2006, after their third album bombed. They reformed a few times, and now exist with only the three female members. One of the two original male members, Kevin Simms, has been the lead vocalist for Wet Wet Wet since 2018. Imagine telling someone in 2002 that one of the token blokes in Liberty X would go on to become the new Marti Pellow…
The UK Number Ones Blog 
I have to say, this group visually looks more like a perfectly manufactured pop group than Hear’Say who all look like just random people pulled off the street and told to sing in a pop group (which I guess is basically the truth). Liberty X look hot and sexy and young in that typical late-90s/early-2000s way. Just the way it’s meant to be. The best things about these faceless pop groups is that they usually look great.
Then you play the song and it’s…eh. At least until the chorus which is pretty good. Wish it gave me a little bit more though. I was going to comment that this seems like a typical men-women pop group where the women vastly overshadow the men in the group, and I guess in this song it’s still the same by the end where the women make up 90% of the song, but the blonde guy had a pretty good vocal part in the 2nd half. As I’m writing and listening to this, the song won me over by the end. It’s not I would call a song that is anything special, but I quite liked it. Certainly liked it much more than Hear’Say’s two No. 1s
I rated this and the band at the time – top 10 for me, and they had more class, closer to the cooler end of pop-dance, and looked like they fit together more than hearsay and the boyband that lost the battle to Girls Aloud. Height should never be under-estimated in pop bands that dance (see One Direction 3 inches between them), too much of a difference and it just jars sometimes.
That’s an interesting point. Liberty X do look more suited to one another, though the boys still have a ‘let your brothers join in’ look about them (not as much as the boys from Hearsay, though.) I was going to make a childish joke about One Direction and the 3 inches between them… but won’t!
Well, Harry is the superstar and he was the tallest, so insert gag here, hah! 🙂
This was when I stopped taking any notice of the charts and from now on any song not by an established artist had to be absolutely huge and cross over to radio 2 for me to have even heard of it ( uptown funk, Crazy, Gaga’s number ones etc). Okay I was hurtling towards 40 at this point but it’s more than that, the seemingly complete domination of the music charts by reality TV crap killed off the progression through genres that rock and roll started and glam, punk, rap, dance etc continued. From now on it’s the real talent of the era like Beyoncé or Eminem squeezing in a couple of weeks at number one every few months in between a sea of Cowell’s shit acts. Girls Aloud aside, nobody who’s come from noughties the talent show stable is fit to be in this countdown.
It has been noticeable how much 2002 was the year the reality TV boom started. I think there are seven Pop Idol/Popstars #1s in total.
So many of them are crap, but like you said, Girls Aloud were great. I think this Liberty X tune is a decent enough pop song too, as is an upcoming Gareth Gates record. We can hate the format, but I’ll give each record a fair assessment.
And I don’t think it’s quite true to say these acts ruined the charts, or ended popular music as we know it. They dominated, but only for a few years. 2002-03, then there was a bit of a lull, and 2007-11 were the peak X Factor years. Since 2012/13, very few talent show winners have had any lasting impact, and the shows have been off the air for years now. Little Mix were the last big X Factor act, and they were good enough to have probably made it outwith the format.
I can see what you’re saying but putting it another way 02-03 and 07-11 is 6- 7 years in all and that’s the same length of time as the Beatles entire span of number ones ( not counting the recent one) and a year longer than ABBA’s. That’s an awful lot of time for total shit to be the dominant chart force. And now, with the likes of Sheeran and Swift being the dominant force, the charts are almost like the 1950’s again, but with no Elvis or Chuck Berry on the horizon to break the monotony. I’m glad I was young when I was. Also, have to agree to disagree on Little Mix, Sugababes and Girls Aloud were class acts, but LM were rubbish
I can see what you’re saying too, but compare anything to the Beatles and ABBA and it comes off much worse. I don’t want to excuse the Pop Idol/X Factor age but I do think people overexaggerate when they claim it ‘killed the charts’. What it did ruin was the Xmas number one battle! However, outside of Xmas not too many reality TV acts made top spot, as hopefully this blog will show, and even when they did fast turnover meant there was space for other stuff in between.
What’s really killed off the charts, as you alluded to, is streaming, which has led to Ed Sheeran racking up weeks and weeks, and to Wham! being Xmas #1 every year until the end of time. But… even Ed Sheeran hasn’t made #1 with his last few singles, and although Taylor Swift is huge she has never quite managed to turn that into singles chart domination (only 5 #1s so far). Nothing is permanent. We’ll have something else to complain about soon enough : )