This month I’m featuring my top 20 albums of the past decade, to celebrate 10 years of This Must Be Pop! Click here to see all the Decade of Pop posts so far.
Come and Get It is proof that you don’t need to be a great pop star to make a great pop album. At the time Come and Get It was released, I wished it had been recorded by someone with a little more personality, but now I wonder if it would have lost a certain strange appeal. This album took the robotic pop princess persona to a new extreme, and with such a high calibre of producers involved, I wouldn’t be too surprised if it was intentional. Richard X’s music videos featured clones and 2D characters, and he famously chose to give Some Girls to Rachel over the female singer with the most personality, Geri Halliwell (a story which inspired a brilliant Annie song).
One of the things I love about Come and Get It is the fact that it’s a snapshot of British pop at that time. Although other countries, particularly those in Scandinavia, make excellent electro-pop, these songs represent the period of the mid-’00s when pop was struggling for recognition. The producers and writers who believed in and depended on pop had no choice but to try harder, and they created their best work. This album was a chart flop, but it was the quality of music showcased here, and also by Xenomania on the Girls Aloud albums, that reminded the industry that there is more to pop than throwaway novelty tunes. The wider world wasn’t ready, so Rachel took one for the team. She should be commended for her sacrifice, even if it wasn’t intentional!
one of the best albums ever!…