So if the Beatles helped invent the idea of the get-up-and-go-for-it, all boy group playing guitars and drums, obediently wearing carefully chosen fashionable clothes and singing songs about what it is to be young, good looking, cocksure, surrounded by disorientating change, full of turbulent feelings, then what must it be like to be a group going for it almost 50 years after the Beatles found their name and their purpose? A group not following in the footsteps of the Beatles but following in the footsteps of the group after the group after the group after the group etc etc etc etc after the group after the Beatles. Or can the world, and the possibilities, seem completely different from when the Beatles ran the world from inside their Apple, because so much has changed in the world, and those new changes still demand exciting, surprising, new pop groups to reflect, anticipate, exploit and decorate?
Essentially, whatever has changed, there are still teenagers, real sensationally self-centred ones, not those in their twenties, thirties and beyond clinging on to teen-styled passions, and these teenagers now believe it is a fundamental right, or at least some kind of commercial inevitability, that their lives are filled with an amount of entertainment, partying and sundry good times that involves pop music. The record industry in the middle of all kinds of collapse still negotiates its way forward believing that there can be yet another recreation of the once fresh and ferocious Beatles phenomenon, a spectacular, time and place alignment of song, image, hedonism, horniness, neurosis, emancipation, glamour, technology and money, and that somehow this will save everything. If the Beatles invented everything, or at least were always in the right place and time when the inventions of others fitted into their particular way with words and music, then one of the things they invented was the teenybop band, the boy band, the group only at home in the hit parade, driven forward for better or worse by the screaming girls in their ears, the band filled with highly-styled heartthrobs, pretty boys, cute ones, loveable odd balls and, without it being really dangerous, edgy ruffians.
The young, ambitious and very knowing Vagabond are not a boy band, although they are all male and possess looks that suggest they have been designed to send much of the pop-based world swooning in their jeans. Alex glows with casual pop star intensity and seems to be the result of a genetic experiment in pop star production that blended the DNA of Bolan, Kylie and Arthur Lee of Love.
They are unlined, prepossessing and shapely, although Alex sings Vagabond's glistening soul songs as though he is a little lined, and shapeless, and potentially troublemaking, and while critics detect a little Wet Wet Wet and Simply Red, in his heart and soul he's hearing a little Tim and Jeff Buckley. We talk in their publicist's office, which is just about a toss of the Beatles' June 1964 Long Tall Sally ep from Paul's St Johns Wood house. It's one of those strange conversations that won't be happening for much longer, where a determined pop group just out of their teens, dealing with a whole new set of unprecedented circumstances in terms of their sound and career, have to deal with nagging questions and a little anxiety about what's to become of us from someone who is old enough to be their dad. In this case, the conversation is about a group whose surviving members are old enough to be their granddads.
I wonder if this means that to Vagabond the Beatles are history, an over-archived fuss from the once significant distant past that doesn't have much impact on their thoughts and planning as a 21st century pop group, or in fact, as stars, image, performers, content providers, marketing masters, money makers, creative dreamers, entertainment adventurers and songwriters as alive, inspiring and instructive as they've ever been? Funnily enough, once they start answering my questions, it's clear that they've been giving the subject a lot of thought.
