And Finally

The Wanted won’t feud with 1D, however they may be quoted in the tabs – spoil sports

By | Published on Thursday 8 March 2012

The Wanted

Oh, those naughty naughty journalists, twisting the words of The Wanted so that it looks like they said something ever so slightly interesting.

It seems the emerging Wanted/One Direction feud was manufactured by eager tabloid hacks. No surprises there really. But be fair, if you find yourself writing about the current crop of boybands every day, you’re going to want something to spice things up just a little bit, aren’t you? I mean, Harry 1D did his bit shacking up with a 30-something for a few weeks, but that’s long forgotten news now. Perhaps he could start shagging someone famous in their 60s – Cher maybe – just to ensure that the pop journalists of Great Britain don’t all die of boredom.

Anyway, as previously reported, the Metro recently quoted The Wanted’s Max George as saying that 1D are just a toy band for hyperactive children, while his group is a proper musical phenomenon. This was most obvious, George said, in America. He apparently told the paper: “I’m not sure how well [One Direction] are actually doing yet [in the US]. I don’t think people really look at us over there as the same kind of band [as 1D], because I think people look at them more like a Jonas Brothers sort of band, that are very TV and children’s magazine based. They make magazines instead of you actually hearing them on the radio”.

And if that wasn’t the makings of a good old fashioned pop feud in its own right, George’s band mate Nathan Sykes was then quoted in The People saying: “If you look at One Direction’s chart position and then look at ours, they’re not really even our rivals. They have different fans to us. We don’t want their fans, they’re too young. We laugh and say that their fans are our fans’ younger sisters. We have our own success going on in America and it isn’t just with the music”. Mysterious.

Returning to the theme that One Direction are just puppets of the Syco pop machine while they’re serious pop innovators (and not, in case you wondered, just puppets of a poor man’s Syco pop machine), Sykes continued: “Unlike One Direction we don’t have Simon [Cowell] but we don’t need him either. He is too controlling for us – we like to have control of our own music. We like to sit and write our songs, decide what we do, but, like any of the ‘X-Factor’ acts, One Direction don’t really have much of a choice about what they do”.

So, this is turning into a good pop feud, right? No, it’s not, because both George and Sykes have taken to Twitter to distance themselves from their newspaper quotage, adding that they deeply respect all other artistes and would fight to the death if anyone tried to stop their rivals from singing their songs. Damn Twitter, life was so much better when twisted quotes in the tabs went unchallenged until the celeb being quoted got round to writing a bitter memoir nine years later.

Says George: “Just to clear up… I think interviews have been twisted and made into [something] much [more] dramatic than what they were.. We appreciate all other artists. And all fans of any age, whether you’re one or 90. Anyone who says or thinks different is full of shit. Hope this puts people’s minds at rest”.

Says Sykes: “When someone takes your words and twists them, it’s like a knife in the back. Whatever happened to the good guys?!”

For those of you concerned about Syke’s apparent back problems, may I apologise on behalf of pop journalists everywhere for twisting The Wanted’s words in a futile effort to make them look interesting. And if you want further proof The Wanted are a serious band not interested in cheap TV projects, do look out for the boys being pranked on the next series of ‘Punk’d’. Classic.



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