Feelings of magnitude and minitude
from my childhood bedroom and the O2 arena
Isn’t it funny how the world can seem so small, and so big at the same time? How it can feel both simultaneously, in the same situation? And how you can feel the weight of that in the most quotidian of moments?
A couple of weeks ago I went to go see Girls Aloud at the O2. Usually I prep for concerts by listening to their songs, if not the setlist on Spotify, but for whatever reason I didn’t get round to it this time; NO WORRIES THOUGH, because as soon as the lights went down and the music started, muscle memory took over. Fragments of songs buried in the back of beyond in my brain suddenly burst from my mouth, fully formed, and I transformed into the disco dancing man emoji for 90 solid minutes — halfway through, I turned to my friend Charlotte and said “Just banger after banger after banger, isn’t it? You forget!” (and when we were filing out after the finish, my friend Ed, who had been at the other end of the row, said to me, verbatim, “Banger after banger after banger, wasn’t it?”, so that’s the official review).
The whole thing was incandescently enjoyable, in the special way that only screaming songs from your youth in unison with 20,000 can be. And whilst this could well have been where I found both the magnitude and minitude1 of life at the same time, it was a particular song that really made that happen.
The year was 2004. I’m in a lilac bedroom with silver stickers around the middle of the walls. I’m plugging in a huge blue CD player-cum-radio, which has been on a constant rotation of The Long And Winding Road / Suspicious Minds by Will Young and Gareth Gates, Room on the Third Floor by McFly, and What Will The Neighbours Say? by Girls Aloud (I still listen to 2 of these 3 albums now…I shall leave it to you to decide which one hasn’t made the 2024 cut.)
It’s an absolutely incredible first 5 run on the Girls Aloud album, whether it was on repeat for you as an 8 year old or not: The Show/Love Machine/I’ll Stand By You/Jump/Wake Me Up. It was Track 11, though, ‘Here We Go’ that really shook me to my core, because it was the exact same tune as the theme tune to my favourite tv show of the time, Totally Spies. The verses were different, and it wasn’t obviously Girls Aloud singing on the theme tune, but it was undoubtedly the same song. How could these worlds have been colliding?!
I couldn’t get my head around how something that was, for me, an insular ‘home’ thing — music I was listening to in my bedroom from a UK band I’d watched and voted to form — was suddenly related to something that seemed so otherworldly — a brightly-coloured cartoon set in glamorous Beverly Hills that I watched during snippets of early mornings before the day had truly begun. To this end I genuinely remember it as being a Moment in my childhood with a capital M, where I realised that the world was huge…but also possibly on my doorstep. That I knew everything and nothing. That I was, possibly, whatever I wanted to be.
This is an insane realisation to have from this instance, I know — but I was 8, ok?
Anyway, over time this crossover took up less and less brain space (I would argue that it didn’t shrink in importance to me, my brain just grew bigger around it in pre-pubescence), and I eventually totally forgot about it until the O2.
After we got back, with sore throats and full hearts and a quick prayer for the Jubilee Line which had Girls Aloud fans embarking on one end and Taylor Swift fans embarking on the other on the same night, I decided to google it. Of course, I had tried this at the time — I turned our chunky home computer on with my toe, waiting for it to boot up, and did some internet sleuthing which didn’t return much. This time, however, I knew the cheat code of adding “reddit” at the end of my search term and, as it always does, Reddit delivered.
The answer is, as you will believe in your infinite adult wisdom, fairly banal. WWTNS was produced by a group called Xenomania, one of whom had written and released Here We Go in 2000 under her own moniker Moonbaby before agreeing for it to be the Totally Spies theme tune. 4 years later, she agreed for Girls Aloud to cover it on their album.
This doesn’t inspire my feelings of wonder and place in the world as much, however, so I’m going to pretend I never found the answer, if that’s ok with you.
aware this isn’t a word but it should be