I love a music quiz and The Hit List provides a lively boost of music and energy on a Saturday night. The scheduling of this show confuses me but every now and then a celebrity special pops up, and this past weekend was exactly that. Harry from McFly, some people from morning TV and yay, two Gladiators. Now, there were plenty of questions raised by this appearance - why those two Gladiators in particular? How much music are they going to know? And more than anything, why did they come in their Gladiator outfits??

The Backstreet Boys popped up on Saturday Night Live’s 50th anniversary concert and boy were they well received! Who would have thought that Paul Rudd and Jon Hamm would be bopping along to these boys as if their lives depended on it! Plus Maya Rudolph always in flirt mode, it’s wonderful. What I love most about this is actually the YouTube comments, not traditionally a place known for positivity, are all so supportive of Brian, it makes me quite emotional. Such love.

The 90s repeats of Top of the Pops on BBC Four have had a bit of a break recently (Proms and the Olympics will do that to your channels) but came back with a bang with this amazing episode. It kicked off with the Backstreet Boys which was such a surprise to me that I almost choked on my drink, and aside from the next song, continued to astound and surprise.

I always think at this point I started to lose touch with Backstreet Boys, having been a proper fan-girl for the first few albums. But actually, listening to this now, I did know quite a few of the songs, and really quite liked it. It’s a change in direction for the band, obviously dropping one member for a bit, and moving away from the Max Martin production team. I love Any Other Way and Panic, potentially more than the actual singles, but I do admit it’s not as strong as what has come before.

My seventh year of listening to albums has drawn to a close and it’s that agonising time where I need to decide on a top five. Each year I listen to 100 albums, one new and one old each week for fifty weeks, and they each get two listens to make sure I really get a feel for the sound. Then, at the end of the year, I pull together my top five from the new albums. It’s always a hideous choice and this year’s shortlist of ten albums made it really difficult to decide on the final five. But I’ve done it, so here goes!

Somehow another year of music has flown by, I’ve banked another 100 albums, both new and old, and now I have to decide which were the cream of the crop and which weren’t worth the download speeds. Each week, for fifty weeks, I’ve listened to one new album (usually from this year, or 2020 at a push), and one older album (any time before that), and have listened to each twice because I’ve found just one listen through isn’t always enough to full appreciate what’s going on.

This is the last album I really listened to as a proper, hardcore Backstreet Boys fan. After this, they drifted, I drifted, it all changed. So I don’t know it as intimately as I do the first four but it was still nicely familiar to me. I like the quirky songs too, My Beautiful Woman is great and quite different to the rest of the songs on there. Great voices, great chemistry, a good album that I should listen to more!

Hooray for the dreaded time of year where I pick out the top five albums I’ve listened to over the past twelve months. Each week for 50 weeks, I listen to two albums. One is a new one (this year or the previous year) and one is an older one (from any time previous to that). So I can’t promise to have listened to every album that was released last year but of those I did, I’ve managed to narrow down five of the best.

I needed something warm and comforting this week so dived into the back catalogue of my favourite boy band. This is their second album, and you can tell that they were slightly maturing from their first, but still nowhere near old enough, experienced enough, or in control enough of their albums to let their real sound show.

It’s that time again! A whole year of music listening gets distilled down to a choice of five top albums and seeing if any of them can break into my top ten of all time. I don’t usually enjoy this process and this year hasn’t been any different, although if I’m honest, the choice was slightly less inspiring than usual. It felt like the year was very top heavy in terms of stand-out albums, and as I was reviewing my shortlist, none of them were really jumping out.

Naturally, I know all the words to all the songs off by heart which makes them super fun to listen and sing along to. It’s a bit of a difficult one to score because I’m so close to this album that it is naturally a five, but really, objectively, there are some less-than-stellar songs on there.

My write up of our outing to see the Spice Girls at Wembley mentions the fact that I had previously not been a concert-going person. I had practically no experience of seeing music live and in person, but that was all set to change that year. My realisation that I could now probably cope with it all coincided nicely with the Backstreet Boys going on their huge DNA World Tour. To celebrate (and encourage) me going, we decided to go VIP and make a nice big deal of my first proper concert experience.

Backstreet Boys have been celebrating the launch of their new tour, 20 years of their best album Millennium, and a host of other things. Lots of content, tweets, videos, competitions, the works. I really liked the recent videos they released featuring their videos from the Millennium album with added information. It’s like the good old days when MTV was actually comprised of music videos, and you could sit all day and watch pop videos with bonus trivia in the lower thirds. Ahh, there is a gap in the market for that, surely?

This is the last of the Backstreet Boys albums that I was properly obsessed with when it came out, and that has me pondering: do I like this album because it’s good or do I like it because I know it so well? If I listened to it for the first time now would I love it as much as I do? I don’t have the answer for that but all I can say is that I do love it.

My Backstreet Boys fandom sort of took a dip in the middle there, the last few albums I’ve not really paid too much attention to. But now I’m back on it, and thankfully, so are they! I really enjoyed this one, there are some great tunes on here and yea, they have grown up and are more reflective and thoughtful, but that’s no bad thing.

I mean, I love this album. Mr C very kindly gave me the choice of BSB albums to round off the year with, and although I didn’t know it before I made the selection, this one is my favourite. It’s the boys at the height of their fame, at the height of my fandom, and it’s stacked full of pure, unadulterated pop pleasure.

Totally what you would expect, slightly poppy country music. I so wanted the Backstreet Boys track to be amazing but I didn’t think it was, sadly. There are a good selection of guests on there, but there are no real stand out songs.

It’s always a lot of fun when artists cover other artists, and that is never more true than when it’s a Backstreet Boys tune on display. The superbly fun Florida Georgia Line took on that challenge with an impromptu cover of ‘Everybody’ and they did it pretty well, I think! If anyone else leaves BSB, there could be a spot open for one of these two. Although, I have to admit, my one takeaway from this video is to ask what device is it being filmed with? It’s a brilliantly clear image! Love it.

When I first starting putting together my Life List, I pondered adding “See a Backstreet Boys concert” to it. I added it, then I took it off again, then added it, then removed it, and repeated the process a few more times. In the end, I left it off. I wasn’t totally convinced I wanted to see the band with just four members anyway, and besides, going to gigs isn’t really my thing.

I was looking through some of the archives of my blog (don’t you do that, I’m still in the midst of sorting it all out!), and discovered that I didn’t actually write about mine and Mr C’s wedding here on my personal blog. There are pictures and suchlike on Sidepodcast, and we even answered some questions in one of the episodes, but over here, it was all quiet. There are probably a lot of reasons, but one of them springs to mind straight away. Aside from the whole wedding aspect of it, we really didn’t have a very good time. We married on a cruise ship because we wanted something very private, plus it was a great way of having the wedding and honeymoon at the same time. Except, the honeymoon/holiday part… not great.

Eight Songs The song choices are by far the hardest part. My mother left her choices on the previous post, and told me that it took her the best part of an hour to narrow it down to eight. I’m not sure how long I’ve spent thinking about this as I chose them over a period of several days, by writing one, then going away to ponder and picking it up again later. Here goes:

The end of Friends - I’m stocked up with Doritos and tissues, just in case. I was driving home and it’s been a mega stressful day, there was nothing on the radio so I was flicking through all the stations. I have pre-programmed all of the available slots in my car, despite the fact that I never listen to them. So, I picked a completely random station and lo and behold, they began playing Backstreet Boys. I know I’ve grown out of them, but it was still kind of comforting to hear.