CityLife

JLS

JLS 1 / 3 images

JLS
MEN Arena
December 16, 2010

Last Saturday, 20 million viewers watched The X Factor as girly-voiced hat-wearer Matt Cardle beat Rebecca Ferguson (a woman so wet, it’s a wonder your television screen didn’t grow mildew) to win a recording contract.

She should take heart from the runaway success of JLS. In merely 18 months, the 2008 runner-ups have transformed themselves into chart-topping, MOBO-winning, multi-date-arena-filling pop stars. They even have their own brand of condoms, which might prompt the insult from naysayers: “I hate JLS so much, I’m going to have lots of unprotected sex just to spite them!”

As they descend from the ceiling in a silver sports car, the hysteria tonight among tweenage girls is shrilly audible. Were they any more raucous, police would surely have to kettle them.

The night scores a full-house on ‘Boyband Bingo’: there’s costume changes, slick choreography, a ballad section performed on a walkway protruding into the crowd, fire shooting from the floor, and exhortations that “Manchester is the sexiest city in the world so far!”

There’s even a medley of *NSync and Backstreet Boys hits. Indeed, they couldn’t conjure up images of the 90s more accurately without Daniella Westbrook turning up with her original nose.

Musically, JLS’s conveyor-belt pop is as well-oiled as their deltoids, from the sublime Beat Again to the Rihanna-aping Work (as if to underline the melody’s similarity to Rude Boy, the quartet follow it up with a version of Umbrella).

Keenly sensitive to pop’s wind-change, second album, Outta This World,  has seen them move away from R&B to the dancefloor, with the likes of The Club Is Alive essentially being club music for people not old enough to get into clubs.

What prevents things from feeling workmanlike is the relentless  enthusiasm and undeniable charisma of the group themselves – whatever ‘it’ is, they have it, particularly backflipping Lilliputian Lothario crowd-favourite Aston Merrygold. In a neat set-piece, they perform Superhero alongside a giant robot, surely the greatest dancing automaton in pop this side of The Saturdays.

For the encore, they return in their trademark primary coloured hoodies  - seeing them out of them is for pop fans  the equivalent of watching Kiss out of their make-up - for Everybody in Love (replete with equally  colour-coded hankies in their back pockets, which you can’t help but assume is a stylist in-joke).

As confetti subsumes  the  rapt crowd, JLS cut through cynicism like a laser beam: sometimes you have to just take your hand off your chin and put in the air.