For several years, FACT’s print magazine back page was dedicated to ‘Fuck No!’ – you can probably guess the tone of the articles already. Here, we’ve republished two of our favourite takedowns – K-Punk on Sandi ‘I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker’ Thom, and Simon Hampson on Mika:

“The success of Sandi Thom’s ghastly ‘I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker (With Feathers in my Hair)’ is one of the most wretched moments in pop history.

You all know the (fairy) story: poor, desperate wee Sandi, down to her last PR consultant, was reduced to webcasting her songs from her “piss-stained basement” in Tooting. “Rumours of her gigs spread like wildfire over MySpace.com”, and she soon had a number one single.

Whether the MySpace story – now so discredited that Thom and her manager, Ian Wellesley Brown, have taken to downplaying it – is true or not is no longer the issue. The more interesting question is what trumped-up “internet sensations” tell us about the mechanics of hype in contemporary pop.

Hype aims to induce success by claiming that a product is already successful. It seeks to overcome the buyer’s doubts by convincing them that someone else likes the product. Pop has always used such techniques, of course: what are chart rundowns if not attempts to induce consumers to buy products because other people already like them? We take this for granted, but Jean-Paul Sartre’s response when he first came across record charts is salutary: “if he listens to the radio every Saturday and if he can afford to buy every week’s No. 1 record, [the consumer] will end up with the record collection of ‘the Other’. That is to say, the collection of no-one.”

Literally no-one, in the case of Sandi Thom’s webcasts, it would seem. Thom’s PR company, Quite Great, whose other clients include such struggling up-and-coming artistes as Michael McDonald, Meatloaf and Van Morrison, specialises in ‘ghost marketing’, where CDs are ‘accidentally’ left in public places to be ‘discovered’ by potential consumers. It was no doubt the ghosts who enthusiastically watched Thom’s internet gigs in their hundreds of thousands.

Ironically, the idea that there are spontaneous, word-of-mouth internet phenomena is so seductive because it plays on a desire to believe that there is still a popular space where “accountants don’t have control and the media can’t buy your soul.” But it is precisely media manipulators who depend upon the concept of ‘authenticity’. Thom’s defenders maintain that it is the ‘freshness’ of her talent that matters. But blogger Adrian du Plessis, who has worked tirelessly to explode the Thom myth, informs us that, “of 30 songs listing Sandi Thom among their credits, not a single one was written by Thom on her own.” The songs weren’t co-written by her bandmates, Marcus Bonfanti and Craig Connet, neither of whom play on her album, but grizzled hit makers such as Brown and John McLaughlin (who has written hits for Blue and Busted).

Thom is the perfect corporate product: a designed-in-a-lab simulation of authenticity easily marketable to people who look down their noses at ‘manufactured’ pop.”

– Mark ‘K-Punk’ Fisher, 2006

“You’d hope that Mika’s success has to be the nadir, the end-game of the revival of bloated, vacuous, tritely camp music, that started with Robbie Williams’ winks, and was carried by Scissor Sisters’ Bee-Gees-lite schtick.

Right now, large parts of the record buying public seem to be intent on bringing back the very worst aspects of the 1970s. If Leo Sayer hadn’t gone mental on Celebrity Big Brother and expressed a desire to masturbate over Danielle Lloyd’s coat, a comeback would have surely been due. Never before have we needed another ’77 so badly.

Mika is a Rufus Wainwright for Daily Mail readers. Pop music used to be the preserve of the young. It used to be stuff that your parents just didn’t get. No more: 50 quid man has splurged out time and time again at the cash register, buying up all that “proper music” where “they write their own songs”. The stuff he saw on Jools fucking Holland. We just can’t compete with that kind of spending power, nor that kind of utter tastelessness. And so the charts are swamped by stuff that no one who isn’t a middle-aged Englander would ever want to go near, and with good reason.

Mika’s music is foul. I remember hearing ‘Grace Kelly’ for the first time recently over a shop’s PA. It’s one of the few occasions where I’ve been physically taken aback by how bad a piece of music is. “Why don’t you like me?”, he wails, oblivious to the fact that he’s answered his own question. Mika goes beyond Robbie Williams’ preening narcissism and dives head-long into that which is dreaded by all reasonable people: wackiness. You probably know people like this at school, or at work. And you probably hate them.

And the worst part of it is, of course, that it can, and will, get worse than this. A lot worse. Mika’s selling obscenely well, which means one thing: major labels will soon start pumping out ersatz little Mika-clones one after the other. It’s going to be tough out there this summer: good luck, and stay strong.”

– Simon Hampson (with illustration by Alex Sushon, 2006)