Rejoice! New Kids On The Block Are Reforming
You heard me right, Maurice Starr’s all-singing, all-dancing boyband, New Kids On The Block are reforming. With all these 90’s pop acts reuniting, there has never been a better time to have a midlife crisis.
Funnily enough, we were sitting in the kitchen the other day trying to remember the dance moves to The Right Stuff. When it comes to music gossip, I swear I’m psychic!
All the furore about New Kids reforming seems to centre around their suddenly-active-again website. As yet, there’s no official confirmation of a reunion, or indeed whether original manager Maurice Starr is behind the venture.
Word on the street is that there’ll be some kind of announcement in the next couple of weeks. Before they split, they shortened the name of the group to NKOTB – which was popular with fans, but confused everybody else. Now that they’re older (and presumably more brand-savvy), I predict they’ll revert to the full ‘New Kids On The Block’ moniker. Even if ‘Kids’ is really stretching it at this point – the youngest member, Joey McIntyre, is 36 this year.
If you weren’t there at the time, New Kids had a virtually unchallenged rise to fame and became the biggest boyband in the world between 1988 and 1992. The Hangin’ Tough album is probably their best known, followed by Step By Step a couple of years later. The group released a remix album called No More Games, but at that point they seemed to be on the slide.
I distinctly remember feeling that Donnie Wahlberg was the most restless member of the group. Not only did he have a wild streak, resulting in an unfortunate arson-type incident in a hotel, but he also seemed to have a growing thing for rap music, which was less in keeping with the NKOTB image.
Anyway, as they faded from the scene and eventually disbanded in 1994, they still paved the scene for the string of boyband acts in the UK that followed: Take That, Boyzone and the rest.
So, an NKOTB reunion could be either very awesome, or very sad indeed. Now, apparently Danny Wood has dismissed the rumours, but sure we’ll speculate a little bit anyway, shall we? They probably just forgot to tell him…
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New Kids were huge in the US in 89.
Re-forming for money is today’s music business.
Who will write their songs for them and sing for them?