Firstly, some of you may have noticed that there haven’t been any new posts this year and that’s because 2022 is the first year since 2007 where Max hasn’t been involved in a US top 10 single. And the rules of this site (that I made up) are that I only write about a song once it’s broken that upper echelon. It’s been an intriguing year for Max, what with & Juliet rumbling on in London and also making its debut on Broadway. In the studio he’s worked with artists perhaps less inclined to scale the charts, people like Kim Petras and Måneskin, while his songs with bigger artists like Pink and Lizzo haven’t quite set the charts alight as some may have expected. Perhaps this is all part of his eagerness to experiment more, and to make life more exciting for himself. Certainly his songs on the Måneskin album are unlike any that he’s worked on in a while, and feels like a real throwback to his ROCK days.

ANYWAY, as the title of the post suggests, I have written a book. It’s called Reach For The Stars and it’s an oral history of pop in the UK between 1996 and 2006, so from the Spice Girls through to The X Factor. There’s a big chapter on boyband Five, who many of you will know worked with Max and Denniz PoP extensively on their debut album, Five.

I tried to speak to Max for the book but it was a polite ‘no thank you’, which is FINE, but he does feature in the chapter, specifically in terms of how close he came to giving Five ‘…Baby One More Time’ before it ended up with Britney. There’s a pretty remarkable story about it all that I won’t spoil here, but if you would like to know more then you can pre-order the book here, here and also here.

Here’s the lovely cover:

Actually Max also appears in The X Factor chapter, specifically in regards to this absolute bop by Shayne Ward that may or may not have started out as a joke that got a little out of hand…