A Five Star Flop: The Collision of Music Industry Machinations, Genre Maintenance, and Black Britishness in 1980s Pop

In a 1987 interview with BBC Radio 1 DJ, Mike Read, members of the British pop group Five Star collectively stated that their hopes and wishes for 1988 were “to crack America” – that is, to achieve comparable success in the US music market to what they had in the UK. Formed in 1983, the five-sibling group had a string of highly successful UK releases between 1985 and 1987, including six Top 10 hits. In 1987, they received a prestigious Brit Award for Best British Group, largely based on the success of their second album, Silk and Steel. Yet following the release of Five Star’s fourth album, Rock the World, in August 1988, the group’s highest-ranking song would reach a paltry Number 49 on the UK Singles Chart. This article centers, Rock the World, as the key hinge in Five Star’s dramatic decline. The group never cracked the US market – their highest Billboard Hot 100 song being the 1986 single, “Can’t Wait Another Minute ” (peaking at Number 41) – and remain virtually unknown to most American music fans. By combining a production of culture approach to organizational sociology, a musicological examination of the history and boundary maintenance of key genres, and a critical assessment of how the group’s Black Britishness was presented and received, I argue that Five Star’s short-lived visibility in the UK and invisibility in the US had little to do with the quality of their music and can be attributed to industry politics and the transnational impacts of prevailing notions of race, genre, and authenticity on popular music reception.