Tom Wilson takes a look at Pussycat Dolls and asks the burning question: has there ever been an act with more members that are clearly surplus to requirements?

How to best describe the Pussycat Dolls: it’s the band that you’d end up with if you left a sex-obsessed thirteen year old boy in charge of a record company for a week and asked him to draw up a brand new band. It’s as though they’d been put together by cutting out different body parts from porn magazines, a true Frankenstein’s monster specially assembled to make ordinary women feel so inadequate that they want to give up completely and join a convent. You probably hadn’t had time to count, given that they’re videos generally look like countless writhing legs and improbably skinny waists, but there are no less than six members in the group. You get the impression that the person who put them together couldn’t help himself from keeping adding members in the hope of upping the ‘sexiness’ factor. PDC (as all the cool people apparently call them) are a veritable army, a crack militia of sex-appeal.

I can already hear the voices raised in objection: “But only one of them sings! The others a simply second-rate lap-dancers!” But not so fast – I must here spring to the Pussycat’s defence. Any die-hard fan will tell you that the multi-talented Melody and Carmit (what kind of a name is that?) both have solo spots on a number of tracks. No, really! Ashley and Jessica also sing, a little bit, on (erm) one single, solitary B-side. Alright, alright, I admit, they’re a group with one singer in which the rest of them have the sole occupation of looking attractive. But wait! Before you tear them to pieces for not being a “proper” group, think for a moment of the long and noble history of bands who’ve had entirely superfluous members. Surely there must be another band with a line-up more pointless than the Pussycat Dolls? Let’s take a look…

The Prodigy: I watched a few of their videos just a few days ago, and suddenly realised that the Prodigy’s stuff now looks rather embarrassing. Keith Flint, the blonde one with the stupid ‘inverse Mohican’ haircut, tried his best to come across as a latter-day Sid Vicious, but never managed to do a very good job of it. His act would have been more convincing if he hadn’t gone and married Natalie Appleton out of the extremely non-punk girl-band All Saints. Even more embarrassingly, before their hit single “Firestarter,” Keith was the band’s dancer. He just danced. Nothing else. It gets worse: the Prodigy actually had not one, but two full-time dancer-members. Leeroy, the fourth member of the group, not only danced with worrying enthusiasm, but at just over two metres tall looked rather silly at the same time. He describes his dancing style as 'technical running on the spot'. Make of that what you will. Could the Prodigy rival the Pussycat Doll’s in terms of sheer pointlessness? The Prodigy VS Pussycat Dolls: Liam started to sing, and Leeroy wisely realised that being the dancer in a band isn’t a suitable profession for a fully grown man, and left in 2000. The Prodigy currently have no superfluous members, meaning they’re no match for the Dolls in terms of superfluous-ness.

Betty Boo: Briefly famous towards the start of the 90s, you might remember Betty’s enjoyable hit "Doin' The Do". However, poor Betty had to cancel her Australian tour when it became public that she was lip-syncing to tapes whilst performing, making her, in effect, nothing more than a dancer. The scandal signalled the beginning of the end of her solo career, though today she writes hits for other people – including Girls Aloud. Betty Boo VS Pussycat Dolls: Given that the entire Pussycat Dolls team couldn’t figure out the right way to hold a pencil, never mind write a piece of music, I think I might have been a bit hasty in putting them in the same bracket as Ms Boo, who has written a score of top ten hits. Plus she had a brief side-project with Alex James, the bassist from Blur, which sounds pretty cool if you ask me… The Dolls remain unbeaten!

Milli Vanilli: Ah, yes, Milli Vanilli. The textbook example of the dancer-performer. As every schoolchild will tell you, this internationally acclaimed pop-duo met with a sticky end on the fateful day of November 15 th, 1990 , when it was admitted that the duo that fronted the act, Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus, didn’t actually do any singing. At all. The scandal that erupted meant that Milli Vanilli’s Grammy award was taken back off them, for days later. They were dropped by their record label and their album was deleted from the record company’s catalogue. All this was made infinitely more amusing due to the fact that Mr Pilatus had started comparing himself to Paul McCartney, Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan. Milli Vanilli VS Pussycat Dolls: Just looking at a photo of Milli Vanilli, I suspect that Milli may be a serious rival to the dolls in terms of pointlessness. 0% of Mili Vanilli sang, while the Pussycats have a comparably impressive 16.6% singer to non-singer ratio.

Bez: The undisputed dancer king. No mere mortal has ever taken the art of the dancer to such exuberant heights; no dancer in the history of the universe has ever had such a colossal impact on music. Bez was the dancer in the seminal Manchester act The Happy Mondays, the story of which was touched upon in the film 24 Hour Party People. As well as being a genuine genius, Bez forms the connecting bridge between Milli Vanilli and The Pussycat Dolls: he didn’t sing, but then again, he never pretended to. His job, in the words of lead singer (or rather shouter) Sean Ryder, was to “provide the vibe”. To translate, he took huge quantities of drugs, and danced in an inimitable wavy-armed manner. What’s more, he also pushed musical boundaries by not only dancing, but also attempting vague percussive skills: he played the maracas. More superfluous than the Pussycat Dolls? Don’t you understand? Bez was never superfluous. He was an integral part of the band, man. What’s more, until the Pussycat Dolls prove their skills on the maracas, they’re no match for the might of Bez.

The verdict: Milli Vanilli, a band fronted by two non-singing dancers with planet-sized egos may well have been more useless than the five-sixths of the Dolls who do very little. However, the real thing that we’ve learned from this exercise is that nobody really wants to watch a band made up of six gyrating life-size Barbie dolls: what they want is a group made up of six Bez’s. Imagine that: six drugged up dancers with maracas waving their arms around like epileptic chimpanzees. That’s what I call a super-group.