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JLS to Pay a Visit to Oxford’s Dreaming Spires

Brace yourselves for enough oiled-up man cleavage to warrant its own ‘slippery surfaces’ safety sign, as boy band JLS are set to take to the stage in Oxford’s South Park this summer on Sunday, 19th August.

The r’n’b quartet, whose latest release Proud is the new single for Sports Relief 2012, will perform at six open air venues across England, in what is their most (overly) ambitious tour to date. Bringing us such lyrical gems as ‘ She makes me wanna uh oh uh oh uh oh’ and ‘They say that some things are too good to be true/ But I just hope they ain’t talking about you’  it’s perhaps fair, if unkind, to say that Oxford is not in store for an afternoon of songwriting par excellence.

Still, this will little trouble the hordes of screaming banner-bearing tweens who look set temporarily to swell the Oxford population, bringing down the average age by approximately forty years. As for the hipster brigade, well unless they can wrestle through the ‘I heart JLS 4eva’ emblazoned foam fingers, they’d best stock up on supplies of falafel and chai lattes and get bolting those doors.

But from their modest beginnings as the 2008 X Factor runner up, to launching their own range of JLS branded condoms (that perennial barometer of boy band success), one must point out that it’s a tad unfair to deride a group that has sold over 3 million albums over the course of its not-so-lengthy career. Some might even say that customarily genteel Oxford is well overdue for some torso-thrusting, shirt-popping boy band bravado of the JLS variety.

Marvin from JLS has said of the reasons behind their tour,  “We’re still a young band with a lot to prove …we had to prove ourselves every week on The X Factor, then we had to prove we were proper recording artists with our first album. Now we want to prove that wasn’t just a fluke – we’re here to stay.

Whether this sends pre-emptive paroxysms of fear into your musical sensibilities or you’re already happily humming ‘Everybody in love, put your hands up’, it’s clear that JLS have cannily exploited the current gap in the always-lucrative boy band market. On the bright side, for those who are sticking around in Oxford this August, there’s always the very real possibility that the lustful screams of their devoted fans will render the JLS vocal experience barely audible. Or if not, there’s always the underground Gladstone Link …. 

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