A crowd of teenagers huddles outside the O2 Academy in Brixton, their phones held aloft like votive candles. They are waiting for XG, a seven-piece Japanese girl group whose rise has been anything but accidental. The British music industry, which has spent years wringing its hands over the decline of homegrown pop factories, is now applauding the Japanese model with an enthusiasm that borders on envy. But what is the human cost of this gleaming product?
XG stands for Xtraordinary Girls, and their backstory is indeed extraordinary. For five years, these seven young women trained for up to twelve hours a day, six days a week, in a programme that makes the K-pop system look like a holiday camp. They learned not just singing and dancing, but English, Korean, Japanese, and the art of being completely identical in movement yet distinct in personality. The result is a group that moves like a single organism, and speaks to their fans in three languages without a stumble.
I spoke to one of the trainees' mothers, a woman in her fifties who had moved from Osaka to Seoul to be near her daughter. 'She was twelve when she started,' she told me. 'I would see her once a month. She cried every night for the first year. But she wanted this more than anything.' The cold, hard calculus of the entertainment industry: you can have the glittering prize, but you must pay for it with years of your life.
The British music insiders I spoke to are unapologetic. 'We've lost the art of development,' a senior A&R man told me over a gin and tonic in Soho. 'We want instant success. XG shows that if you invest in talent, properly invest, you get stars who can actually perform.' He pointed to the group's recent performance on The One Show, where they sang live and danced simultaneously without a wobble in pitch. 'Name me a British group that can do that now,' he said.
But the shift has a shadow side. In Tokyo, I visited a 'talent school' where hundreds of hopefuls, some as young as nine, spend their weekends training in windowless rooms. The parents sit in cafeterias, sipping overpriced coffee, their eyes glued to the clock. One father, a salaryman who had taken a second job to pay for his daughter's lessons, told me: 'She is happy. This is her dream.' But dreams can be double-edged. The XG trainees reportedly lived in dormitories, with strict rules about diet, social media use, and even friendships. The company, Avex, controls every aspect of their image.
The cultural shift is palpable. In the UK, we have watched the demise of the reality TV star factory and the rise of the social media influencer, a figure who manufactures their own fame from a bedroom. XG represents a return to the old model: the long, grinding apprenticeship. And British teenagers are hungry for it. 'I want to train like them,' a sixteen-year-old fan told me outside the venue. 'I'd give up everything for that.'
But would she? The XG members are forbidden from dating, not even allowed to have smartphones in their first two years. They are traded, in essence, as assets. The British industry, which has historically fetishised the amateur, the raw, the 'real', may be about to embrace a system that is anything but. The applause from British executives feels like a surrender: we have given up on organic talent, so we will import the factory model instead.
As the crowd files into the O2 Academy, I watch a mother adjust her daughter's light stick and whisper something in her ear. The girl's eyes are wide, full of a hope that feels both innocent and terrifyingly specific. XG is the dream made flesh, but behind every sparkling performance there is a child who didn't get to go to school, didn't get to make friends, didn't get to fail. And that is a trade we are all now willing to make.
