No Good Advice – Песня группы Girls Aloud

2003 single by Girls Aloud

"No Good Advice" is a song by British Irish girl group Girls Aloud, taken from their debut album, Sound of the Underground (2003). The song was written by Aqua's Lene Nystrøm Rasted, Miranda Cooper, Brian Higgins and his production team Xenomania, and produced by Higgins and Xenomania. The song has themes of rebellion, reflecting Higgins' general mood of failure after a business partnership fell through. Following the overwhelming success of Girls Aloud's debut single, "Sound of the Underground", the group waited five months until May 2003 before releasing the follow up. "No Good Advice" cemented their success when it peaked at number two in Ireland and on the UK Singles Chart. "No Good Advice" performed moderately elsewhere, reaching the top 40 in the Netherlands, the top 50 in Belgium, and number 88 in Australia. The music video features Girls Aloud dressed in futuristic silver outfits and hologram effects. "No Good Advice" was promoted through various live performances and has since been performed on Girls Aloud's first three concert tours. Described as "a disco track with guitar", the song has heavy 1980s influences. The track was lauded by many contemporary music critics, who deemed it a worthy sequel to its predecessor and praised Higgins' production.

Musically, the song was labelled "a disco track with guitar a cross between Blondie and The Bangles." The song was written in the key of B minor. The song consists of a verse followed by a bridge and chorus. In place of a middle 8, there is a guitar solo instead. The song ends with a spoken outro. Originally written for Miranda Cooper under the pseudonym Moonbaby, "No Good Advice" seems to be about a rebellious girl who does not need "no good advice" and does things independently. However, according to an interview for The Guardian in July 2004, Brian Higgins said that the song reflected his general mood of failure after a special deal between Xenomania and London Records fell through in 2000, and about persisting in spite of what people told him to do or not to do. The song's chorus originally began with the phrase "I don't like fried rice". "No Good Advice" was sung over a rave backing track, until different Xenomania musicians were asked to contribute new backing tracks. Brian Higgins said that Girls Aloud initially did not like the song: "We played them some of it, and they said: 'That's not our sound.' I objected to the use of that phrase 'our sound'. I told them they had five minutes to talk about whether or not they wanted to continue with me. They went away and spoke about it and since then it's been fine. They come in expecting to work, and there's a trust there which, I think, dates back to that day."

It took Girls Aloud five months to release "No Good Advice". Nadine Coyle said in an interview with The Lipster, "We were No.1 for a month straight and then getting songs from all these other producers and we were, 'Nah, don't like it'. We waited from December to May before releasing a second single because we knew it had to be our strong point or we might as well kiss our careers goodbye." Kimberley Walsh further exclaimed, "We knew it was strong enough to come back with." However, the line "Here I am / Dirty hands, I don't give a damn" was kept intact. An explicit version of the song appears on the special edition bonus disc of The Sound of Girls Aloud, replacing the lyric "shut your mouth because it might show" with "shut your mouth because your shit might show". Furthermore, an early demo of the song appears on a singles boxset released in 2009; this demo including the clean lyric in the first bridge and the explicit lyric in the second bridge. The song was released as a CD single, featuring an exclusive b side entitled "On a Round", which was later covered by Taiwanese singer Jolin Tsai under the title "Run Run" for her 2009 compilation album Jeneration. The CD format also includes the Dreadzone vocal mix of "No Good Advice" and its music video. The DVD single did not actually feature the "No Good Advice" music video, just a photo gallery and behind the scenes footage. It did, however, include audio of the track and the video to "Sound of the Underground". Another remix, the Doublefunk Vocal Mix, was later featured on the "Life Got Cold" single and the remix album Mixed Up.

"No Good Advice" received mostly positive reviews from music critics. A BBC review described the song as "better than anything else [ ] in the charts." Unlike many other songs, it was said to be "not obsessed with trying to be a cutting edge club hit, [ ] with at least three different killer hooks welded together" that borrowed heavily from the 1980s. It provides "more brassy and in your face lyrics of defiance and determination [ ] Higgins injects an element of instant catchy cool to the songs without going overboard in trying to shape uber chic dance floor hits." On a less positive side, Tourdates. co. uk said that "No Good Advice" was a failure at adding attitude to Girls Aloud's music and imitates "as many songs as possible." The song has been compared to the Knack's "My Sharona". In 2003, the song won the Popjustice £20 Music Prize, an annual prize awarded by a panel of judges organised by music website Popjustice to the singer(s) of the best British pop single of the past year. Popjustice founder Peter Robinson wrote that the song "established a motif that would saturate Girls Aloud's string of subsequent singles: an unpredictable and triumphantly contrary desire to push and pull the band in exciting new directions at every turn." The song slipped to number five in its second week on the chart. The single lasted two more weeks in the top twenty at numbers eleven and seventeen respectively. Overall, "No Good Advice" was inside the top forty for six weeks; it spent an additional eight weeks in the top 75, It spent three consecutive weeks at number three, behind Harte and R. Kelly. The song fell to number seven in its fourth week on the Irish chart. It spent four further weeks in the top twenty. The song also charted in the top fifty in Belgium and the Netherlands, placing at numbers 45 and 26 respectively.