Whatever happened to…B*Witched? - Student Life

Whatever happened to…B*Witched?

If you don’t remember scream-singing along to B*Witched’s1998 hit single “C’est La Vie” (admittedly, this is less likely if you weren’t a girl), then you probably missed out on a large part of childhood. The hit was a staple of every middle-school dance, and is known not only for its heavy reliance on strange Irish-inspired fiddle parts and getting children to sing vaguely sexual gems like “I’ve got a house with windows and doors / I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” but also for lighting up the late ’90s with the trippy-Technicolor video full of daisies and denim.

B*Witched, the Irish girl band behind the ’90s landmark, is made up of twin sisters Edele and Keavy Lynch, and Lindsay Armaou and Sinead O’Carroll. The band formed in 1998 and while it may have only had two albums, and it can technically be classed as a one-hit wonder in the US, it’s hard to express the magnitude of “C’est La Vie”’s cultural significance and how it contributed to kids growing up across Europe and the US—the song crossed borders.

So what is the band up to these days? Their record label promptly dropped the band in 2002 before the completion of its third album, after waning sales (especially stateside) and the realization that nothing could ever top “C’est La Vie.” B*Witched disintegrated soon after that. All four members fought hard to stay in show business; the Lynch sisters formed a second band named Ms. Lynch in 2006, although they found little traction there. Most recently, Edele could be seen winning “Celebrity Apprentice Ireland” last year and entering the “Celebrity Big Brother” U.K. house in August this year—she finished sixth. Both sisters were reported to have suffered mental breakdowns post-B*Witched, disenchanted with the aftermath of their rapid rise to and fall from fame. Armaou joined a new girl band that lasted just less than a year before training in acting. O’Carroll, on the other hand, went into the management business, looking after another act called Minx for a while before stepping back to start her own family.

However, the biggest B*Witched news that you don’t know is that the band is actually currently back together. It reunited in 2012 for a U.K. reality series called “The Big Reunion,” which documented the trails and tribulations of five different reunions of vaguely known ’90s U.K. pop groups and followed their rehearsals for a comeback performance. That performance soon branched out into an entire tour around the U.K. and Ireland. Even better for B*Witched fans; the reunion sparked an entire new album that you can listen to now.

The band released its new six-song extended play this year in August, called “Champagne or Guinness,” clearly a nod to both its Irish heritage and its main fan base of grown-up female tweens. A cursory listen indicates the band has tragically veered away from the strange and frenetic charm of its early work and now resembles a group of top-40 knockoffs; the song “The Stars Are Ours” sounds exactly like a poor karaoke-Avicii tune. There is the odd injection of random fiddles on a few of the songs, but it always feels like a little bit of a cop-out. Everything was better back in the good old days, right?

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