Reproduced from Guardian 14 October, 1999

Phylicia Dyer is nine and wants to be a pop star. The only difference between Phylicia and millions of other children who love to sing in front of the mirror is that she now has a team of songwriters working for her and a £500,000 record contract in her schoolbag.

Phylicia is a member of BreZe, a pre-teen pop band whose oldest member is 11. Their debut single My Heart Goes Boom is being tipped as a pre-Christmas number one and an album is also on the way. Their faces are already plastered across an array of teen magazines and they are about to blitz TV stations across Europe. With the vast majority of singles now bought by children, and CDs being sold alongside sweets in supermarkets, record companies are encouraging more and more kiddy bands. Teenage pop sensations like Billie, B*Witched and Lolly have built huge fan bases by touring schools long before they release a record.

Yet even in an industry which increasingly targets the very young, BreZe's launch so soon after the death of former child star Lena Zavaroni has raised eyebrows and brought accusations of exploitation.

Pete Waterman, who guided the pop careers of Bananarama, Kylie Minogue and Jason Donovan, said he was `disgusted by the very idea of putting nine-year-olds on the road'.

He added: `There are things that even this industry has to drawn the line at, and exposing small children to these sort of pressures can't be justified. We're not talking about Mozarts here. This is a very dangerous world - just look what it did to Michael Jackson.

`There are strict laws governing what you can do with children, but make no mistake, they will be worked very hard. They will have to be if they are going to get anywhere. There will be too much money riding on them.'

Waterman said his experience with Musical Youth, who had a worldwide number one hit with Pass The Dutchie in 1983, convinced him it was `morally wrong to work with young children. It was a nightmare. I will never go down that path again. The youngest members of the group came out of it OK, but one of the older children [Patrick Waite, who was then 13] is now dead, and I can't help thinking he might still be alive if he hadn't been in the band. You can't completely protect them from the harm drugs and money does.

`One day Michael Jackson was inviting them round to play with him in LA, and the next they were back in Birmingham struggling to cope with failure. Success makes children very blase about life. After so much fame so young, it becomes difficult to cope with the little failures of life. If you're a star at 11, what happens after that?'

But Bill Kimber, the veteran producer behind BreZe, said the children would not be forced to do anything that does not come naturally. `Kids aged three and four stand in front of the mirror and dream about being pop stars. The girls do that too. It's just now they'll be doing it on TV. No one makes these accusations about children who play the violin.'

He said BreZe members would still attend the west London stage school where he discovered them and would be accompanied by one of their mothers at all times. `The girls will not be going on tour and there will be no hard graft.' Kimber, who guided Bucks Fizz and The Eurythmics to stardom, was also the brains behind the Minipops, the 1980s kiddy group who covered the hits of the day. His own daughter Abby, then 10, was one of their lead singers. `It never did her any harm. It was a very positive, controlled experience, and we want to do the same thing with BreZe.'

He added: `Obviously, we knew there would be reservations because of their age. That's why we took so much trouble about getting the package right before we approached the record companies.'

Jan Miller, the mother of 10-year-old Jodie Miller, said she had tried to discourage her daughter from going to stage school, never mind joining a band. `We are not showbiz people. But I think the whole experience has been very good for her so far. She is quiet and quite shy and it has made her more confident. She's blossomed, in fact. There is nothing un natural about it. Go to any playground and you will see children as young as four working out their own little dance routines.'

Mrs Miller, 47, added: `I think the image has been very well judged. As parents we would never allow our children to do anything which might harm them. When people see the video and hear the song, I think they will see that. But yes, of course, we had worries.'

The record companies, however, have no worries about the ethics of exploiting so young a market.

This week American 16-year-old Christina Aguilera went straight to number one with her highly suggestive song, Genie in a Bottle, and 17-year-old Britney Spears kicked up a storm earlier this year by appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine draped on a bed in a school uniform.

Despite the emergence of these highly sexualised `girl-women', Peter Loraine of Polydor, who handles pre-teen idol Lolly, claims that the `kiddy' market is the most exciting new thing in pop in decades.

`It's like an underground. You never quite know what is going on until you have a hit. Lolly is a cult hero for eight to 10-year-old girls. She's become a kind of big sister for them to look up to.

`The fact is that three-and four-year-olds have posters of pop stars above their beds now. OK, some of the songs will not stand up to intellectual analysis, but anything that turns kids on to music cannot be bad.'.