NSYNC star Lance Bass says he would’ve loved to be part of New Kids On The Block – the boy band giants who helped define the late ’80s and early ’90s pop explosion.
New Kids On The Block, who formed in 1984 and went on to sell more than 80 million records worldwide, didn’t just dominate charts; they set the blueprint for the boy band boom that followed.
A decade later, NSYNC arrived in 1995, part of the new wave of groups inspired directly by NKOTB’s success. Alongside Take That and Backstreet Boys, they helped turn the ’90s and early 2000s into a golden era for boy-band fandom, with stadium tours, chart domination and a new generation of pop hysteria.
For Lance, the influence was personal. He said New Kids On The Block were the first group that made him want to be on stage.
Lance told PEOPLE: “My sister was obsessed. It was one of my first concerts, my first stadium concert I ever went to, and I think it was the first time that I looked on stage and said, ‘I want to do that. That looks amazing.’”
He said the late ’80s and early ’90s felt like “a more innocent time”, long before social media and smartphones changed fame forever.
He said: “They got that fun era of the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, where again, it was just such a more innocent time where there were no cell phones or anything like that. No one’s taking pictures of you too much. So I think you get away with a lot more back in the late ‘80s. It was just, I don’t know, so much more fun.”
The Bye Bye Bye singer, now 47, added that he would have been “obsessed” with being part of New Kids On The Block.
