Girl Thing
British-Dutch band
Girl Thing were a British girl group, consisting of members Jodi Albert, Michelle Barber, Anika Bostelaar, Linzi Martin, and Nikki Stuart. They were formed in 1998 by Simon Cowell and were originally intended to rival the Spice Girls, but their success was minor and short-lived before disbanding in 2001.
The group reformed in 2013 for the second series of The Big Reunion to perform a one-off gig at the Hammersmith Apollo in 2014.
Career
In 1998, Simon Cowell, having previously turned down the Spice Girls, decided to form his own girl group. Girl Thing's debut single "Last One Standing", written and produced by the Steelworks production team of Tim Lever, Mike Percy and Eliot Kennedy. "Last One Standing" received major promotion and media attention and was expected to top the UK Singles Chart with ease. Record company executives funneled huge amounts of money into the promotional campaign, including an appearance at the top of the Eiffel Tower. Girl Thing even pre-recorded their congratulatory interview with BBC Radio 1. However, the song ended up only charting at number eight. It also made the Australian top 20, where it achieved gold certification.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Girl Thing” is british-Dutch band. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Girl, Thing and British-Dutch, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q976862. VIAF identifies the subject as 141519648. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1998, 2001, 2013 and 2014.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Girl Thing” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.