Remembrance Monday: Fierce Girl - What Makes A Girl Fierce

Probably the finest gay rap duo to have ever hit the charts, Fierce Girl were Greg Oliver and Scott Pilfold. That's them on the right, from left to right. When they met, fresh out of school, both were working in a Deptford branch of McDonalds, and needless to say a pop career seemed about as out of reach as Gabrielle's love life. Well here's the twist: six years later, they did become popstars. Of sorts.

Presenting a back story of troubled upbringings and a rise through London's alternative gay clubs, and offering soundbites like "Mutya is up there with Kat Slater, she's my idol, I love the girl" in adjoining interviews, Fierce Girl released their first single, 'Double Drop', in August 2004. The music was garish, the vocals essentially shouts, and it was all in all quite good. Disappointingly, it only got to Number 74 in the charts.

It would have been easy at this point to offhandedly dismiss the pair as a failed novelty act, but in February of the following the year their second single, 'What Makes A Girl Fierce', was released. Where 'Double Drop' was a bit of a noisy, glorious mess, 'What Makes A Girl Fierce' was much more of a traditionally structured song - not that this meant compromising on the group's self-described 'Council Pop' sound.

It's an ode to the kind of girls that Pilford and Oliver claimed to admire; with a pre-chorus chant of "Kat Slater is our sister" and an order to "Bring on Mutya, Mutya, Mutya she's the queen of them all" this, of course, meant 'fierce' ones.

Unfortunately, gay council estate bleepity-bloop electro rap, no matter how brilliant, was never going to attract any more than a very niche market, and 'What Makes A Girl Fierce' peaked at only Number 52, an improvement on 'Double Drop', but still low enough to leave it as an unheralded classic, and Fierce Girl as two single wonders.

Sociological bit: Some people might disagree with the implicit fetishising (and explicit: "We're scum and proud of it") of the so called 'underclass' that came with Fierce Girl, but when posh comes to chav 'What Makes A Girl Fierce' was very good indeed, and that's all that really matters, right? Right.

Following 'What Makes...' Fierce Girl sank with little trace. A third single, the oddly gloomy 'Microwave', was scrapped, but was found, along with another unreleased track, on a leaked album sampler. As was appropriate for the time, they also had a MySpace page. It was last logged into two and a half years ago but on it there can be found two other songs from 2006 - a bizarre, reflective, 'This Used To Be My Playground'-sampling ballad called 'Lager Lout Ticket Tout' and the misspelt 'Bermonsay Boys', which is a lot more in the mould of the two singles.

Six years on our protagonists are somewhat elusive. Greg Oliver is never going to be particularly easy to trace (through Google at least), and even with a name that might seem to lend itself more to detection, nor is Scott Pilfold, to whom the only references the internet seems to have are contained in old Fierce Girl articles. They could be anywhere.