YMMV / Steps

• Covered Up: A lot of Steps' biggest hits were covers, and their success meant that a lot of people, particular the audience that Steps was aimed at (the tweens), would only have heard the Steps version. The biggest examples of this, with the exception of Tragedy (by the Bee Gees) would be Chain Reaction originally by Diana Ross.
  • Playout of the Steps versions rather than the original versions can result in Berserk buttons being hit in older music fans.
  • Same goes with Last Thing on My Mind, which was a 1992 song by Bananarama.
  • Played out again in Tears on the Dancefloor. One of the singles from the album, Story of a Heart, is a cover of a song written by ABBA's Benny Anderson and Björn Ulvaeus, adding to the common comparison between the two bands.
  • Inverted with their dance moves. The opening of Lucky Star has the steps for "5, 6, 7, 8"'s chorus.
• Fandom Rivalry: With fellow British mixed-gender pop group S Club 7. S Club had more international success but eventually disbanded, whilst Steps had a successful reunion after their first breakup and still performs today.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Steps are very popular in the Flanders region of Belgium.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In the music video for Say You'll Be Mine, Lee reenact Ben Affleck's (whom many agree he resembles) parts in Armageddon (1998). He was also "Batman" in the Batman Returns skit on the same video. Seventeen years later, Ben Affleck plays Batman.
  • Lee, Faye and Lisa are the main vocals on the group's debut single 5,6,7,8 while Claire and H only provide secondary vocals.
• LGBT Fanbase: They're very popular with gay men and helped by the fact that H is openly gay as well.
• Narm: A lot of Steps music videos, especially with the Special Effects Failure by today's standards. Special note to Heartbeat for the green screen sled driving, fake martial arts and random Snow Queen and subplot story.
• Nostalgia Filter: While Steps could be cheesy even by Nineties' pop standards, for those that remember them, nothing screams "90s Nostalgia" like a Steps song.
• Signature Song: "Tragedy" is likely what they're best known for, their cover often being more well-known for a lot of people.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • Subverted with Something In Your Eyes, which sounds a lot like ABBA's As Good As New, but is a cover song originally by Swedish singer Jenny Silver.
  • Played straight with After The Love Has Gone and One For Sorrow, which fans and critics notice to be similar to ABBA's The Winner Takes It All, not only in terms of melody and lyrical theme (After The Love Has Gone also borrows I Have A Dream's opening riff), but also how those songs are mostly solo pieces (Claire is the main vocal of the Steps songs, to the point that she recorded a solo ballad version of One For Sorrow down the line, while The Winner Takes It All has Agnetha in the main role and her bandmates being backing vocal) which were quickly followed by the respective bands' dissolutions.
• The Woobie:
  • H was often this in their music videos, being kidnapped by midgets in Heartbeat and being the patient in Chain Reaction.
    • Also in real life as of 2013. H is Welsh, and his real name is Ian Watkins. So is another guy. The other Ian Watkins was arrested for various VERY awful sex crimes against children. Multiple news outlets and internet commenters got the two confused and proceeded to attack H.
  • In the four-part documentary on their reunion, Claire falls heavily into this category. She hints that she felt like the others gave her the cold shoulder way back when once their producers decided to have her sing lead vocal on most tracks, there is a lot of focus put on her leaving the band (with apparently every single person interviewing them wanting to focus on it) with nobody seeming to have any understanding for why she left and how bad she felt back then, she has a difficult time practicing dance routines because she's never been much of a dancer and now she hasn't danced in a decade and isn't as skinny as she once was... Pretty much throughout the whole documentary you feel like you want to give her a big hug. While you can't blame Lisa, Faye and Lee for being bitter about how things ended it soon starts to feel like enough is enough.

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