“I wouldn’t say we were complacent,” says Keisha Buchanan, attempting to describe the torpor that descended on the Sugababes around the time of their last album. “But I’d walk off stage and I wouldn’t even have broken a sweat. It was like I’d just walked to the bottom of my road.”
The fact that the pop trio she formed in 1998 have survived long enough for torpor to set is improbable enough in itself. What’s even harder to believe is that Buchanan, compact and cherubic across a London hotel-room table, is still two months short of her 25th birthday. She’s had six No. 1 singles (seven, if you include Sugababes’ participation in the 2004 remake of Do They Know It’s Christmas?) and six albums (five of them Top 10s) under her belt, and her London/Liverpool trio has outlived virtually all its pop rivals of the last decade (save Girls Aloud, with whom relations seem to be distant but mutually respectful) — yet she’s too young to remember life before mobile phones.
So are Amelle Berrabah, 25, who still has the faint fragrance of new girl about her despite having replaced original Babe Mutya Buena in 2005, and Heidi Range, 26, the Liverpudlian of the group, whose white Chanel handbag and killingly high heels say “noughties girl group” loud and clear. All three are chatty and fresh-faced, and teenish enough to post Twitter messages like this recent Berrabah tweet: “Hay people!!!! Me and heidi and r hair stylist on r way 2 durham baby!!! O yeah!! We decided 2 get the train coz will b quicker!xxx.”
These deceptively young women are about to release their seventh studio album (as yet untitled) and they’re sitting here, talking like old pros about complacency and how they’re now, as Buchanan says, “Oh my God, so reinvigorated.” It was their last album, 2008’s Catfights and Spotlights, that made them doubt themselves for the first time. Long accustomed to praise for their ultra-sharp urban pop, they were shocked by the lukewarm reviews and sales. The Guardian called it “a general transition from crisp modernity to self-consciously grown-up, Duffyesque soul,” and even the usually adulatory Popjustice.com complained that there were “no decent” uptempo numbers — this from a band renowned for the brilliance of hits such as Freak Like Me and Hole in the Head.
“We’re still really proud of [Catfights], even though it wasn’t our most successful album,” says Buchanan, who’s invariably first to answer questions. “I was surprised — I think Change should’ve got those bad reviews, because that was a lot poppier. With Catfights, we decided to go a bit old-school and stripped-back. But if we stayed in the place we were in, we’d never move on.” But she finally admits they did become complacent, and that must be a difficult thing to own up to, coming from someone who’s otherwise unswervingly on-message about how great it is to be a Sugababe. “When I say complacent, I mean we had put ourselves in boxes and said we were just singers.”
“We took our eye off the ball and didn’t concentrate on the performance and styling side,” says Range. Though presentation is a critical factor in a chart-pop band’s continuing success these days, the trio confess they’d neglected it because, crazily, they assumed fans would want to hear them sing no matter how they looked. Buchanan sighs. “The industry is changing. We used to say in interviews that we could put bin-bags over our heads and people would still come to see us. But they wouldn’t now. People want to see the whole package. They want to know all about you.”
“That’s why my boyfriend [Xfm presenter Dave Berry] and I did OK!” says Range. While it shouldn’t seem remarkable that a girl-group member has taken the OK! magazine money, the Sugababes aren’t just any girl group. They made their name by being just that little bit cooler than the rest. “We were moving into a new house and we thought the money would be useful,” says Range. Hmm. But if she were to get married, would she sell her wedding? That provokes a debate, with Buchanan shaking her head — no, no — and Range saying she’d consider it, because the financial contribution would be helpful. “We’ve been invited to some random weddings, of people we’ve only met once,” says Berrabah, and the others break into laughter. It’s standard these days for celebrities to be invited to other celebrities’ nuptials, no matter how tenuous the connection between them, to increase the number of famous faces at the event and make the photos more saleable. “People we don’t even know ...” Berrabah muses, rolling her eyes sadly at the folly of it.
They did go to the late Jade Goody’s wedding. “She had a wish list of things she wanted, and she asked us to perform,” Buchanan says. “I’ll never forget, we were performing, and she whispered to me, ‘Can I come up there with you?’ And she did, and so did [Goody’s husband] Jack. It was lovely. She looked gorgeous. It made me go and get a smear test afterwards,” she adds.
Range is nodding. “So did I, and I wasn’t due for a year,” says Range.
It’s both gratifying and unexpected to find the trio so forthcoming. What they’ve previously been known for is aloofness, towards both interviewers and each other. Today it’s the opposite. When they arrived at this hotel meeting room they immediately rearranged the chairs so that they were side by side, and now they’re sitting in a row, cheerfully interrupting each other in a show of togetherness.
Occasionally their responses seem a touch media-trained (on the subject of November’s new album, which was recorded entirely in America with an array of hit-making American producers, such as Red One and Ryan Tedder: “We wanted to make the album as Sugababes as possible and wave the British flag — it’s not an American-aiming album at all”), but they can also be rewardingly open. For instance, Berrabah has been riled by a celebrity magazine’s claim that she’s had breast implants (“Omg!!!!! I just saw star mag who say I’ve had a boob job!!!!! He he, I cracked up!!!!!!!” she tweeted), and wants to set the record straight, right here.
“I’ve got 34B boobs,” she says, unbuttoning her checked shirt. Underneath is a tight white vest top, and underneath that is a perky, all-natural bosom. “Some magazine enhanced my boobs, and they had some plastic surgeon say I’d definitely had a boob job!” She buttons up her shirt, still aggrieved.
Berrabah was born in Hampshire, southern England, but her parents are Moroccan, and she was raised Muslim. “I don’t practice — I’m only just learning about it,” she says. Why doesn’t she make more of it — mention it in interviews? It could only be a good thing for people to know that a member of one of the UK’s highest-profile pop groups is Muslim. “People can be judgmental,” murmurs Buchanan, clearly not happy with this strand of the conversation. “There’s too much pressure on young women to be role models. My management put pressure on me because I said on Twitter I went to a strip club. He didn’t make me take it down, but he wasn’t happy about it. I just went with a few of my friends. I’m not hurting anyone, and I’m a good person, so why should it matter?”
She’s certainly good enough not to express schadenfreude at Mutya Buena’s lackluster solo career. After leaving the Babes, whom she’d cofounded with Keisha, and complaining to interviewers that the band had dismissed her attempts to stay friends, her album flopped, and she was last seen on this year’s Celebrity Big Brother. “I thought she came across well,” Buchanan says blandly. Berrabah sympathizes, too. “If people have a family, why blame them for taking money to look after them?”
Such pragmatism is a Sugababes hallmark. They don’t romanticize music; they’re passionate about it, but are also acutely aware that Sugababes is a business, which entails taking hard-headed decisions. When they found themselves feeling complacent at the time of Catfights and Spotlights, their immediate reaction was to up their game. They signed to Jay-Z’s stable of in-house songwriters and producers, Roc Nation, and decamped to Los Angeles to record the new album. “We were nervous at first because we were working with producers like [Lady Gaga producer] Red One. We sang on Lady Gaga’s mike!” swoons Range. “This is our biggest break, signing with Roc Nation.”
“And now we have 10-hour dance rehearsals with Beyonce’s choreographer,” says Berrabah. “We’ve pushed ourselves and stepped it up so much.”
The result is an album that combines American polish and British invention. Cowritten by the band, who take pride in having a great deal of creative input into their records, its first single is the grinding, fiercely catchy R ’n’ B number Get Sexy. It incorporates the chorus of Right Said Fred’s I’m Too Sexy, and, in case anyone missed the blatant let’s-get-physical message, promotional copies of the single come packaged as giant condoms. Ladies, really ...
“[The record company] came up with the condom idea, and we said yeah, it’s funny. But we wouldn’t sell [the condom packaging] to our younger fans. I don’t think it’s appropriate,” Range says primly.
The condom wrapper, the strip club and their uneasy relationship with the celebrity media are peripheral issues, though. The one unassailable thing about the Sugababes is their talent. No one can impugn their ability to sing — the gift that distinguishes them from all the other groups of girls in tight jeans and glossy makeup. I tell them I saw them play at a party given last year by the Music Industry Trusts to present an award to the head of their label. They sang acoustically, to piano accompaniment and, until then, I hadn’t realized how stunning their voices were. Heidi laughs. “We always do an acoustic number at our gigs, but some people don’t realize we can sing. There was a woman at a gig screaming to our tour manager: ‘I didn’t bring my child to see people mime!’ And he had to take her to the sound booth to prove we were doing it live.”
Get Sexy is released on 31 Aug. on Island.
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