Posted October 22, 200618 yr An article from The Times: Three degrees of separation Despite the b**ch fights and the personnel changes, Sugababes have become the 21st century's most successful girl band - so are they finally ready to kiss and make up, asks DAN CAIRNS Keisha Buchanan is in the mood to reminisce. She’s a music-business veteran, 10 years a Sugababe and, as the sole surviving original member, about to mark the event with Overloaded, a greatest hits collection, and Easy, a new single co-written with the Californian band Orson. She is 22. “We were literally whipped into shape,†she says, recalling the trio’s early days in northwest London. “We would go into school at 8.30 and leave by lunchtime, and we’d be in the studio recording and rehearsing until six the next morning. I remember going straight home, jumping in the shower, putting my uniform on and going to school. With no sleep whatsoever.†Those huge, saucer eyes, so expressive of both humour or irritation; that permanently arched eyebrow: in some ways, she’s exactly as she was when I first interviewed the band, in its first line-up, six years ago. Back then, as now, she was distant: not haughty exactly, but self-contained, better able, happier even, to conduct a conversation with herself than with anyone else. This apartness has led to problems. Sugababes are as famous for their fallings-out and strops as they are for hits such as Freak Like Me, Push the Button and Overload. In the Mk I line-up, Buchanan and her schoolmate Mutya Buena were supposed to have bullied their fellow founding member, Siobhan Donaghy, out of the group. Since then, however, it has been Buchanan who has seemed isolated — first when Donaghy’s replacement, the Liverpudlian former Atomic Kitten Heidi Range, bonded with Buena. And, recently, there have been reports that Amelle Berrabah, who filled Buena’s shoes when the latter left the band late last year, is thick as thieves with Range, to Buchanan’s irritation. The band once labelled “evil-looking freaks†by a music magazine have always attracted the hot breath and long lenses of the scandal sheets. This notoriety certainly hasn’t hurt Sugababes as a brand: on the contrary, it has added to their appeal, their otherness in a sea of conveyor-belt, airbrushed pop mediocrity. Groomed for stardom before she had even reached her teens, Buchanan was having a hard enough time working out who she was without the cruel and, she says, mostly inaccurate jibes that filled the papers. “I definitely struggled with trying to find myself,†she admits. “People would say, ‘Tell me about yourself’, and all I could say was, ‘I’m a Sugababe.’ And that really upset me for a long time.†She was her own worst enemy. “If it was a day off, I’d still be doing interviews, or going into the studio.†It’s only recently, she says, that she’s learnt to let go. “Now, I’ll hang out with my friends, go to the cinema. I went to Butlins for a holiday last year, for crying out loud.†Suddenly, she’s in tears. Great big mirrored pools of emotion, they jet into her eyes and down her cheeks. She’s talking about the media muckraking, about the price she thinks she paid. “I don’t think I was angry,†she begins. “I was more hurt than anything else. Because I feel like... I’m going to go.†For a second, I think she’s about to take a loo break, or walk out. “Sorry,†she continues. “Sorry. How embarrassing is this? I’m bloody crying. When people don’t know anything about you it’s hard, because you have to constantly defend yourself. But you can’t go up to every single person and say, ‘I’m this way, not that way.’†In truth, she’s probably a bit of both, simply because she’s had to be. She’ll refer quite openly to the band as a business, and that’s precisely what it is, and precisely why the personnel changes have never been allowed to threaten the brand. This explains the decision to re-record some of the tracks on Taller in More Ways, the last album Buena appeared on, with new vocals by Berrabah; and to re-release the album with fresh packaging, sans Buena. And, verbally, Buchanan can wield a mean stiletto, ranging from a sharp little prod to the full insertion. Referring to Donaghy, she says: “Things had come out in the press about Siobhan saying whatever she had said about depression and stuffâ€; how powerful the “whatever†is, and how wonderfully dismissive that “and stuffâ€. And commenting on the new line-up, and life post-Buena, she trills: “The chemistry is better now than it’s ever been, and Mutya’s happy doing whatever she’s doing.†(Looking after her 18-month-old daughter and working on a solo album.) But Buchanan does seem genuinely relaxed, perhaps because she is the undisputed top dog now. It’s also down, she says, to the irrefutable affirmation that Overloaded represents. “I’m just enjoying it, man,†she purrs. She will admit to some enduring and revealing vulnerabilities. “Me and her (Mutya),†she says, “had history together. There was love there, but no friendship. Her and Heidi were very, very, very, very close.†At this point you remember Buena’s “yeah, so?†response to accusations that she had cold-shouldered Range when she first joined in 2001 (“I never argued with her; I just didn’t speak to herâ€). And you think, hang on, Buchanan still sounds like a teen, giving an after-school update on the endlessly shifting sands of playground politics. Yet the Suga saga remains strangely compelling. And their singles are some of the best pop songs of the past 20 years. It’s easy to forget that they were dropped by their original label following Donaghy’s dramatic, mid-tour exit in Japan. Or that nobody gave them a cat in hell’s chance of a comeback; they had, after all, only scored one top10 single in their first incarnation. But back they came. The maverick record producer Richard X had been mucking around in the studio, arriving at a sonic collision between Tubeway Army’s Are Friends Electric? and Freak Like Me by the US R&B singer Adina Howard. He asked Sugababes to do the vocals, and the resulting single went straight in at No1. “From Freak on,†says the Anglo-Moroccan Berrabah approvingly, “everyone was like, ‘What are they going to bring out next? What are they going to sound like?’ It kept everyone on their toes.†Berrabah and Range, talking separately from Buchanan, have both, of course, been through the experience of joining an already established setup. The former, after failing to hit the big time with her sister in the duo Boo2, was hand-picked by Sugababes’ management one year ago, and, judging by the ease with which she handled her duties on stage at an album-launch gig at the 100 Club, three weeks ago, is settling in nicely. Range has helped her through this, though she herself was, she feels, rather left to get on with things when she arrived in London, knowing nobody, five years ago. “They put me in a hotel for about eight months,†she says, wistfully, “which sounds fine, but the room was this big (she indicates the tiny alcove we’re sitting in). The staff were like a little family to me. I actually had a Post-it note on my wall with names of people I knew in London that might want to go for a coffee.†Now she’s welling up, too. “I’d get the train back to Liverpool if we had a day off. I’d have tea at home and then take the train back. I remember one time I went back and my mum was waiting for me at the station, and she said, ‘Your manager’s phoned, you’ve got to go straight back.’ I was crying my eyes out.†On their new single, the Babes sing: “I’ve got such a pretty kitty, boy, I know you want to pet it.†It’s a classic Sugababes track, with its mix of steamy sexual chutzpah and only semi-concealed self-doubt. The fact that its bridge at first sounds like the chorus — so that, when the real thing explodes into life, resistance becomes futile — is also typical. Indeed, the strength in depth of Overloaded is testament to the band’s, and the brand’s, socking great impact: no matter the line-up, they have always looked like individ-uals, always tried to conceal their messy hearts and urchin manners beneath a surface sheen, and failed miserably. It’s not, then, just the quality of their songs that keeps us wanting more. Shortly before the 100 Club show, the band are presented with an award by the Guinness Book of British Hit Singles & Albums. They are named the top girl band of the 21st century so far, bestriding its short span as convincingly as the Spice Girls did the 1990s and Bananarama the 1980s. What does Buchanan credit this to? “We didn’t know about the stage-school thing, about smiling for the camera. Now, I definitely know how to play the game a little bit more; because†— and she lets slip a mischievous chuckle — “you don’t want to scare people. But it’s never been three models singing a song. We weren’t this smiley pop group.†She pauses. “Sometimes I wish we bloody had been.†Easy is released on November 6 on Island; Overloaded follows on November 13 Nice interview ^_^ Seems that Keisha is the one that was the loner, not Siobhan or Heidi :(
