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Front cover of The Sunday Times Style!

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in Sugababes

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They were one of the most successful girl bands in British history and now the three original @sugababes are back. This Sunday, they reveal what really happened and why this time, they’re calling the shots. Plus, @hillhousevintage’s top tips for shopping vintage, and @charlottegainsbourg on the style lessons she's learnt from her famous parents.

 

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

An actual cover with an actual interview in The Sunday Times :w00t: :w00t: Sorry, I think I got a bit overexcited.

Hahahahah not us having the same thought at the same time :lol:

 

Merged the threads!

 

 

 

Yeah they look great I can’t wait to see it

Omg, did we just all three post it at the same time :lol:

Hahahaha yes we did :lol:

 

 

All merged so it’s all good. Anyone wanna go for a 4th?

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No way! Great minds think alike. :lol:

 

That could be an album cover. :wub:

I can't get over how pretty the cover looks and very curious to read the interview. Need one of my UK friends to pick me up a copy.

^Thanks!!

 

Just for my information, this is a supplement of the paper right? Or a seperate magazine? The only British paper I ever buy is The Guardian, so I have no idea.

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Here’s the video from the web article version of the piece!!

 

Love it! Such a cute segment. :wub:

 

Thanks to Disco Tears from PJ for posting the entire interview:

 

The three original Sugababes (yes, the ones who all ended up falling out with each other, leaving their own band one by one and being replaced until 13 years later there were none of the original line-up left) are sitting together on a sofa in a studio in north London disagreeing. Not about the future of the group — they are excited to be reunited now, having won back the legal rights to their name just before the pandemic, and they plan to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their debut album, One Touch, with a rerelease, plus are back in the studio working on new music. No, they’re disagreeing about exactly how they got their band name in the first place, half their lifetimes ago.

 

‘‘We were called the Sugababies, not babes, for a while,” Keisha Buchanan says. “But we cared more about what our friends thought than anybody else back then, and it was so important to us not to be fake. So we dropped the babies — because to our friends we were babes.”

 

“But also there was another Sugababies,” pipes up Mutya Buena, “a choir in America.”

 

Keisha is not having this. “It was porn!”

 

Mutya is horrified. “Porn? I thought it was a choir!”

 

At a primary school in the northwest London suburbs in the 1990s, two girls, aged eight and nine, bonded over a shared love of pop music. By the time they were 12, Mutya and Keisha not only had plans for their group, but record industry interest too. An executive, recognising their talent, put them together with another local singer, Siobhan Donaghy, and the group, in its first line-up, was born. It was 1998 and they were indeed babies in the industry, only 15 or so when they started releasing records.

 

They went on to have six No 1 singles, including Push the Button, Round Round and Freak Like Me, sometimes with Heidi Range or Amelle Berrabah in the group. The Heidi years were the band’s most successful, though they don’t mention her today, and I suspect they are not in touch — the revolving door of entrance to the band had become something of a bitter joke by the time she was out of the picture.

 

Still, this all made them one of the most successful bands in British history (only the Spice Girls have had more No 1 hits as a girl band). But Sugababes were always the group it was cool to be fascinated by, the ones who got invited to the laddish NME awards, more street than sweet, with avant-garde pop producers and cult remixers queueing up to work with them. Mutya’s dad is Filipino, Keisha’s family Jamaican, Siobhan’s Irish: three multicultural, working-class London girls who could really sing, really harmonise, but who didn’t smile on camera and wouldn’t always play nicely. Sometimes it seemed they were the biggest source of backstage gossip in the whole game.

 

I worked with a lot of music-industry people at the time and remember almost daily discussions about what people thought was going on with the band: the in-fighting, the line-up changes, the dramas. (There was a rumour that Siobhan left the band by escaping through a bathroom window during a press conference — not true.) Much of which made its way into the tabloid press. What I didn’t fully realise then was that the industry itself stood to gain from this buzz — to the detriment of these very young women.

 

“Girl bands get a harder time,” says Keisha, pointing out that members of the boy band 5ive got in trouble for physical violence but it was soon forgotten. “We have never had a physical fight. But I do believe that those stories — I mean, it would be a lie to say there weren’t arguments here and there. And in this line-up there were probably the most. But there was one time when me and Mutya, we had this argument in Fulham, in a rehearsal studio, honestly I don’t know what it was about, and these two producers pushed us into a room together … ”

 

“Yes!” Mutya responds, remembering.

 

Keisha looks at her warningly. “Don’t say the names,” she urges her.

 

She turns back to me. “They told us to fight each other,” Keisha continues, “they pushed me and Mutya into a room together and — don’t say the names — said, right, you fight each other right now. And we wouldn’t, we refused. I will never forget just standing there in tears.”

 

Sorry, they did what?

 

“Oh, people would be appalled if that happened now,” Mutya says quietly, with no relish in her voice. After she left the band, she went on to record solo, including duets with George Michael and Amy Winehouse. It can be hard for her to look back to her more vulnerable days. “I think they actually enjoyed letting us think that one of us was better than the other. People knew what to say to each one of us in private to keep it going.” It wasn’t even necessarily about shouting and flare-ups, — sometimes the silences were worse, while each band member would sit on their own, stewing over what they thought was going on.

 

“The silences were louder,” says Keisha, now 36 and partly based in Canada, where she has begun an acting career. “Someone around us thought, actually, this is kind of edgy. It wasn’t enjoyable, I don’t think it was a good idea at all. But I think they clocked on to the fact that it all added to the mystery, the interest, in the group, so it just carried on.”

 

Siobhan, who was the first to leave the band, going on to release two solo albums, is now, at 37, quite analytical about it, saying it was always about divide and conquer, and that music industry executives “used a lot of that strategy, because it meant they could put in all the pieces of the puzzle that they wanted. Profiting from it. And then we wouldn’t communicate about what was going on, because we were young or whatever, and that suited them. They didn’t encourage good relations at all.” But the joy of coming back to a band in your thirties, not your teens, is that “we can tell when people are trying to divide and conquer us now. We see it a mile off.”

 

Siobhan is married with two small children, and Mutya, who is now 36, has a 16-year-old daughter: “That’s the age we were performing and releasing music. I look at her and think, no, I would not want her to be doing what we were doing at her age. If she chose to do music, I would ask her to wait. But she wants to go to college to be a paramedic.”

 

Still, their heyday doesn’t feel like ancient history, so it’s pretty astonishing to hear their revelations from that time. For example, there were occasions when they would be in a recording studio, working through the night, fuelled by Chinese takeaways, then finish at 6am and head straight to school. A man from the record label entered into a two-year relationship with Siobhan, beginning when she was 16. She still believes their love was genuine, if naive, “but he wasn’t a good boyfriend, and my friends and family were not happy about that relationship at all. He nearly lost his job.”

 

They are all big fans of therapy now and have used it to rebuild bridges with each other. Keisha says it was not encouraged in the community she grew up in, “because we’re taught from a young age that what goes on in this house stays in this house”. In interviews she used to feel insecure about people’s perceptions of her, so decided not to show she was upset. “I thought that came across as being confident, but actually you come across as having a bit of an attitude.”

 

Her issue is with the media speculation about her, which often portrayed her as a bully. I ask if she feels that, as a black woman, other people were quicker to judge her. “I could talk about that for a long time,” she says, nodding. “I definitely wouldn’t have had the same forgiveness as everyone else. Those are just the facts. But I’m so glad I wasn’t aware of that actually, because when I watched Leigh-Anne Pinnock’s documentary [about being a black member of Little Mix and feeling rejected by the fans] her experiences were so different from mine. I didn’t ever feel different with the fans, I felt fully seen as a person. My issue was more the character assassination of a child.”

 

This is how she describes the popular press’s characterisation of her. She has nieces who are in their mid-teens now “and I take it to heart because I think, imagine if I saw them having a meltdown — that is a child. That’s why my heart breaks for the younger me. I just wish we’d had a support system that said, oh look, they’re kids.”

 

The group only trust a small number of people to work with them now, “and we keep it like that”, Mutya says. “We won’t have seven managers standing in a corner, waiting for us to fight.” One of her biggest regrets, personally, is that she wasn’t able to enjoy so much of what they did at the time. She knows, for example, that they played at the Brit awards, but when she tries to summon that particular night of her life, all she can find in her mind is a vague image of a camera. Not because she was drunk, “but because I have blanked out a lot of things. There are so many things that I have to be reminded of now. There was a lot of trauma for everyone.”

 

Siobhan is keen to remember the good times too, though — and there definitely were some. “Do you remember when we were in Japan and the head of Warner sang Bohemian Rhapsody to us at karaoke?” she asks the others. They were 16 at the time. “I loved that day! They took us out and there was this whole table of sushi and not one of us touched it because we didn’t know what it was.”I ask if they were friendly with Girls Aloud, the other big girl band from the Noughties, and whether they had known Sarah Harding, who died of breast cancer last month aged 39. Keisha says she worked with her a lot, while Mutya, who lost her sister in recent years, makes the sign of the cross. Keisha then says she used to attach herself to Girls Aloud, as she loved spending girl time with them all, and Sarah was just so sweet to her.

 

Keisha also lost her dad a few weeks ago and has been thinking a lot about life itself recently. “Grief is … there’s nothing you can say really. This isn’t a dress rehearsal, you get one life, one shot. You’ve got to dream big, take chances, win, lose — it’s OK to lose.”

 

She sighs, but then her cheeky grin returns, just a hint of it. “But winning’s better, obviously.”

 

A lot of rather alarming stuff went down in those early days...

Interesting article, we already knew that things were hard for them in the beginning but the story of putting them in a room "to fight it out" is pretty horrendous. I did made me giggle how Keisha was like 'no names', I'm sure Mutya would have mentioned something otherwise.

 

Also really loved the mention of Girls Aloud and Keisha mentioning how she loved spending time with them. I really appreciated how well they always got on with each other, especially as the press always tried to put them up against each other as the two big girlbands.

These photos are incredible, they haven't aged at all.

The photos and the video are the best part of this!

 

 

I made my mum buy the Sunday Times for me for this :lol:

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