For the past eight weeks the Sugababes have been under attack. The group who once could boast 17 Top Ten singles, six No 1s and six platinum albums plus loads of critical kudos suddenly became, as of September 21, “a total laughing stock”, according to one newspaper. The website Popjustice declared the band “dead”, posting a “Sugababes: 1998-2009” obituary. The trio’s Wikipedia entry was vandalised too, so that it described them as “a hollow, machine-like representation of the music industry’s deconstruction of music as an art form”. Then things got personal.
“The abuse on Twitter from some people ... ” says Heidi Range, the normally cheery and relentlessly suntanned Scouse 26-year-old. “I had one person saying ‘Burn in Hell you c***.’ I had other people saying, ‘Why don’t you get an eating disorder because you look fat.’ Really vicious things.”
Jade Ewen, who sits beside her bandmate in the bar of a swish London hotel, shakes her head. “I went into a shop in Stratford,” she recalls. “I had someone shouting abuse at me. Really rude, nasty things.”
What did they say? “That I was a backstabbing bitch. She was obviously a fan of Keisha.” “Keisha” is Keisha Buchanan, who was, basically, booted out of the Sugababes on September 21 and replaced, double-quick, by Ewen. A steady staff turnover has been a trait of the band ever since they embarked on a career of cool, dolled-up pop that was sharp without lacking soul and which could, on occasion, sound inspired (see: Overload, Round Round, Push the Button, while Freak Like Me from 2002 easily ranks as one of the decade’s finest chart toppers). In 2001 Siobh?n Donaghy became the first member to leave the band, after clinical depression was diagnosed, to be replaced by Range.
Next to go was Mutya Buena in 2005, citing personal reasons, and replaced, 48 hours later, by Amelle Berrabah. None of this helped to quell the sense that the Sugababes’ internal dynamics were closer to a girl gang than a successful pop group, with former members talking of bitchiness, feuding and byzantine scheming. Even their own record label titled the sixth studio album Catfights and Spotlights.
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When Buchanan was shown the door, however, it was more than the routine pruning of a pop family tree. It was more a complete uprooting: the Sugababes sudd-enly didn’t contain any original Sugababes, and to many this felt very wrong.
When we meet, it is one month since the transformation. Ewen is waiting in the hotel bar booth, says “hello” enthusiastically and beams with the wide eyes and impossibly long lashes of a Japanese manga character. Range arrives a few minutes later, the pair embrace and compliment each others’ appearance crisply. Berrabah is absent. The word is that she is at a foreign clinic receiving treatment for nervous exhaustion. The girls concede that she has been “ill”, but queries about her wellbeing or whereabouts are ignored.
They both order tea. Ewen, who says she gets hungry when she’s nervous, also orders steamed duck rolls. They both giggle politely when they feel they ought to, but you get the sense that Ewen is following Range’s lead, and that Range is smiling far too tightly to be anywhere near enjoying herself. They talk about the string of radio interviews they’ve just done, which, in turn, quickly leads to a string of gripes about how events of the past few weeks have been reported.
“Apparently the three of us [Range, Ewen and Berrabah] were having a photo-shoot together, and we were rowing over who was going to be in the middle of the picture,” Range says. “Completely made up! We hadn’t even had a photo-shoot together. I’ve also read things about how we ‘plotted’ to get Keisha out of the band, how I was ‘the silent assassin’. It’s just horrible because the last few months leading up to the previous line-up ending was really stressful. It was a horrible time, particularly for Amelle.”
The precise circumstances surrounding Buchanan’s exit are hazy, made hazier by Range’s reluctance to talk about them in anything but the driest terms. In short, relations between the members had deteriorated to the point where, during time spent working in LA, Range and Berrabah told their manager, Mark Hargreaves, that they couldn’t carry on (the previous week, Amelle had “disappeared, and we didn’t know why”, only to be coaxed eventually on to a US-bound plane). It sounds a simple case of two against one, though Range says she was supporting Berrabah rather than ganging up against Buchanan.
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“It wasn’t even a case of [asking] ‘Can we get someone else?’ ” she says. “It was ... ‘That’s it ... we can’t do it anymore.’ They said, ‘Are you sure?’ and we said, ‘Yes’. We didn’t know if the label would drop us and keep Keisha, but we didn’t really have a choice. It just couldn’t go on.”
What exactly had Buchanan done to make things so bad?
Range smiles sadly. “I don’t want to go into all the ... I don’t want all the things in the papers yet. One of the hardest things throughout this whole process has been that it would be so easy to come out and say all the details, and then people would understand why things have happened. But that’s not something we would want to talk about and get into, because there’s respect for the past, y’know?”
In the event, Range and Berrabah were served up with Ewen, just as Range and Buchanan had been served up with Berrabah, just as Buchanan and Buena had been served up with Range. It’s hard not to feel for Ewen, quietly picking at her duck rolls while Range talks tears, drama and professional heartache. But when it comes to exploring the realpolitik of forging and maintaining pop careers, her story is much the more revealing. The 21-year-old from Stratford, East London, is now on her fourth record deal. After struggling with the teen R&B trio Trinity Stone she struggled as a solo artist before, “as a last resort”, signing up for the TV talent contest created to select the UK’s entry for the 2009 Eurovision Song Contest. She won, sang an Andrew Lloyd Webber ballad and finished a respectable fifth at the final in Moscow.
Follow-on success did not beckon. She had a single due for release on September 20, but no one was playing it on the radio. Then Ewen received a call from a Sarah Wall at Crown Music Management (which runs the Sugababes). Wall had been in contact with her before about the possibility of working together, but now she was insisting they meet that night.
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“So I came down to her house, and she was asking me all these weird questions like ‘How bad do you want this?’ and ‘What lengths are you prepared to go to achieve your dream?’ I remember saying, ‘I’ll do whatever it takes.’ So she said there might be the opportunity to join the Sugababes, but it could mean I’d have to get on a plane to LA tomorrow to shoot a video.”
Ewen was put on standby for the next few days, taking a packed suitcase with her everywhere until word came from LA that she was not required: the Sugababes were going to try to make it work. Then, that night, a knock on the door. There had been a change of plan. Did she still want to go?
Why the rush for an instant replacement? Truth is the Sugababes couldn’t have picked a worse time to lose a member. Having signed up with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation label and his team of crack songwriters and producers in March, by then they had singles to promote, videos to shoot, an album forthcoming. The day after meeting Range and Berrabah in LA, she was rehearsing dance moves for the video for the single About a Girl.
Range explains that just before this, when the band’s future was still undecided, a video was shot anyway. “Only using body doubles,” she says. “They thought, there’s no band but we still need a video to put out with this song, so the girls who were our stunt doubles became the stars.”
This version was never used, but that it happened at all seems slightly shocking. Just as Ewen’s recruitment makes you wonder how many other girls over the past decade have been discreetly put on standby for Sugababedom. Do the band understand why so many people have a problem with their new, no-original-members incarnation? Ewen takes issue with this.
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“As a consumer, Heidi to me is one of the original members,” she reasons. “She’s been in the band eight years, was there for their first No 1 ... from the point they had success, she was involved.”
Range concurs demurely. Now they are finalising the legal side of incorporating Ewen into Sugababes Mk IV.
“Mark explained it really well,” Ewen explains breezily. “It’s a business, at the end of the day. We’re just ending one business, and starting a new one.”
A few weeks later I was supposed to meet Berrabah once she returned to band duties. A frantic schedule of rehearsals meant we could arrange only a telephone call. Compared with her bandmates, she sounds surprisingly husky and tough, but enthusiastic, too. How is she doing?
“Really good! Happy happy! Haha! I heard I went to some depression clinic,” she says. “It wasn’t a clinic. It was called ... well, it doesn’t matter what it’s called. It’s a place in Austria where you cleanse your mind, body and spirit. You can walk around in your dressing gown day and night, you don’t have to wear make-up, no one’s judging you. I spoke to a life coach and sorted myself out a little bit.”
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What had been the problem? “I needed to get my confidence back. It can be very cut-throat, you need a thick skin. People criticise you a lot, dissect you bit by bit, your looks, your vocals, your skin, what you’re bloody wearing! If I could turn back time, I would have made it clear not to speak to me in certain ways or treat me in certain ways. I would have put a stop to that a long time ago.” Is she talking about Buchanan? She won’t say. Did she fear her stint in the band was over? She says she’d be lying if she said it didn’t. But now, after three weeks in a dressing gown, without make-up, she’s making all the right raring-to-go, I’m-still-a-Sugababe noises.
“And I’m grateful to Heidi and Jade for understanding, and grateful to the label. Three weeks is a bloody long time,” she says. “Especially in this industry.”
The Sugababes single, About a Girl, is out now on Universal/Island and their album, Sweet 7, is released in February