We changed everything
Daily Telegraph
4th November 2004
www.telegraph.co.uk
As the product of a TV talent show, Girls Aloud should have been a one-hit wonder. Instead, they're the queens of cutting-edge, innovative pop. Sarah Donaldson reports...

The make-up artist leans in conspiratorially. "Seen the papers are saying Britney might be pregnant?" Singer Nicola Roberts, 19, has. "It makes me feel sick, it really does." She shakes her head solemnly. "At her age, for God's sake. She's only 23."

It's early on a bright autumn morning, and the five members of Girls Aloud are in a studio in east London for a photoshoot, taking turns to be slathered in slap or have their hair cajoled into elaborate styles. A rack of impossibly small high-street clothes hangs beside them. It's not very glamorous - just another day at pop's hectic office, and the girls behave like any other young women turning up for work. They yawn. They drink tea. They talk shop (Britney Spears in the tabloids; how chuffed they are to be chosen over Geri Halliwell and rivals Busted for the Children in Need single).

Two years ago this month, the band's line-up - Roberts, Cheryl Tweedy, Kimberley Walsh, Nadine Coyle and Sarah Harding - was elected by public vote on the final of the reality pop show Popstars: The Rivals. A boy band was also chosen (One True Voice), and the two groups released their debut singles simultaneously, in competition for the Christmas number one.

The girls won with Sound of the Underground, a rowdy dance track built on a filthy industrial bass line and apoplectic break beats. It sounded nothing like a Christmas single. And nothing like the cloying ballads invariably released by TV show pop puppets. (The boys went to number two - with a cover of a Bee Gees song - and sank without trace, in much the same way as Hear'Say, the original reality TV pop band).

Since then, it's been a hard slog. The girls have released a number-two album and six singles (all top-three). They've appeared on innumerable TV shows, radio shows, double-decker buses and in shopping precincts. In short, they've done exactly what's expected of a pop TV band - wooed their fans, courted the charts, fluttered their eyelids at the press.

But there is a paradox in the Girls Aloud story. They are the most manufactured of bands (created in 10 weeks by the public, on TV), yet completely original. Their songs are witty, exuberant and ground-breaking, built around sounds pinched from all the files in the pop archive: The Show had Euro-house; Love Machine, 1960s rock and roll. The stand-out tracks on their forthcoming second album, which is easily the pop release of the year, pack in Hendrix-style wah wah pedals (Deadlines and Diets), a buzzsaw punk riff (Wake Me Up), and rave sirens (Graffiti My Soul) among banging house beats or gentle synth soundwashes.

The musical exuberance is down to producer Brian Higgins, member of a new British production aristocracy which has picked up pop's goalposts and heaved them into orbit. Since Cathy Dennis gave Kylie's Can't Get You Out of My Head a glacial techno sheen in 2001, no sound has been considered off-limits for chart pop. Gone is the slavish devotion to American R&B; instead, we have Rachel Stevens referencing glam rock and the Sugababes going electro.

Higgins describes his style as "quite aggressive". He and creative partner Miranda Cooper build every composition from "a single sound which we don't feel has been used in pop before". A Cumbrian based in Kent, his influences are resolutely British: "The Cure; Depeche Mode; Sex Pistols; New Wave, '80s house, the Stone Roses - very much the indie side of pop. I've got nothing against American music; it just doesn't interest me."

This, combined with the girls' unreconstructed bolshiness (no cool London posturing for them - four are down-to-earth northerners; Coyle is an Londonderry lass) and the seaside postcard sauciness of Cooper's lyrics, makes Girls Aloud a very British kind of act. Tracks about hanging around the house in underwear or worrying "what will the neighbours say?" line up next to insouciant ballads dismissing "devious men". These are songs with a tottering step and a glint in the eye, joining the dots between Barbara Windsor, Bananarama and the Spice Girls. Higgins says the success of the songs rides on the girls' personalities: "No matter how good a tune might be, if the girls couldn't take charge of it and get us excited, we'd chuck it out."

The girls themselves are bubbly and fun, but also polite and business-like. They have well-rehearsed answers about "pulling together" in response to questions about Tweedy's criminal conviction last year for attacking a nightclub attendant (she was cleared of a more serious charge of racially aggravated assault). They manage to seem enthusiastic about a looming national radio-station tour on a double-decker bus. They erupt in a chorus of "Oh my God"s when talking about the size of the crowd who watched them turn on Manchester's Christmas lights.

It seems the "fantasy-come-true" of winning Popstars is now a more mundane reality of "markets" and "strategies". They are wise, too, to the dangers of befriending strangers, having opened many a tabloid newspaper to kiss-and-tell stories about themselves. "You just don't know who to trust," says Harding sagely. "Anyone we meet through work is just an acquaintance. When we're not together, we all just hang out with our old friends from home."

Like a lot of girls their age, they're into hip hop and R&B ("I don't think I'd go to a club where they were playing Love Machine," says Tweedy). And, like any pop singers, they yearn for a hit ballad "to prove themselves" musically (they hope Higgins's arrangement of the Pretenders song I'll Stand By You, which has been chosen for Children in Need, will be it). But they're extremely proud of their chart success. "When we were launched, we weren't just a new girl band, we were a whole new sound," says Walsh.

For Higgins, the girls have helped usher in a new, credible age of pop. "It's moved away from being merely a product to satisfy a market. Bands such as Sugababes and Girls Aloud indicate to the public where the bar is, and anyone coming in below that really struggles. There's less pop out there, but the producers and writers are coming up with stuff as original as anything the indie bands are. And that's how it should be."

Ever the ex-stage-school exhibitionist, Tweedy puts it more simply: "I just hope that when they make future telly programmes about pop history, we're there as the band that changed everything in 2002."