Ask anyone to name an iconic girlband and they’ll probably say the Spice Girls. Baby, Ginger, Scary, Sporty and Posh high-kicked their way onto the music scene in 1996 with their anarchic single “Wannabe” and changed the world with their vivacious brand of girl power.
So it makes sense that they’re the jumping off point for the BBC’s new music documentary Girlbands Forever, which charts the rise of British groups throughout the late 90s and Noughties – just as last year’s excellent Boybands Forever did with Take That and their hair-gelled, pleather-clad peers. “The Spice Girls changed a lot for everybody,” says Su-Elise Nash, who was a member of Mis-Teeq from 1999 to 2005. “Before then, people never really understood just how big girlbands could be.”
Girlbands are the underdogs of the music industry. For too long they were dismissed as frivolous or vapid, and it took 44 years for a group of women (Little Mix, in 2021) to win Best British Group at the Brit Awards. But Girlbands Forever proves that they were – still are – a force to be reckoned with. Alongside the usual love songs, girlbands wrote their own songs (yes, really) about friendship and ambition and feminism, speaking to generations of young girls and women who had rarely seen their lives reflected back at them in pop.
The explosion may have begun in the 90s, but its aftershocks have been felt for decades. Girls Aloud, The Saturdays, Little Mix and, most recently, FLO, have all carried the girl power torch – and as the documentary reminds us, the Spice Girls were far from the only British girlband to break the mould. At the same time, All Saints – a cooler, more authentic four-piece from London – and gospel-inspired Eternal (featuring a young Louise Redknapp), were storming the charts. Their eventual splits made room for the likes of gobby Northern threesome Atomic Kitten and the edgy, garage-inspired Mis-Teeq.
“Coming through that UK garage scene gave us a credibility that maybe more fluffy acts didn’t have – that street cred,” says Nash, speaking over video from her home in Australia. The now 44-year-old was recruited by Alesha Dixon and Sabrina Washington to replace Tina Barrett (who had left to join S Club 7) when she was just 18. “I was in university and deferred after the first year to join a girlband,” she laughs. But the risk paid off.
While their first single – 2000’s “Why?” – was a middling success, a remix was everywhere in the UK’s underground garage clubs and eventually reached number eight in the charts (back in those days, chart position was the most important measure of success). The girls savvily capitalised on the success and began to incorporate the syncopated beats and MCing – courtesy of Dixon – of UK garage into their music.
“We had the creative freedom to write our own tracks, to pursue the avenues that we wanted to do,” says Nash. Their debut album, Lickin’ on Both Sides, went platinum, their single “Scandalous” reached number two and they embarked on the ultimate girlband dream: breaking America. Impressive, but even more so when you learn the girls – still all teenagers – were managing themselves.
“We did try to take on some managers at various points, and nothing really worked out,” says Nash, who was studying for a business degree before joining Mis-Teeq. “No one knows what you want more than yourself. If people are not following your direction and your vision, then they’re just in the way.”
Meanwhile, back in the UK, the surly, uber-cool Sugababes – Siobhán Donaghy, Keisha Buchanan and Mutya Buena – were getting attention for their debut single “Overload”, a slow, nonchalant pop song about teenage infatuation, driven by the girls’ stunning, euphonious harmonies. But just one year later, in 2001, Donaghy left the band, later alleging that she was being “bullied” by Buchanan.
But the record label wasn’t about to throw away the popularity Sugababes had earned. Enter 18-year-old scouser Heidi Range, previously of Atomic Kitten. “I’d just been for an interview for a bar job in Liverpool when the Sugababes manager [who had been looking after Range as a solo artist] rang and asked me to go to London to meet the girls. I had to go and buy the CD and learn all the songs,” she tells me.
“On the train back home, they rang again and asked me to go back. The next day I was in a photoshoot for that Saturday’s CD:UK. A few weeks later we were in Frankfurt on stage with Eminem presenting at the MTV awards. I didn’t really have time to think about it.”
Her first single with Buchanan and Mutya, 2002’s “Freak Like Me”, went straight in the charts at number one. Range, now 42, has happy memories of that time, but Sugababes were plagued by rumours of a rift between the members. “I was in the group for 11 years so there were good times and there were bad times, like there would be in anyone’s career over that period of time,” she says, delicately.
“I don’t know if it was a good thing to do or a bad thing to do, but we never spoke openly about it. We were told that if you start to try and explain things, it just adds fuel to the fire, but maybe not speaking about it made people think it was a bigger thing than it was. There were rows and bad times, don’t get me wrong, but for the bigger part of it we were really close.”
Mis-Teeq were less targeted by the gossip columns, largely because they took steps to keep their personal lives private. “I remember very early on we had press training with Kate Thornton. They told us to never chat your business in a black cab – drivers always sell stories. And – everyone knows this now – to put a pin on your voicemail,” says Nash.
“When you go to a club, if you want to go out the back door the security will take you. It’s up to you if you want to walk out the front after you’ve had a couple of drinks. I just think we were really sensible.”
But there was a more grim reason Mis-Teeq were featured in the newspapers less frequently – they were Black. “We felt like we had to fight harder and do better than everybody else to get where we wanted to go, because there were so many doors that were closed to us,” says Nash. In the documentary, it’s detailed how they were always featured inside the pages of magazines like Smash Hits, but never allowed on the cover. “Back then Black British artists weren’t supported as much as they are now.”
As for Range, the height of Sugababes’ fame coincided with the rise of celebrity gossip magazines like Heat. Paparazzi pictures of girlband members were frequently published with red “circles of shame” and “hoops of horror” drawing attention to their cellulite or apparently horrifying wobbly bits. Now, this body shaming makes Range “so angry”.
“Every holiday I went on I wore a full-length sarong because I was terrified of a pap getting a picture of my cellulite and blowing it up in a magazine and humiliating me,” she says. “I would literally sit on the edge of the pool, take the sarong off, and slide in the water and do the same on the way back out. That is mentally damaging.”
There was also little concern about bands members’ mental health back then, and, in hindsight, Range thinks some awareness would have been helpful. “We didn’t get time off. We worked 20-hour days, seven days a week. That was just the reality of it. To be that young and to have that level of responsibility and that level of fame, everybody deals with it in different ways,” she says. “Some members in particular would have benefited massively from professional help.”
“Taking time off was really hard to do, especially in the beginning,” says Nash. “We were working to the point where we were absolutely exhausted. One day we all turned our phones off so they couldn’t get hold of us and had to pay attention. We weren’t rebellious, but we had to make ourselves happy.”
Eventually, both the Sugababes and Mis-Teeq broke up. For Range, the split in 2011 came after a number of line-up changes – by the time the band ended there were no original members left. Buchanan was allegedly ousted by management without her knowledge in 2009. (“It was not my decision to leave,” she wrote in a statement.) Buena had left four years earlier after suffering from postnatal depression.
“It probably sounds like it was more manufactured than it really was,” says Range. “We were three teenage girls growing up in this crazy industry and people’s needs were different. You’re not going to give up a career you’ve dreamt of your whole life, if you don’t have to.”
Mis-Teeq’s premature end in 2005 was forced by the collapse of their record company, Telstar. “It was a shock. We had no idea. When they went bust, they owed us hundreds of thousands of pounds, hundreds,” says Nash. They were never paid the money, but they were given their masters in lieu.
“It was bittersweet,” she says. “We were at our peak, and I didn’t want it all to end. But on the other hand, it meant I could spend time with my grandmother – she had thyroid cancer and was given six months to live. You can’t put a price on that.”
And in this age of getting the band back together, a split isn’t always forever. In fact, the original line-up of Sugababes has recently reunited to much acclaim, packing out their Glastonbury set and embarking on a national tour. Despite not being a part of the action, Range is diplomatically supportive of her former bandmates: “I’m happy to see that our music is still out there. I think it’s amazing our old fans are enjoying the music, but also there’s this whole new generation of fans, including my two little girls, which is the most bizarre thing for me.”
Taking part in the documentary has made Nash want to get closer to Dixon and Washington. “Doing this documentary was the first time that I’ve sat down and gone through everything from beginning to the end. It was such a really good trip down memory lane,” she says. Is there a potential reunion on the cards? “We are on really good terms… I’d never say never!”
Girlbands Forever is a long overdue celebration of girlbands gone by and all they achieved. Without them, the music landscape of today would be unrecognisable, full of sad blokes with guitars (or at least more than there are now) – and there’d be no unapologetically feminine – and feminist – pop bangers. Their long-lasting influence is obvious looking at today’s megastars – Dua Lipa, Sabrina Carpenter and Olivia Rodrigo all embody their foremothers’ spirit.
“It’s about time we got our flowers,” says Nash. “We all broke down barriers and opened people’s eyes to that fact that girls are bloody cool, man.”
‘Girlbands Forever’ is on BBC Two tonight at 9.20pm
