CityLife

Empty? Hollow? Not us, says Saturdays girl

The Saturdays - just don't quiz 'em on politics

BACKSTAGE with The Saturdays and Una Healy, one fifth of the girl group, is reflecting on how their sold-out tour hasn't been all plain sailing. In Dundee, fellow singer Vanessa White twisted her ankle arriving onstage.

"The poor thing!," coos Healy sympathetically.

"She tore a ligament, so she was off for the first half of the set, but she was rolled on in a wheelchair to sing at the end. She's very brave.

"We just had to keep going because we didn't know when it happened. We just knew she wasn't onstage and we were like, 'Where's Vanessa?'.

"But obviously you can't speak and you have to keep going with the choreography. It was stressful, but we got through it."

It may not be the most scintillating anecdote ever to grace the annals of pop, but in the carefully-cultivated, perma-grinning world of The Saturdays, it's right up there with Mötley Crüe's Nikki Sixx being declared clinically dead and revived by two adrenaline shots to the heart.

The title of the prefab five's latest single is Work, which is apt because they make being pretenders to Girls Aloud's throne sound like a bloody hard slog.

According to Healy, they don't paint the town red, so much as a shade of beige.

"Photographers will never catch us falling out of a club, because we're not party animals," she explains.

"We don't have time to go out. And if we do go out, we don't drink as in this job, you can't afford to look rough and be in a bad mood."

It's this laser-focused professionalism that's helped them get where they are today.

Their debut album, Chasing Lights went platinum; singles such as the Yazoo-sampling If This Is Love and the precision-tooled electropop of Up were widely acclaimed by critics as surpassing the recent efforts of the Sugababes and Pussycat Dolls; while their cover of Depeche Mode's 1981 single Just Can't Get Enough joined the pantheon of fundraising songs that includes Hale and Pace's Stonk.

The Saturdays' success - all four singles and the attendant long-player penetrated the Top Ten - is even more surprising when you consider how notoriously difficult it is to launch a boil-in-the-bag girl group in a climate where music increasingly has to arrive with a veneer of muso authenticity.

Why does Healy think The Saturdays have thrived?

"It's because we're just really down to earth people," she muses.

"We're not divas. Our personalities come through quite a lot. Musically, I think they're just fantastic, top-quality songs. We love what we do. We don't go out there to offend anybody, we just want to please people, you know."

Despite striving for inoffensiveness, The Saturdays have weathered criticisms of being 'Girls-A-Lite', created by Polydor as some kind of Girls Aloud subs bench for when Cheryl Cole et al call it a day.

Damning

Most damning of all, however, are accusations that they're five pristine Rachel Stevens' who have had every iota of individuality wrung out of them.

The argument goes that The Saturdays can barely muster one personality between them. Electropop duo La Roux branded them 'empty and hollow', while rising trio the Dolly Rockers insisted ‘they could have been five completely different girls and nobody would have given a s***’.

Healy shrugs: "Well, they want to come along to one of our tours and see for themselves and ask our fans that cos that's their opinion, and everyone's entitled to that, but I think they're wrong and pretty desperate.

"I don't even know who they are, really. I haven't heard their music, but I've heard of them purely because of that, and it's a pretty bad way to try and promote yourself, isn't it? By offending people. That's how they're trying to get attention. It's shocking, really."

All in their early to mid-twenties, The Saturdays are already battle-scarred veterans of the pop scene.

Frankie Sandford (FHM's 17th sexiest woman in the world, and dating Dougie Poynter from McFly) and Rochelle Wiseman cut their milk-teeth in the S Club Juniors, who released two albums, rebranded as S Club 8, then split before re-emerging as the dying gasp of Simon Fuller's S Club franchise: I Dream.

Sandford says: "When S Club ended, I felt like I was finished in pop.

"I started panicking and everyone was reassuring me: 'You're 16! You've got so many years left in you'."

Mollie King, meanwhile, appeared on The X Factor in 2007 as part of girl group Fallen Angelz. An All-Ireland champion swimmer when she was a child, Healy's interest in music was sparked when her mother taught her guitar at 13.

With numerous self-penned albums under her belt (as well as a stint as a backing singer in the Eurovision Song Contest), she joined The Saturdays in 2007, after completing its gruelling six-round audition process.

Sweet ones

There's always been two types of girl groups: the sweet ones like Atomic Kitten; punctual, professional, and seemingly fitted by the record company with a chip that detonates if they utter anything remotely controversial.

Then there are those like Bananarama: shambling, shameless, and whose idea of detox is putting ice cubes in their G&Ts.

The Saturdays fall into the first category.

They are unfailingly, indefatigably nice. Although in pop terms, that's the equivalent of telling a morbidly obese woman she 'has a lovely smile', and they speak in X Factor esperanto ("this is a dream come true", "we're so grateful to our fans," "it's been a journey").

You get the feeling that - after various false starts - they're relishing their moment in the upper-echelons of the charts.

"The only embarrassing moment for me was when we were on the front cover of FHM and my mum went down to the local shop and bought it," laughs Healy.

"Picking it up and boasting there's my daughter on the front there.

"We get asked to model for dodgy magazines all the time," she admits. "But we're not glamour models. We want to model fashion."

After completing this tour, The Saturdays are due back in the studio to finish work on their sophomore album, which Healy hopes will appeal to a more mature set of ears.

"All of our songs are quite mature, it's not kiddies music at all," she says, "exclusively I mean.

"Obviously young kids do love pop and all that, but it would be good for us to perform to older audiences as well. There will be a lot more of our personalities on it because we're actually writing on it this time."

On the day we meet, it has been announced that the BNP have secured two seats in the European Parliament.

How does Una feel about this? "About what?", retorts the 27-year-old, "the EMP winning two seats....in the European Parliament? I don't really understand that question."

CityLife proceeds to explain. "Is this politics? Like, voting and stuff? Are you challenging me? I think you are.

"Hold on, let me talk to my manager." There's a pause.

"No comment."

The Saturdays play the Apollo again on Tuesday, July 7. £20. Call 0871 2200 260.

*YOU can read a review of their first date to the right.