“We’re definitely more relaxed, mature, wiser and appreciative this time round,” says Melanie Blatt of the All Saints of the band’s unexpected second comeback. “All the good stuff. Lessons learnt and all that.”
The 40-year-old Londoner is curled up on a couch alongside her Canadian bandmate Natalie Appleton, in a suite on the fifth floor of the Hilton Olympia Hotel on Kensington High Street. The sound of raucous laughter, clapping and hooting is coming from the room next door, where their fellow All Saints Shaznay Lewis and Nicole Appleton are filming a TV interview.
“I bet you wish you were in there with them,” Natalie smiles.
Actually, Hot Press is happy enough right here. It’s the afternoon of Wednesday, April 6th, and with their fourth album, Red Flag, about to drop, this is the now fortysomething foursome’s first full day of promotional activity in almost a decade.
Although I’d been promised an interview with All Saints, it quickly transpires that I’m only getting face-to-face time with Two Saints. This might have something to do with the record company’s repeated requests that I promise to refrain from asking any questions about Nicole Appleton’s divorce from Liam Gallagher (she split with the Oasis singer in 2014, after six years of marriage, following revelations that he had fathered a child with an American journalist). Despite assurances that I wouldn’t mention the L-word, it would appear that they’re taking no chances.
Which is fine because Mel and Nat – as they refer to each other – are friendly, flirty and funny, and there’s plenty more to ask about anyway. But first a little recap.
Having originally shot to fame in 1997 with their self-titled album (which featured signature earworm ‘Never Ever’), and followed it with the multi-platinum Saints & Sinners in 2000, All Saints sold truckloads of records and garnered acres of tabloid coverage before splitting in 2001. Famously, the split happened following an unseemly row between Nat and Shaz over who would wear a combat jacket for a photo shoot.
They reformed in 2006, long enough to make the critically panned album Studio 1, but broke up again soon afterwards. Everybody thought that that was the end of that, but on January 1st of this year, All Saints announced on Twitter that they were about to release new material...
Their first salvo was impressive single ‘One Strike’, which was obviously written about Nic’s divorce (“I don’t want to stay, time to go/ I don’t want to be in this home/ Broken promises, time to leave/ I had everything that you needed”).
Surprising as it may seem, coming from a band on its third outing, Red Flag is actually as strong an offering as they’ve ever produced. The band members might be two decades older, and all mothers now, but they still sound fresh and original. They’re still serious lookers, too, which is bound to help matters. Their original incarnation was as slightly raunchier Spice Girls. Now they’re four MILFs.
Natalie’s daughter is 23 now, almost as old as she was when All Saints first started. “I think about that sometimes – that I was 24 and she’ll be 24 soon – and I can’t get my head around it,” she admits, shaking her head. “She’ll be the same age as I was when I started the band. She still feels like a kid to me, and it makes me realise how young we actually were. We were babies. We felt so grown up at the time, but obviously we weren’t.”
They hadn’t ever planned on reforming. Indeed, although they’d all been friends since childhood, there were quite a few years when certain members hardly spoke to one another.
“Losing friends,” Natalie says, sighing sadly. “You can’t get any lower than that, can you? I’ll always regret... (wells up). God, I’m getting emotional now! I wish they were at my wedding and things like that. It just seemed weird.”
Mel touches her arm supportively. “You know what, though? That time spent apart means that now we’re much better friends than we would have ever been – because we know now what there is to miss, and what happens when you do miss out. We’re just more caring, respectful and understanding. We cherish our friendship now. We didn’t realise how important it was in our lives. You don’t realise how good it is until it’s gone.”
Their reunion happened following an unexpected offer to support the Backstreet Boys tour in 2014. “Basically, we went on tour with the Backstreet Boys two years ago,” explains Mel. “We were in The Point (aka 3Arena – OT) in Ireland, actually! We had a great time and we wanted to carry on touring, maybe go on our own tour. If we wanted to do that then we had to think of doing new music. So without any real expectation, Shaz started writing with a few different producers that she liked, and came back with stuff that we loved.”
“It just worked out,” Nat adds. “We didn’t know how it would turn out or what the vibe of it would be but we just said, ‘Let’s see’, and the stars aligned. So we figured it was meant to be.”
Mel: “After the Backstreet Boys tour we got the taste for it, really. We really enjoyed performing the old songs which we hadn’t really done. ‘Pure Shores’ and stuff like that, we’d never actually performed live. So then we wanted to go on tour, which meant we needed new music.”
Did any band member have reservations about doing the Backstreet Boys tour?
“Well, Shaz was approached to ask us,” Nat explains. “We didn’t think Mel would want to do it because we’re friends and we were wondering ‘Do we want to start messing around?’ because we’re so happy now as friends why would we jeopardise that by going through it all again? But we said, ‘yeah!’”
Mel: “That’s the beauty about being wiser and older. There are those moments where the voice in your head just says, ‘You might as well just fucking go for it!’ What is there to lose?”
Unlike most other Nineties girl bands, All Saints always wrote their own material. Nothing has changed on that front. “Shaz writes all the songs,” Mel explains. “She’s an amazing songwriter.”
Nat: “We throw in harmony ideas and stuff like that. She’s the lyricist.”
A highly polished affair, most of the songs on Red Flag seem to be about heartache and love gone wrong. ‘One Strike’ is obviously deeply personal and based on real events, and it’s hard to escape the impression that at least some of the others are too. So is Shaz the creative channel for expressing all of their romantic woes?
“She’s the one who can put it down on paper,” Nat explains, after a pause. “Putting it into words is a skill – and she’s got that.”
When was the last time you all cried together?
“Monday!” she laughs. “It was an emotional night. We played at [London venue] KOKO and it was our first gig in 17 years, being the headline act. Doing our own thing, seeing the fans and it was just really overwhelming.”
Mel: “The venue was quite intimate so you felt that much closer to everybody. It was like we were part of this big party and they were hanging out with us. It was like the audience were on their own stage because they gave us a performance. So we were enjoying them while they were enjoying us, it went both ways!”
While it sounds very cohesive, in fact Red Flag was recorded over the course of 12 months in a number of different London studios. Long term collaborator K-Gee was the executive producer, with various individual tracks being produced by Fred Ball, Hutch, James Draper, The Invisible Men, The Rural and Utters.
“Shaz had a few different producers that she wanted to work with and so she took charge of that,” Mel explains. “She worked with them – and after she’d done that, she’d written about 10 songs. Then, she worked with K-Gee again who’d worked on both our previous albums. That cemented the whole thing.”
Of course, the entire music industry model has been turned on its head since All Saints first appeared on the scene. Most artists now release albums to promote tours rather than the other way around. What do they make of the paradigm shift?
“We don’t get it,” Nat laughs, dismissively waving a hand. “We let everyone else take care of that side of things.”
Mel can see the positives. “I like it though, it’s very blunt. Why wait? People can find out for themselves. One thing we all decided – because we spent so much time promoting back in the day, we decided that we’re not doing that again. If people like this music, then buy it. We’re not going to try and stuff it down people’s throats or be on every single show imaginable. That’s not fun for us. We love being in the studio, we love being on stage and we’re happy to do a few promotional bits here and there, but we won’t do anything that we don’t want to do. And we can because we’re our own bosses. It’s amazing.”
Is there a major tour planned?
“Yeah, for October,” nods Nat. “A UK tour, and hopefully we’ll be able to tour everywhere else soon as well. We’ll see how it goes. We’re not thinking about the future, really, we’re just taking every day as it comes.”
Even so, they admit that they already have the makings of enough new material to do another album.
“When we finished the last part of the album where Shaz was writing with K-Gee, she was on a roll and we started to develop this sound which was really exciting,” says Mel. “We would have liked to continue that, but we had a deadline, so we could go on tour. So we had to stop the album. So knowing that, there could be more material there. I think Shaz was really inspired towards the end.”
Nat nods her head in agreement. “Yeah, there’s definitely more there, but it depends – because you don’t know what’s going to happen in your life either. Anything could happen. So we’re enjoying it, appreciating it, and just being grateful for the now.”
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Red Flag is out now on London Records