For Whom the Belles Toll

It’s Saturday night and in the RTÉ green room Ryan Tubridy is graciously meeting and greeting his public, pausing only to score points over some alleged incident when yours truly supposedly got one of his guests tipsy before they went on air. What an outrageous ingrate.

As I watch him ‘do the room’ I’m slowly realising that my five minute wait for the Sugababes is turning into what might be a lifetime for many lesser mammals. Is it still the weekend outside, I wonder? A flurry of assistants offer a flurry of excuses. The plane was cancelled. The ferry was late. Their hair needs straightening. And here comes the kicker; Keisha and Heidi won’t be doing interviews after all.
Though she does not appear to have an official rose petal thrower, by the time Amelle Berraba arrives I am quite convinced that we are slap bang in the middle of Diva Central.
These are the Sugababes after all, a band whose bitching is the stuff of legend. Hell, their current album is even called Catfights And Spotlights.
We’ve all heard the stories. Original member Siobhán Donaghy walked out on the band during 2001, citing bullying from her colleagues Keisha Buchanan and Mutya Buena. Rumours of intimidation and playground rules continued when Heidi Range stepped up to take Donaghy’s place, and later when Amelle Berraba was parachuted in following Mutya’s departure in 2005.
Before I can duck and cover, the new girl is quick to disabuse me of such notions.
“I used to think the exact same way,” she tells me. “I remember early on saying to the girls that I didn’t expect them to be very nice people, especially Keisha. I had read awful things about her. I felt so guilty for the first few months as I got to know them.”
The young Amelle was, she admits, “a mad little girl who really wanted to be Michael Jackson”. A precocious and accomplished imitator of Mariah Carey and Mary J. Blige, she studied at the Academy of Contemporary Music in Surrey before forming Boo2 with her younger sister Samiya. She has been co-writing songs with Keisha and Heidi since her induction, starting with ‘Follow Me Home’ on the 2006 album Taller In More Ways.
Authorship remains a contentious issue for Amelle and the girls. They have always been The Girl Band It’s Okay To Like but their perfect earworm pop is frequently attributed to a conflagration of marketing know-how and unseen machinations rather than the girls themselves. As Keisha and Heidi have often pointed out, the ladies wouldn’t be as wealthy as they are now were they not co-writing the songs. Amelle concurs.
“We’re so not manufactured,” she says. “We’re not told what to say. I think there’s a certain edginess to us, a realness. We’re allowed to be unique.”
I’m glad Ms. Berraba appears to be her own person. She has had a terribly turbulent time of it since her tenure as a Sugababe began.
In early 2007 her boyfriend was arrested for attempted rape though it quickly transpired he had been miles away from the alleged crime scene. The unfortunate fellow was also the victim of a machete attack last December after which he almost lost an arm. Amelle herself was arrested for the alleged assault of a woman in a nightclub in April 2007 and again last January on suspicion of causing criminal damage. Both charges proved to be groundless but the boring truth did little to prevent negative tabloid headlines.
“Jealousy is part of it,” explains Amelle. “But that doesn’t make it less horrible. I’ve sat beside Heidi and heard stories about myself on the radio and she’s turned around and said ‘but you were with me that night’. Actually the worst of it is finding out who your friends are. The personal betrayals are far more devastating than the ones from people you don’t know.”
I do wonder if it’s worth being a Sugababe. It sounds like that tricephalous entity gobbles up any possibility of having a normal life.
“People do just think you’re a Sugababe,” nods Amelle. “If I’m on holiday people come up to ask me where the girls are. But I’m still me. I watch The Simpsons. I watch Scrubs. I read a lot. I love James Frey. I love Kathy O'Beirne. I love science. It’d be lovely if I could do the job and then go home. It’d be great if we were just known for the music.”
Then she smiles: “But I still can’t imagine doing anything else.”