Where many pop bands of the early ‘00s have played out their reunions at Freshers Week gigs and on nostalgia festival bills, the reformed line-up of Mutya Buena, Keisha Buchanan and Siobhan Donaghy under the Sugababes name has been altogether more credible. At the end of 2022 they released well-received new album The Lost Tapes; later this year they’ll headline The O2; their underplay at London’s Garage last night for BRITS Week presented by Mastercard for War Child was a hen party-free zone, filled with people more likely into PinkPantheress than P!nk.
Indeed, now feels like the perfect moment in music for them to return. Seated nonchalantly on stools (a sort of deadpan effortlessness having been their original mode of cool) to deliver 23-year-old debut single Overload, what struck the most is how current the track sounded. Mixed into a dubby outro, before they segued into a cover of Sweet Female Attitude’s Flowers, its understated beats shuffled along as both influential and strangely modern – proof that the theory of music’s 20-year cycle of trends still has legs.
Though the trio have only released two albums – with more than two decades between them – in this incarnation of the band, Sugababes’ set dealt purely in the hits from across all iterations of their career, from the sass-pop of Red Dress to the epic balladry of Too Lost In You to a still-superlative Freak Like Me.
If there was any question as to how Donaghy – the first to leave back in 2001 – would fare tackling a majority set of songs she was never part of, from her first verse in opener Push The Button the crowd were on her side, giving the singer an audibly louder cheer as she took the mic. Spare a thought for long-term former member Heidi Range, but the chemistry between the three old friends reunited on stage felt different: a genuine bond originated in three voices that still sound flawless together, as evidenced on a spine-tingling, harmony-drenched Stronger.
Though the new album was only represented by the euphoric Today and 2013 MKS track Flatline, both hit with as much earworm immediacy as their classics. And while set-closer About You Now’s super-sugary pop didn’t fit the three quite so well (only Buchanan sung on the original), its message of learning from your mistakes and realising that what you wanted was on your doorstep needed little further explanation.
Dressed down in T-shirts, and embracing moments of choreography with laidback swagger rather than a sense of meticulous polish, Sugababes were always outliers in the pop pack. It makes sense, then, that their second-coming would be equally unique: one intrinsically filled with nostalgia, but that could prove relevant to a whole new generation.
