Falling out of the girlband-matic in 2000, the Sugababes were Keisha Buchanan (the black one), Siobhan Donaghey (the ginger one) and Mutya Buena (the dog rough one who'd probably ride you down an alley after the nightclub closed and then rob your wallet after you'd cum). Lauded for an album that easily fulfilled the promise of well-crafted pop evident from debut single Overload and the dark and moody Run for Cover, a tale of an abusive relationship, the girls' album One Touch sold exactly one hundred and thirteen copies, which was several hundred thousand less than their record label was hoping for. During a promotional tour in Japan, it emerged that the abusive relationship described in Run for Cover was actually that Donaghey suffered from her bandmates. Buchanan and Buena, beyond annoyed at the revelation that they had spent months singing and promoting a song about how they were being cunts, abandoned Donaghey dramatically in torrential rain at a train station while staring defiantly at her outside on the platform, as she desperately ran after the departing train, soaked to the skin and no doubt resembling some sort of drowned Irish setter. Donaghey then found that before departing the country without her, Buena had stolen her mobile phone and several thousand Yen, leaving behind only a partially opened condom in her purse.
Arriving back in Britain, Mutya and Keisha met with record label executives to chart the band's new direction. The label balked at the idea that the girls would no longer sing songs about being bitches, and were further appalled by Buchanan's desire to smile in their music videos. They were quickly released from their record deal and found themselves in a boarding house for wayward girls. Sugababes v.1 were officially dead.
But salvation came in the form of a leggy blonde named Heidi Range, with whom the two shared a room at St. Sebastian's School for Morally Bankrupt Young Ladies. A Liverpudlian, Heidi was a capable singer but more importantly, and unlike any of the members of Sugababes v1, she was kinda hot. She was also passionate and had a burning desire for success, driven as she was by the notion of musically annihilating Atomic Kitten, a trio of vapid, talent free young women from the same council estate as Heidi. Range had held a grudge against them ever since they had thrown piss-filled balloons at her younger brother. “That wasn't on, what they did.”, Heidi recalled in a recent interview, “He's a bit slow. A bit of a spaz, is our kid. It just wasn't on. And they stole our telly.” Making the most of the new addition's comparable attractiveness, the girls were able to escape St. Sebastian's when Heidi distracted the security guard while Mutya “twatted him one”. The girls intended to confront their former label with a mixture of threats and suggestive double entendres in the hopes of securing a new record deal. However, London Records had moved premises, and when the girls arrived at the offices of newly formed Island Records, label bosses were charmed by their precocious mix of juvenile sexuality and insinuations of bodily harm both actual and grievous. Also, one of the executives had contracted genital warts from Atomic Kitten's Kerry Katona, and was enthusiastic about Heidi Range's ideas for revenge on the Scouse STI magnet.
The Sugababes lived again! Version 2.0 scored their first number one with their comeback single, Freak Like Me, which crested the wave of the early noughties enthusiasm for mash-ups, combining the music of Gary Numan's Are Friends Electric? with.... someone else's lyrics. So very 2002. They followed this up with Round Round, another number one, and went on to release the album Angels With Dirty Faces, which actually made it into the top five, a good seventy places higher than their debut. The early promise of Sugababes v2 blossomed into consistent success. Follow-up album Three spawned another number-one hit and was certified twice-platinum. Which is probably impressive and means it sold bucketloads. They had songs on film soundtracks and Heidi Range fulfilled a personal ambition and pleased their label immeasureably when she introduced Kerry Katona to the two vices that would destroy her; cocaine and Brian McFadden.
Despite all this, label bosses were not completely happy. It was proving impossible to crack America, widely regarded as A Big Market important for the making of money. A team of music scientists were tasked with uncovering the reason why the 'Babes were failing to set the Billboard charts alight. After 8 months of intensive research, they concluded that the girls were producing lacklustre music videos, which in turn was making it impossible for them to get playlisted on MTV; a prerequisite for success in the days when YouTube was just a squiggle of half-formed code in a programmer's cerebellum. Attempts to secure the services of creative music directors proved fruitless, for, as one visionary director put it “Autotune can make anyone sing good, but no amount of special effects can turn a pig's ear into a silk purse”. That pig's ear was Mutya Buena.
The record label were stumped. They couldn't simply fire Buena, as she would undoubtedly retaliate by bottling their faces or having her drug dealer friends jack up the price of the cocaine they dealt. The Execs sat on their hands as production on the fourth album, Taller In More Ways, continued. An attempt to subconsciously communicate their desire to get rid of Mutya by having her sing lead vocals on a song called Ugly failed to bear fruit. But a stroke of inspiration gave the suits the opportunity they needed to get rid of the girl cruelly described as “a cross between a shitzu and an obstructed bowel”. They slipped some sleeping pills into a bottle of Buckfast, and while Mutya was unconscious, replaced her contraceptives with tic-tacs. A week later, Mutya was pregnant.
As they had predicted, the pressure of being a new mother in a popular girlband, combined with the need to tour regularly and the dangers inherent in running the various gangs in the flats she grew up in, proved too much for Mutya, and she was forced to bow out of the group not long after the release of the fourth album. Eager not to mess with a winning formula, executives replaced Mutya, the rough-as-fuck bitch with the seven inch nails with Amelle Berrabah, a prettier rough-as-fuck bitch with five inch nails. Sugababes v3 was born, and a new era begun with the re-release of Taller in More Ways, still with Mutya's vocals, except for the three singles, which had been re-recorded with Amelle. Who was also badly photoshopped onto the cover. This commitment to quality would surely see the girls break America.
After touring for most of 2007, the group returned to the studio to work with a number of US-based producers for the album Change. The lead single About You Now was a huge success and seemed to bode well for the group's aspirations to take on America. Unfortunately, the producers they chose for the album were the ones everyone else had grown sick of throughout 2007, and when the album was released in December, it already sounded quite dated and failed to make the impact the label were hoping for. The girls had settled into a lazy routine of releasing catchy single every year in the Autumn, a ballad in November and stocking-filler album for Xmas. They stuck to this pattern for 2008, with the release of Catfights and Spotlights. However, the lazy stupor that the band had fallen into was reflected by decreasing public interest. This was only heightened in 2008's market when Cheryl Cole, of rival girlband Girls Aloud, ascended the throne and became Queen of England following a successful campaign for the role of Nation's Sweetheart. Cole's increased media presence benefitted her own group but at the expense of the Sugababes. Catfights and Spotlights was considered an embarrassing flop, performing so poorly that a tour to promote it could not be justified. The girls decided to spend 2009 hard at work on their 7th album, keen to make up for the failings of 2008.
But the girls weren't the only ones hard at work. Original Sugababe Siobhán Donaghey had came a long way since being abandoned in Japan. Her fiery red hair led the Japanese to worship her as a goddess. She had been given the honorific “Amaterasu omikami” meaning “that which illuminates all-Heaven” and sent a group of ninja assassins to disrupt the recording of Sweet 7, the Sugababes make-or-break 2009 album. Wave after wave of ninja foes attempted to distract the group from their hard work, but they were fortunate enough to be able to call on Amelle's East End gangster friends to buy them enough time to finish recording. A particularly bloody encounter on the night of July 20th whle recording the first song from the album has now become popularly known as “The Battle of Get Sexy”. The 28 lives lost that night are remembered in lyrics such as “Cause I'm too sexy in this club, too sexy in this club, so sexy it hurts” and “In a two piece at the beach they say hey, sexy”. Donaghey was not to be deterred however. Mobilising Japan's ultimate weapon; besuited businessmen, she negotiated a takeover of Island Records and prepared to terminate the Sugababes once and for all. The jig looked to be up. All the hard work was for nothing and Sweet 7 would never be released. A song from a Boots advert would be the Sugababes epitaph. But Keisha Buchanan was not prepared to let it end like that. She had learned one thing through the various incarnations of her band, and that was the importance of fighting. Buchanan researched her strange and unfamiliar foes. She immersed herself in every Wikipedia article about Japan she could find, and eventually went to the most authoritative source on all-things Japanese available to the West: fan-translated anime on the internet. She came to understand her enemy. She knew how much they valued honour. If she did the honourable thing, she reasoned, the Sugababes might be saved. Sweet 7 could be released. The Japanese wanted Keisha, and only Keisha. It was she who had, along with Mutya, enraged their Empress all those years before. It was she who should pay the price.
On the 21st of September 2009, Keisha Buchanan turned herself over to the Imperial Forces of Her August Majesty Siobhán Donaghey of Japan, resigning from the Sugababes. On the 22nd of September 2009, Empress Donaghey announced that diplomatic relations between Britain and Japan would be restored following the execution of Buchanan some time in October. As is the way of things, Keisha was replaced with the next most talented black person on the record label's books, Jade Ewen, former United Kingdom Eurovision hopeful. On the 23rd of November, Sugababes v4, the first without any of the original three members, will release their first album. They will honour the sacrifice that Keisha Buchanan made with their next single, About a Girl. “Girls bring the fun of life, sugar like apple pie, take a trip to paradise, let's have a party – oh!”
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