The Saturdays interview: Something for the weekend

Published on Saturday 13 June 2009 13:38

RIGHT about now, The Saturdays will arrive at the grand civic hall, but it won't be at the front door where a big sleeper-bus is parked and it won't be at the rear entrance where the gear is being lugged into the sold-out venue.

Fans are camped at both spots but the phone in my pocket has just throbbed with this text, from tour manager Mark: "Meet us round the side." For the first time in a while, I can claim to know more crucial stuff than a representative sample of the nation's school-skiving adolescents and the feeling is great, like I've just rendered Twitter obsolete.

Within seconds of taking up position, however, I'm joined by all the girls and boys with their CDs and posters ready for signatures, among them Jon, 13, who lifts up his T-shirt and declares: "I'm getting Rochelle on my six-pack!"

You know you've made it when management has to set aside time in your hectic schedule for amassing an autograph mountain. Rochelle Wiseman, the one who resembles a young Donna Summer when she's been at the hair-straighteners, leads the charge to catering where the chef has prepared a salad of edamame beans, as promoted by Victoria Beckham. You know you've made it, though, when you can veer off menu with impunity.

"Hot dog," says Frankie Sandford.

"Me too," says Mollie King.

Una Healy: "I could eat a horse."

Vanessa White: "You wouldn't want to; I have." And as regulars on the various fansites for "The Satz" will know, White has also eaten snake in her brief but eventful and increasingly glamorous life.

The Saturdays are headlining for the first time, the tour has reached Newcastle, surprisingly and medal-deservedly T in the Park is on the itinerary… and I'm to interview the band during the vital hair and make-up process. One stylist does all five, which makes the cynical journalist think they have a bit to go before they can usurp Girls Aloud, who surely employ manicurists for each hand. But Kes, another member of Team Saturdays, puts me right: "Girls Aloud used to have a hairdresser each but that just caused jealousy and bitchiness over who looked the best. Girls' groups function more effectively when there's absolute hair democracy." Truly, then, The Saturdays are the hair apparent.

Any thoughts of me being allowed to hang out in the dressing-room, to grapple with the industrial-strength hairspray in a manly way for the band's benefit, are quickly dispelled. I'm told to sit at the back of the empty stalls and they'll be brought up, one by one, in various states of gig-readiness, beginning with Wiseman, so let's deal straight away with the Girls Aloud comparisons – have The Saturdays really been cloned from them in a laboratory, using a test-tube of Cheryl Cole's false-nail DNA, a discarded Sarah Harding bra-strap and some supermodel-approved pong?

The five-headed Saturdays monster is variously Irish, part-Filipino and posh, but Wiseman is the one who laughs like an Essex drain. "Well, we share the same label, but we're trying to be ourselves. From the start we wanted to work with different people from them and now we have our secret Norwegian sixth member, Ina Wroldsen, who wrote Up for us, and Stirkin & Rogers, Rihanna's producers, wrote Issues. We'll be using all these guys again for the next album but this time the five of us are going to have proper input. We respect Girls Aloud but they're so far ahead of us right now. They sell out Wembley; we play Glasgow (first date on this tour], and even though there's people banging on our car, we're turning to each other and going: 'Did they really like us?' Then again, Glasgow's tough, maybe they didn't, ha ha."

Nevertheless, The Saturdays are a manufactured band, assembled from an audition lasting six rounds which King remembers as "gruelling" and Wiseman as "hardcore bitchy". They know this will always provoke snootiness – and suspicion that they're what Sandford terms "puppets on strings, not even allowed to decide between Nutella or jam" – although with the national-institution status recently achieved by Take That, maybe there will be less of it than in the past. "All we can do," says Healy, "is work hard, never forget we're living the dream, but speak up if we're asked to do something which isn't us."

And they do. White, the baby at 19, says some of the outfits offered to them barely exist. "I'm funny about that. I mean, in a few years I might strip, but I'll be the one who decides." Second night of the tour in Dundee, Healy had a wardrobe malfunction involving a too-tight skirt: "There's this bit where we throw open our coats. Well, it had rode right up. After that I demanded hot pants." And a proposal that new video Work be filmed on a beach was greeted with five sulks. "They wanted us in our bright colours again," groans King. The Saturdays may not be facing down totalitarian tanks but there was another tiny victory for personal freedom: they got a grubby back-lane location for what King calls "a harder edge, and to show we can really dance".

Wiseman and Sandford have yet to be glammed up and, in their cardies and skinny jeans, these Saturdays could almost be Saturday girls at your local Topshop; the band are pretty but not unattainable and that's important. If fans get their friends round and push back the sofa, they can be The Saturdays; and if they show potential, their dads might chauffeur them a 270-mile round trip to singing lessons, like White's did.

I ask the band about pop's downside, its casualties, and there are sad nods of recognition when Britney Spears gets mentioned, especially from King, who idolised her when she was younger, then shocked her strict girls' school and stockbroker-belt family when she announced she was turning her back on uni. "I don't think that'll happen to any of us," says Healy. Wiseman adds: "Our mums wouldn't dare let it." There is a strong support network and they also have each other, something that was by no means guaranteed when they were being constructed.

We shouldn't mistake sweet looks for naivety; the girls got many of the disruptive dramas of pop out of the way pre-The Saturdays. White was an errant pupil of the Sylvia Young Theatre School and King was rejected at The X Factor's boot-camp stage with another band. Both Wiseman and Sandford are veterans of S Club Juniors, the latter taking their break-up particularly badly. "For four years my life had been organised for me. I was like 'Help, what am I going to do today?' At 16 I thought I was a has-been. How nuts is that?"

Then there's Healy, at 27 the oldest Saturday, who wasn't talent-spotted early like the others and so endured a longer slog of pub gigs, corporates for drunken race-goers and mood music for Gary Rhodes' Dublin restaurant. First out of make-up and flashing spectacular peepers, she's ready for tonight's show. "All those times before I was background, but a tough apprenticeship makes you appreciate the nice things," she says. You could say she's gone from Girl Quiet to Girl Aloud, but The Saturdays are determined that such easy reference points will soon become meaningless.

Work is released 29 June. The Saturdays play T in the Park, 12 July, www.thesaturdays.co.uk