Curious that I am, I used that "login and you can read 2 articles" and there is the full thing, if anyone is interested:
www.thetimes.co.uk/article/does-liam-like-it-yeah-hes-curious-he-probably-loves-it-vs5zwvkz9All Saints: Does Liam like it? Yeah, he’s curious, he probably loves it
The Nineties band are back with a new album and songs about their famous exes
Ed Potton
October 7 2016, 12:01am, The Times
Interviewing All Saints is a bit like stumbling into an episode of Loose Women. The reunited girl band are holding court on plastic chairs in the garden of their publicist’s office in central London, talking over each other in a gale of dirty laughter and in-jokes. Mention of Chris Martin from Coldplay’s declaration that he’s “so happy All Saints are back” prompts a chorus of “aaahs” from the quartet, as does the memory of Adele singing Never Ever, their slinky signature hit, at her recent live show. Then Nicole Appleton decides that I look like somebody she knows: “Doesn’t he remind you of Freddie?”
It’s a combination of convivial, chaotic and slightly scary, which is All Saints to a T. When they emerged in 1997 they were billed as the bolshy, sexy, streetwise Stones to the Spice Girls’ Beatles; more urban, less manufactured. There was Shaznay Lewis, who wrote the songs, Melanie Blatt, the outspoken one, and the Canadian-born sisters, Natalie and Nicole Appleton. When they went on a Smash Hits tour with Aqua and some of their other Nineties peers they were, Blatt insists, “definitely the most hardcore”. The boyband NSYNC were “terrified” of them, she says. I can well believe it.
Combat trousers and crop tops: All Saints in the Nineties
Tim Roney/Getty Images
All Saints were at the throbbing heart of Nineties London, winning two Brits, selling ten million albums and appearing with tabloid-baiting regularity at such nightspots of the moment as the Met Bar. They had rock-star beaus coming out of their ears: Nicole went out with Robbie Williams before marrying and divorcing Liam Gallagher of Oasis; Natalie married the nation’s second most famous Liam, Howlett of the Prodigy; Blatt was in a relationship with Stuart Zender of Jamiroquai.
All are now mums in their early forties — they have six children between them, aged from 6 to 23. “We feel like we’re skiving from our real lives,” Blatt says.
“These are our play dates!” Lewis adds.
They all look good on it, groomed and youthful in baseball caps, jeans and designer trainers. No sign of the combat trousers and crop tops of their twenties, although they point out that both are back in fashion. “I saw someone just now,” Nicole says. “I said to Mel, ‘Look, she’s dressed like we used to dress.’ ”
Blatt’s daughter, Lily, has just finished at Sylvia Young, the theatre school where her mother met Nicole. Like the rest of the All Saints progeny, she has been supportive of her mum returning to the limelight with a national tour this month. “They could easily have been, ‘Oh no, what are you guys doing?’ ” Blatt says. “But they haven’t at all.”
Nicole, who received a £5.5 million divorce settlement from Gallagher in 2014, lives with their son, Gene, in north London. Has Gene been urging his dad to reform his band? “Oh, I don’t know what they talk about,” Nicole says, suddenly taciturn. Boy stuff? “Not even that.”It’s 23 years since All Saints formed in west London, and three since their latest reunion, which culminated this year with a comeback album, Red Flag, and a single, One Strike, about Nicole’s messy split from Gallagher. Reviews have ranged from warm to gushing, which was “overwhelming”, Nicole says.
“I think people were probably expecting it to be really bad,” says Blatt, living up to her reputation as the straightest talker of the group. Blatt, who had moved to Ibiza, needed the most persuading to sign up. “We FaceTimed Mel,” Natalie says. “She took the longest drag on a cigarette.”
“I’m not one for working in general,” says Blatt with a smile.
She had been put off by the failure of their first reunion in 2006, which she later admitted that she had only done “for the money”, adding that “All Saints are never ever getting back together again”.
This time, though, there was no pressure to come up with new material. They had been asked to support Backstreet Boys on tour. All they had to do was belt out their back catalogue. Seeing “people singing your songs 20 years later, enjoying them like they’d just come out yesterday” was the ideal confidence booster, Lewis says. After that, making an album seemed natural.
All Saints always fought against external pressures from labels, promoters and sponsors. When they started out, that got them a reputation for being difficult.
“We were like those two guys in An American Werewolf in London walking into the pub,” Nicole says. “We just didn’t fit in.”
“I think that’s why people thought we were miserable the whole time,” Blatt says. “If we didn’t want to be there, you knew about it.”
Friction was internal, too. While Lewis was acknowledged as the real talent of the group, the Appletons, with their celebrity spouses, attracted more media attention. Tensions increased to the point where the four were travelling in separate limos. It all came to a head in 2001 when Lewis and Blatt had a blazing row over who would wear a particular jacket for a photo shoot.
“It was about way more than a jacket,” Lewis says (although she still has the jacket at home).
“It was the straw that broke the camel’s back. We just lost communication with each other,” Natalie says, reaching for some classic therapy-speak: “We never reset the button and said, ‘It’s about us, guys.’ ”
The group split. “We were all devastated for a long time,” Blatt says. “The bitterness. We didn’t even want to hear the words ‘All Saints’.” Nicole and Natalie returned as a duo, Appleton, while Lewis and Blatt launched solo careers. None of them rivalled their success as a quartet.
So how has music changed since they’ve been away? “You’re probably allowed to be a bit more real now,” says Lewis. “Back in the Nineties it was so polished and poppy. That was probably another reason we didn’t fit it.”
The new album moves away from what Nicole calls the “really naughty” R’n’B pop of their early years — songs such as All Hooked Up (“I know you want a piece of my ass”) — towards more confessional material such as One Strike, which was inspired by the phone call in which Gallagher told Nicole that he had fathered a child with the journalist, Liza Ghorbani. After hanging up Nicole spoke to Lewis on the phone for two hours and Lewis wrote One Strike based on their conversation. “And with one strike/My world lights up in a fire,” run the lyrics.
Did the song function as therapy for Nicole? “It wasn’t therapy at all,” she insists. “She was my friend and it was a bad situation and I was calling her. That was real life, real emotions and she was getting it raw.”
Has Gallagher heard the song? It refers at one point to “your poisoned tongue”.
“Gosh, I don’t know,” Nicole says. “Probably. Yeah, he’s curious. He probably loves it.”
“It’s his all-time top favourite song!” says Lewis, to another round of laughter.
Nicole says she was nervous to perform One Strike live for the first time, but the one that’s actually harder to sing, in light of Gallagher’s infidelity, is Never Ever (“How you could ever hurt me so?/I need to know what I’ve done wrong/And how long it’s been going on/Was it that I never paid enough attention?”)It always comes back to Never Ever. Natalie’s favourite moment of the Nineties was when it won the Brit for best single in 1998. “We were up against Elton John’s Candle in the Wind and Blur’s Song 2. We thought, ‘There’s no way we’re gonna win this one.’ ”
Also at the Brits that year were their so-called nemeses, the Spice Girls. Disappointingly, they didn’t actually hate each other’s guts.
“We used to hang out, we still do,” Natalie says.
“I was with Emma [Bunton] last week, and I see Mel C all the time,” Nicole adds.
They’re clearly relishing a life that’s relatively free of media games and concocted rivalries. Even Blatt is on board: “There’s just no bullshit with it now, thank God.”
All Saints are touring the UK until October 18