More than just pretty faces

More than just pretty faces

Conrad Astley
5/ 5/2006

WHEN a group of girls won a reality TV show back in 2002 it would have been a brave move to have put money on anyone still caring four years later.

The five girls in question were chosen after auditioning for Popstars: The Rivals - the show which aimed to create one male and one female band to battle it out for the Christmas number one single.

Logic should have dictated that's where the story would end. But while many would-be stars who tried to find fame through reality TV quickly fell by the wayside - notably the male rivals One True Voice - Girls Aloud are very much still with us.

The girls are on their third album, are embarking on another arena tour, and even have a TV series dedicated to them - Girls Aloud: Off The Record, which started on E4 last month.

Speaking during rehearsals for the new tour, band member Kimberley Walsh said she thought the sisterly relations within the band had helped them stay together.

"There's no room for bitchiness," she said. "We'd probably last two minutes if we had that sort of attitude.

"There's no competition between us, I don't know why anyone would think there would be.

"We auditioned to be in a band, we didn't want to be on our own. Everyone's got their own strengths and weaknesses that they bring to it and if one person does well we all will."

That isn't the impression you'd get from reading the celebrity pages of the tabloids, which are routinely filled with stories about in-fighting between band members.

But Bradford-born Kimberley had plenty to say on that subject.

"The press have always got something about one of us leaving the band or having a fight with another member," she said. "But we know that a lot of the things that they write - well, all of them - are completely untrue."

The girls have received their fair share of press attention since they first formed, particularly after band member Cheryl Tweedy was sentenced to community service after being convicted of assaulting a nightclub toilet attendant.

But Kimberley, who had appeared in the Granada TV drama, This Is Personal: The Hunt For The Yorkshire Ripper, as well as in the comedy drama Dream before joining the band, said the attention from the papperazi had fast become a bore.

"The worse thing thing I've ever had to put up with is really bad knicker shots," she said. "They're like vultures, they crawl on the floor and literally put the camera up your skirt. It's a totally invasion of privacy.

"You're getting into a car really carefully, and you're completely sober, but they just shove the camera up there and make you look like a drunken mess.

"There's nothing you can do once the picture's in. You've got to carry on and pretend you don't know the whole nation's seen your crotch. The only thing you can do is just wear big knickers."

She said many of the stories, such as their long-standing rivalry with singer Charlotte Church, had simply been made up.

And she also knocked the recent speculation that rap singer Mike Skinner's single When You Wasn't Famous - about the singer having a one-night stand with a crack smoking female pop star - was about Cheryl.

"That was absolutely ridiculous," she said. "We met him for the first time when we did Top Of The Pops a few weeks ago.

"We just said `hi, nice to meet you' and that was it.

"It was just a publicity stunt on someone else's part, but we had nothing to do with it."

While the press can't get enough of Girls Aloud, the same seems to be true of the fans. Far from only being adored by pre-pubescent girls, their releases are often praised by "serious" periodicals such as The NME and The Guardian, and they have been confirmed to play this summer's V Festival alongside artists such as Radiohead, Morrissey, Beck and Paul Weller.

"A lot of the younger fans probably don't realise how clever the music is," Kimberley said.

"It works on completely different levels, which is great for us.

"There's a big mix of people whenever we play, you get fully grown blokes and a lot of gay men, as well as the teenagers.

"We've had full-on punk rockers down at the front, and even a 60-year-old man on the front row, which was a bit of a surprise."

Girls Aloud are playing at a special VIP event at The Arndale Centre on Thursday. Entrance into this concert is by invitation only, but the band is back in the city to play the Manchester Evening News Arena on May 27.


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