Often hailed as the best singer in Girls Aloud, now Nadine Coyle is going solo – with a little help from Tesco's. So is this the end of the band? Jude Rogers can't quite tell
By Jude Rogers
In 2001, the 16-year-old Nadine Coyle told the best lie in pop: she pretended to be 18 to take part in the Irish version of Popstars. She was found out and thrown out – but then her luck began. Rather than becoming a member of Six – whose only album, This Is It, rather lived up to its name – she got close to judge Louis Walsh, tried out for 2002's ITV series Popstars: The Rivals, and then became a member of Girls Aloud, who became one of the most successful British groups of all time.
Now, five much-loved albums later, Coyle is hoping for a new run of luck. She's launching her debut solo album, Insatiable, which she has been working on in LA, her home for the last two years. Given her reputation as the best singer in Girls Aloud, all should be dandy, but the rumour mill suggests otherwise. First, the time it has taken for the record to come together has led Popjustice's Peter Robinson to comment, rather drily: "[Nadine]'s been in enough studios with enough producers and enough writers … to have accidentally sung the entire works of Shakespeare." Second, Coyle has also been distancing herself from Girls Aloud for some time – she was conspicuously absent from the 2008 Brit awards, when the band were up for their first best British group award. Third, there have been rumours that the record was turned down by every major label, including Girls Aloud's alma mater, Polydor. Fourth, there's the fact that Girls Aloud have already spawned one solo star, and her name is not Nadine, but Cheryl Cole.
One louder … Nadine Coyle
Nevertheless, her debut album of loud, gutsy pop songs – plus, it must be said, some rather weak and weedy ballads – is finally coming out on Coyle's own label, Black Pen, next month, albeit via an exclusive deal that means you can only buy it in Tesco. "I'm so excited about it!" Coyle beams broadly. She settles down in a room in her publicist's building, which is disconcertingly full of smartly dressed mannequins. In the middle of them, she stretches her long legs and primps her hair, looking like a more glamorous version of the showroom dummies. Every little helps.
Coyle was born in 1985 in Derry, Northern Ireland. Music has always been in her blood, she begins, her accent claggy and thick, although it now betrays a hint of Malibu Beach. "My dad was a singer. Old classic stuff like Brown Eyed Girl, or Delilah if he was getting really dramatic. And there was always a gig. All the men would go out and play, congregate back at our house, and I would be up with them wailing into the wee hours." As Coyle got older, she would sing with them at little jazz festivals, and a local restaurant called The Drunken Duck. She never got an easy ride because she was younger, she adds. "If you weren't good enough, your mic would be turned off. That was my training."
Then she entered the Irish Popstars competition. In retrospect, was lying to get on it the best thing she did? "No," she smiles, a little cautiously. "Not the best thing I did." Coyle looks back on that period as an innocent time, though. "It was just an audition for a band. Those shows weren't at the forefront of the media then. They didn't say they could change people's lives. But I guess, even then, you had choreographers and motivators …" She shakes her head. "I didn't get that at all. I felt like saying, I'm here to sing, you know, not run for a marathon. I'm not going to last five minutes if this is how it is."
But last she did. Before Popstars: The Rivals, Louis Walsh advised Coyle to go solo, but she says she was keener to be in a band. She was a frontrunner throughout the competition, largely because of her obvious vocal talents. But once the band got together and beat runners-up One True Voice, Coyle started to realise her skills were no longer necessary. "For someone with my upbringing to do another TV show, and hear people saying, 'Oh, just, you know, mime to that … '" She shimmies under her jumper dress. "I couldn't get my head around it. For it to be that easy. It became more about doing a cute routine that singing a song." She sighs, a little over-dramatically. "It took a long time for me to realise, well, this is just what people do."
From Girls Aloud's debut album onwards, Coyle sang all the initial vocals in the studio, at the express wish of their producer, Brian Higgins of Xenomania. "From day one. Well, maybe not day one, but definitely week two. And that's how it worked from then onwards. The girls just left me to it." She nods. "And then they would come in and do their parts, and they would have their holidays."
So Girls Aloud don't always make records together? "Oh yes. We were very, very separate. We didn't know it any other way." Coyle speaks in the past tense about the group all the time – although she bats off questions about whether they have split, or are splitting. "After the last record, it was the right time to go and do our own individual things, and then come back together when the time was right, if the time was right." Even when she is pushed, this is as far as she will go.
However, she brims with enthusiasm for her favourite Girls Aloud records – their second album, What Will the Neighbours Say?, and their 2007 single, Can't Speak French. She liked dressing up in Marie Antoinette frocks for that video, she laughs, although "all that stuff" is far less important than the music. "But its funny – I would come home from work, and peel my eyelashes off. Then maybe take stuff out of my top, pads and little balls. Then the weaves in my hair, unclip these big things. And watching my sisters watching me, going, 'God, what else, Nadine, are you going to start unhooking limbs?'"
As Coyle talks about her vital contributions to Girls Aloud, you become increasingly aware of an elephant in the room. When the band got together, Coyle was its Queen Bee, after all. You wonder if she ever entertained the idea that one of her band-mates would emerge like a butterfly from a chrysalis, become the darling of the press, and get the band's first solo No 1.
Or to use another single-sex band analogy, is Nadine Coyle the Gary Barlow to Cheryl Cole's Robbie Williams? "Oh no!" Coyle squeaks, suddenly cautious. For the first time today, she looks like she might lose control. Then she pauses, and thinks. "Well, you know, Gary is very talented. Just like that, she has saved herself. "No, I think that's fine. But it's not dog work, what I did for the group. I enjoyed it and I wouldn't have wanted it any other way." She also says that Cole has done "amazingly well", having been raring to be a solo artist since their last tour. "Although I would have been exhausted doing what she did. I was exhausted just watching her, do you know what I mean? I needed time for myself and distance from the last album, too. To write about stuff that wasn't just about the way my life had been. You know, I woke up today and got my hair and makeup done."
Would Coyle say that she is more of a natural musician, and Cole more of a natural celebrity? "Yeah, I would say that would be an accurate evaluation." She shrugs her skinny shoulders. "But Cheryl's great, you know, and we get on. And I wouldn't be good at stuff like judging the X Factor. I would be the worst. Partly because I would want to be the one up there singing, with the lights and the stuff. Also, I'd be going, that's not good, never mind, let me do it. Just watch me."
In the last few years, Coyle has also been writing more music herself. She has become "obsessed" with the computer program Garageband, recording vocal melodies and basslines on her laptop at home. She would then take them to songwriters and producers, among them Guy Chambers, who wrote the album's punchy title track; Desmond Child, songwriter of choice for the US rock aristocracy; and Tony Gad, who writes for Beyoncé. "And William Orbit," she glows, who worked on a song called Unbroken. "He said about my track, 'I love it, how do you get that effect on your voice?' And there am I going, 'That's the living-room effect.'" She says she wanted a huge sound for the record. "That's what took most of the time, really. Getting all the musicians together, the drummers and the guitarists and the bassists. I just love a big wall of sound, and I really worked hard to get that."
So given all that glamour and ambition, why release the album through Tesco? Coyle has prepared quite an answer. "If I was to sign to a major – which I was going to, you know – they would have to get Tescos to buy the records to sell in the shops. Now, there's 4,600 Tesco stores and there's 200 HMV stores …" She spins off into various spirals of logic. She says she had been choosing between Universal and EMI, but that an exclusive deal with Tesco would see the grocer stock enough LPs for her to go platinum straightaway. It would also let her direct operations herself, so she could choose her own video directors and marketing teams.
But selling a record as if it were a tin of baked beans – doesn't that strip music of its glamour a little? "To me, it doesn't matter," she says, a little unconvincingly. "I just think of me in a supermarket planning what I'm going to cook for the evening, and buying maybe a bottle of wine, getting excited about putting on my new CD. That to me is, it's a lovely, nostalgic feeling. Everybody needs to eat and live and shop, after all …" She runs out of steam. "And, you know, it's realistic."
As we wrap up, and further questions about her going it alone get batted away, Coyle talks about other artists she admires – rather unfashionable acts such as Jamiroquai and Michael Bolton, as well songwriters "with brilliant lyrics" like Lily Allen. She also mentions her concerns about the younger generations, worrying that they can be influenced negatively by pop. "I saw my nieces copying these grinding moves I'd done with the girls the other day," she says. "That made me flinch. And now they're copying Rihanna singing: 'Come on rude boy boy, can you get it up.' Sweet mother of God. Hopefully they don't know what they're saying, or doing – although I understand why people like stuff like that.''
As she leaves, Coyle hugs me with relish, adding there are no other big things in her life apart from the album at the moment. A few hours later, she goes into Radio 1, and announces her engagement live on air. A few weeks later, the video for her first single is banned from TV, on account of her raunchy, see-through dress, stockings and suspenders.
Whatever she says, Nadine Coyle still knows exactly what she is doing.
via guardian.co.uk
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