She’s back from the States with a solo album and an open mind about a reboot with her bandmates. But she might need to build some bridges with Cheryl, Nicola and Kimberley first, writes Nick Levine

During our hour-long interview, Nadine Coyle shows me a picture of a T-shirt a fan’s just tweeted to her. He’s had it made especially for her upcoming gig at London club G-A-Y. On the front is a photo of Girls Aloud and the tweet Coyle posted in March 2013, right after the group announced their separation. ‘You should know by now I had no part in any of this split business. I couldn’t stop them. I had the best time & want to keep going. Xxxx.’ Nadine shoots me a look, equal parts bemused and amused, that seems to say, ‘Fans, what are they like?’

Having reconnected with Girls Aloud’s producer and founder of Xenomania, Brian Higgins, Nadine has just released her first solo single since the group’s demise. Go To Work is a motivational pop song on which her voice, always the group’s best, sounds super-gutsy. ‘This song is a good bridge between Girls Aloud and some of the more “out there” songs I’ve recorded,’ she explains. ‘I’m reintroducing myself, and I don’t want to do it by smacking people round the face with some massive song that I’m just singing the hell out of.’

Since Girls Aloud ended, Nadine has moved back to London after nine years in LA. ‘I grew up in Northern Ireland where it was freezing. Having 26 degrees every day is great for a holiday but, after a while, it didn’t feel like my life,’ she says, her thick Derry accent gloriously unaffected by California. Nadine and her partner, former American football player Jason Bell, have also welcomed a daughter, Anaíya, who’s now three. ‘She thinks my job is so much fun,’ says Nadine proudly. ‘I might have to go away with work for a few days, but when I come back it feels like I actually get more time with her. So I feel very fortunate I can do that.’

The official video has finally landed, and Nadine is a total boss in it <3 We love the video that much we have screencapped every single frame from the video and uploaded it to the gallery, over 1000 images! Click the link below to view them:

Screen Captures > Music Videos > Go To Work

“My favourite smell is bleach,” says Nadine Coyle.

“If I walk into the house and there’s things being bleached, it just makes me feel at home, euphoric almost.”

She pauses and laughs. “I can’t believe we’re having a whole discussion about bleach. Real pop star things!”

The topic has come up because Coyle’s new song, Go To Work, is a withering riposte to a lover who’s not pulling their weight.

“Tell me what I got to do / To get you up in the morning?” she sings over an infectious house piano. “Why don’t you go to work?”

The song sees the 32-year-old reunited with Xenomania, the songwriting geniuses behind her old band Girls Aloud. Together they scored 21 Top 10 singles, more than any other female band in history, before calling it a day in 2013. (Coyle says the split was “silly” and refused to put her name to it. But more on that later.)

Go To Work was inspired, says Coyle, by “general annoyance” with people “who just don’t do anything” to help out, at home or at work.

But she’s quick to point out the lyrics have nothing to do with her partner, American Football player Jason Bell.

“It’s funny, we were watching this programme, Married to a Celebrity, the other night, and people had to write lists of whinges about their partner.

“I said to Jason, ‘what would we write on our lists?’ and he said, ‘I wouldn’t write anything.’

“I was like, ‘that’s a good answer. Well done, Jason!’

“We live really well together,” she adds. “He doesn’t cook and he doesn’t clean, but he makes really good coffees.”

Feel-good pop

Home life has been Coyle’s priority since Girls Aloud split in 2013. She moved back to Northern Ireland after nine years in Los Angeles to raise her three-year-old daughter Anaiya.

Now, though, she’s all fired up and ready to return to the charts.

Nadine’s first solo record was released, somewhat disastrously, in partnership with Tesco.

Six years on she’s signed a deal with Virgin EMI, home to Justin Bieber and Katy Perry, and says there’s already a “four-single plan” for her new album.

It’s been seven years since ‘Insatiable’, why was now the right time to come back?

Now is the time, because now we have really good songs. It took all that time.

I mean, I hadn’t been working, it wasn’t like I’d been trying to do songs. After ‘Insantiable’ I didn’t do anything, literally I didn’t sing at all until the Girls Aloud reunion tour, and we did ‘Something New’.

And after that, I stopped singing again, but when I started back with Brian [Higgins, the founder of Xenomania] it was almost like something clicked. It was like, ’that’s right, that’s right, I love doing this stuff’.

I had been, like, ‘I don’t wanna be a singer anymore’, so dramatic, but when I was [recording with Brian] I was like, oh my god I love this, I love these songs, I love what this is. And then we just kept on working and working until we got more songs.

How did the two of you wind up working together again?

Basically, we have always had a great time together in the studio. I was in a car somewhere in London, and there were these amazing songs on [the radio], and I’d just moved back to London. And I was like, ’I wanna do [that]… who does amazing songs?’, and then I was like, ‘Brian Higgins, let me text him!’

So I sent him a text, and he was like, ′Nadine, I’ve been trying to get hold of you, you must have changed your number’. So we met a couple a days of later, and we were in the studio not long after that.

How was it getting back together after such a long gap, did it feel like anything had changed?

It didn’t feel like a day had passed. And it’s funny, because I’ve known Brian since the very beginning, since I was still auditioning to be in the band. And it feels like time hasn’t moved on. We’re still the same way, and still as focussed and as passionate about it as what we were trying to do the first Girls Aloud album.

When you started out, were the two of you conscious of trying not to replicate Girls Aloud’s sound?

It was more about just singing a load of stuff. Because my voice has changed since then. So it was about what’s going to mix in. I’m not gonna sing about jumping in tutus now, because it might seem a bit weird, you know?

So there was that thing of, ‘what kind of stuff would it be now’, ‘what kind of stuff can I sing?’, ‘what sounds best?’… but it was a blank canvas, we weren’t trying to make it like Girls Aloud, we weren’t trying to make it completely different. We just wanted to do stuff we enjoyed, stuff that’s fun and that we feel really good about, and that’s what happened.

Nadine performed at tonight’s We Are Manchester benefit concert, raising money for a memorial to those who lost their lives in the devastating terror attack in May.

She sang Go To Work for the first time live, and also Girls Aloud classic, Call The Shots. I’ve recorded them below for you to listen if you missed it.

Go To Work

Call The Shots