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.
