Down a back road in London’s Highgate is a pop fortress, decorated in massive prints of bygone Top 40 glitter. Girls Aloud pout from above office desks. Alison Goldfrapp smoulders in a purple veil, like gay Dune. The eyes of The Saturdays seem to follow you to the loo. And actually here at the centre of Fascination Management today, flesh and blood and eerily ageless, are Nicole and Natalie Appleton, half of All Saints – the aspirational cool kids’ favourite girlband of the Nineties. These are the women who taught a generation that they, too, could get totally sloshed, then roll into Live & Kicking the next morning and belt out the prettiest, airiest and most confessional pop of the era.
“We were so young, but that’s what made it work,” Natalie says, pragmatic and serene, accent all over the place (they grew up nomadically – born in Canada, before spells living in New York, then London, then New York again as teens). “We worked hard, we played hard. We were machines back then.”
