Cheryl has a wind problem. We’re meeting at rehearsals for Girls Aloud’s comeback tour, standing in what will later become the Gift Wrapped Kitty Kat VIP Zone – essentially a pit next to the stage named after a ludicrous lyric in their equally ludicrous 2004 single Love Machine. It’s Monday, the tour starts on Friday, the band only performed a first onstage run-through yesterday and everyone is on edge. Cheryl (formerly Tweedy, but now professionally just Cheryl) is joined by her bandmates – Nadine Coyle, Nicola Roberts and Kimberley Walsh – on two lightly battered white leather sofas surrounded by empty Coke cans, dozens of sparkly high-heeled boots and, intriguingly, four motorbikes.
It’s not nerves that are causing the wind issues, but an overzealous industrial fan being aimed inside a 10ft billowing red skirt being tested on stage by the band’s stylist Victoria Adcock. “Less wind,” Cheryl shouts between furtive puffs on a vape. No one listens. “LESS WIND!” she bellows again in her thick geordie accent. (Ironically, a week after we meet, on tour in Dublin, Cheryl’s skirt will fail to inflate at all.) The look is for the band’s performance of Sexy! No No No, another brilliantly bizarre hit that still sounds as if it’s been beamed in from pop’s future. As the shiny red material continues to inflate, Roberts has noticed another issue. “Unless we’re pushing it down it’s going to look like we’re fucking toilet roll covers,” she says, to much amusement from the other girls (despite all now being in their late 30s and early 40s, everyone still refers to them collectively as “the girls”).
