Where many pop bands of the early ‘00s have played out their reunions at Freshers Week gigs and on nostalgia festival bills, the reformed line-up of Mutya Buena, Keisha Buchanan and Siobhan Donaghy under the Sugababes name has been altogether more credible. At the end of 2022 they released well-received new album The Lost Tapes; later this year they’ll headline The O2; their underplay at London’s Garage last night for BRITS Week presented by Mastercard for War Child was a hen party-free zone, filled with people more likely into PinkPantheress than P!nk.
Indeed, now feels like the perfect moment in music for them to return. Seated nonchalantly on stools (a sort of deadpan effortlessness having been their original mode of cool) to deliver 23-year-old debut single Overload, what struck the most is how current the track sounded. Mixed into a dubby outro, before they segued into a cover of Sweet Female Attitude’s Flowers, its understated beats shuffled along as both influential and strangely modern – proof that the theory of music’s 20-year cycle of trends still has legs.
