Sugababes
All Together Now
★★★★☆
The sun comes out and the hits follow closely behind as Sugababes bring feelgood factor 50 to tea-time on day two of All Together Now.
It’s the perfect love-in between pop stars and punters, with Mutya Buena, Keisha Buchanan and Siobhán Donaghy sating the audiences’ craving for late-evening chart escapism. There’s a Waterford angle, too. Donaghy’s grandmother hails from this part of the world. And Buchanan recently discovered she’s four per cent Irish
Sugababes’ original early 2000s incarnation was full of drama. Donaghy quit after their first album; the group subsequently went through a number of further line-up changes. One thing that never wavered was their nose for a classic single and they pushed Girls Aloud for the title of best pop group of the early 21st century.
Having initially reunited as Mutya, Keisha and Siobhán, they have now officially reformed as Sugababes. And at All Together Now, the trio deliver a nostalgia-fest with bite.
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They open with perhaps their most transcendent moment, their cover of Adina Howard’s Freak Like Me, which ingeniously samples the loping cyborg riff from Gary Numan’s Are ‘Friends’ Electric?
Sugababes’ set is from there one long, sweet-toothed rush. Dressed in matching black and grey, they pirouette through a super-charged Red Dress. Even better is heartfelt singalong Ugly: a ballistic bopper about loving who you are rather than who people think you are that lands even more powerfully in the social media age.
There is banter — “we’ve been drinking rum punch, we really are that wired” — though they must work hard to outshine the enthusiast up front waving a Child of Prague statue on a poll.
Stools are whipped out for Overload, their fantastically doomy break-out recorded when they were teenagers. But everyone — artists and audience alike — is on their feet for the closing double high-kick of Round Round and About You Now. For anyone with a sweet tooth for great pop, Sugababes are a triumph.
