The gold discs that adorn the walls of Sheffield songwriter Eliot Kennedy’s home are evidence of his status as a ‘hired gun’ for pop artists in the nineties and noughties. Although some of his evergreen hits, such as Five’s sole US top 10 hit When The Lights Go Out and Boyzone’s Picture Of You (which won him an Ivor Novello Award), were devised quickly and to a brief (‘You have to be OK with removing the emotional aspect — you’re not necessarily making an artistic statement,’ he says), the biggest songwriting lesson he learned was from co-writing the Spice Girls’ 1996 global smash Say You’ll Be There.
‘We sat in a circle, and they’d throw out ideas that were personal to them and their vocabulary,’ he recalls about working with the group on the track. ‘It was like wrangling kittens, but it became about capturing that energy and honing it into something that felt like a song.’
Six years later, Girls Aloud’s debut single Sound Of The Underground, an NME-approved cocktail of surf guitar and drum’n’bass, defied expectations of what a reality show-formed girlband could achieve. It set the template for a succession of wildly inventive tracks like 2005’s Biology, which samples the riff from the Animals’ 1965 single Club-A-Go-Go and dispenses of the standard verse-chorus structure.
‘Those songs sound fresh because they’re not of their time,’ Miranda tells M. ‘We were outsiders with a desire for artistry. These songs were made with love, care and freedom, which was born out of [Xenomania] being a family. We weren’t going in and doing one-day sessions — we were trying to be original. There’s a boldness and complexity there. This wasn’t a time of TikTok where you think, “We need to get to the chorus quickly in case anybody skips.”’
A1’s Ben Adams, who co-wrote the majority of the boyband’s eight top 10 singles, used to spend three weeks at a time working on music at a writing retreat with producer Mike Hedges. End products like the group’s wistful, indie-hued 2002 hit Caught In The Middle justified that time and expense, but, as Ben notes, many of today’s pop artists simply don’t have that luxury.
‘A lot of people I work with now could be number one in the charts, but they have to have another job as well,’ he explains. ‘A lot of songwriters and producers therefore take the approach of throwing as much shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. The world is so fast-paced and everybody’s writing on laptops, so it’s often done and dusted in one day. Is it a hit? No? Then it’s on to the next thing.’
‘As songwriters, we were outsiders with a desire for artistry.’ – Miranda Cooper
While that creative period of incubation isn’t a hallmark of today’s pop songwriting, there are some outliers. ‘I’m delighted that there are now more artists like Lola Young and Charli xcx making albums with one producer or writing team,’ Miranda notes. ‘With that set-up you’re able to experiment, and there’s an intimacy and safety in that.’
Lyrically, Miranda’s Girls Aloud songs strongly align with the kaleidoscopic world-building favoured by songwriters like Charli and Chappell Roan. ‘I felt like I was writing a mission statement for the type of women we wanted to be, emphasising body positivity and sex positivity,’ she explains. ‘So there’s a freedom in seeing these women now on stage embodying those songs in a way that’s even more relevant than perhaps they were originally.’
That authenticity tallies with this current era of pop, which celebrates vulnerability, vivid personalities and the kind of boldness that was pioneered by the girlbands and boybands of the nineties and noughties.
‘On paper, Girls Aloud singing Something Kinda Ooooh in their forties shouldn’t work — but it does,’ Miranda says. ‘It’s empowering. They’re being respected more now than they were back in the noughties, when it felt like they were having to prove themselves. Going into each album, we never knew if it would be the last as it felt like it could be taken away at any moment. But it can’t be taken away now — it’s legacy.
‘There’s a connection between the on-stage authenticity of Girls Aloud and Sugababes with this exciting, colourful and personality-led time we’re in with pop. It’s women leaning into their vulnerabilities and messiness without smoke and mirrors, and that offers something to younger generations.’
This article features in the latest special edition of M Magazine.