Free CD inside today's Mail On Sunday - All Saints: All Hits
Free inside today's Mail On Sunday, another fantastic CD giveaway - All Saints: All Hits.
All Saints are one of the most successful girl bands of all time, with a string of hits including Pure Shores - later memorably used in the Leonardo Di-Caprio film The Beach – Never Ever, Black Coffee and Bootie Call.
The Mail On Sunday CD giveaway, All Saints: All Hits, features all the original studio versions of all their no 1 hits plus 6 other scorching tracks.
The interview...
Their glamorous good looks, insouciant attitude and irreverent, self-penned lyrics changed the face of pop music in the late Nineties.
Clad in combat trousers and full of brazen self-confidence, All Saints offered a real alternative to their manufactured rivals, the Spice Girls, and gave a shot of life into an industry otherwise dominated by the last acts of Britpop and meek boy bands.
And they were an instant success, scoring eight top ten singles - including five No1s - and two double-platinum selling albums.
They also hit the headlines with a string of celebrity boyfriends and a spate of highly publicised spats - and in 2001, after a tumultuous four years together, the girls - Natalie and Nicole Appleton, Shaznay Lewis and Melanie Blatt - split acrimoniously.
They launched solo careers but the individual projects they pursued were no match for their joint achievements and in 2006 the girls - by then all thirty-something women and with husbands and children - admitted they had missed each other, reconciled their differences and hit the charts again.
It was a fantastic musical journey - and one you can now relive with a brilliant CD. Today, The Mail on Sunday is giving away a FREE 11-track CD containing all their greatest hits.
This must-have collection includes the massive hit single Never Ever, the dance floor fillers Bootie Call and Lady Marmalade and the beautiful Pure Shores - soundtrack to the blockbuster movie The Beach, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
Demand will be huge, so if you want to make sure of your copy, cut out the coupon printed opposite and hand it to your newsagent.
The band's re-emergence is remarkable given what each of the girls has gone through since they first got together in 1995.
Original members Melanie and Shaznay recruited Natalie and her younger sister Nicole, who are both half- Canadian and trained at London's prestigious Sylvia Young Stage School.
According to Natalie, now 35 and married to Liam Howlett of The Prodigy: 'None of the record companies thinking of signing us cared about the songs.
'They cared about what we looked like and what we would wear. We told them that only we decide how we present ourselves.'
Their stubbornness paid off. They eventually joined London Records and in the summer of 1997 their debut single, I know Where It's At, reached No4 in the UK charts, and their second, Never Ever, stayed at No 1 for a fortnight.
It sold a million copies in Britain, won them two Brit Awards and launched them to international fame.
Yet they still weren't prepared to sanitise their behaviour or change their appearance for the sake of their careers - preferring to stick with their trademark 'cheap and comfortable' combats which, as Natalie put it, 'hid all the wobbly bits'.
Inevitably, comparisons with the Spice Girls followed but the singers, predictably, were quick to dismiss claims they were cashing in on their rivals' success. 'I hated them,' Melanie, now 33, has confessed. 'I was totally against what they stood for. It was too corporate for me.'
When she fell pregnant in 1998 - her boyfriend was Jamiroquai bassist Stuart Zender - Melanie refreshingly refused to hide her bump on stage or in public, wryly remarking that 'it's a child, not a terminal illness', and paving the way for countless other pictures of pregnant celebrity midriffs.
Meanwhile, the Appletons added to their own hype with a host of celebrity boyfriends - Natalie dated actor Jonny Lee Miller and TV presenter Jamie Theakston, and Nicole teamed up with Robbie Williams.
In 2000, they enjoyed their fourth No1 with Pure Shores and their second album, Saints & Sinners, released later that year, went straight to No1 in the UK and gave them their fifth No1 single, Black Coffee.
But by this stage, bitter rivalries within the group were emerging. Shaznay, the group's songwriter, and Melanie were considered the more serious musicians and believed the Appletons' glamorous antics were belittling the group.
'Things got so bad, I didn't want to go to work any more,' says Nicole, now 33 and married to Oasis singer Liam Gallagher.
'Sometimes it was fighting, sometimes just ignoring each other. It was separate rooms, separate flights, separate everything.'
Melanie adds: 'We had all that success and we couldn't enjoy it. We would fly into an
amazing new country and go straight to our hotel rooms because we didn't like each other. We would just sit on our own, phoning home to say how miserable we were.'
The split came in 2001 and the girls went their own ways, barely troubling the charts with their solo efforts. But, away from the limelight, the girls were able to revel in motherhood and domesticity.
Natalie, who has a 16-year-old daughter, Rachel, from her first marriage, married Howlett in 2002 and gave birth to their son, Ace, in 2004. Nicole has a son, Gene, now seven, with long-term lover Gallagher, whom she married last Valentine's Day.
Although Melanie is now separated from Zender, they are both hands-on parents to their daughter Lily Ella, who is nine. Shaznay, 32, married dancer Christian Storm in 2004 and they have a son, Tyler, now two.
Whispers of a reunion began in 2005 when they met up by chance during separate holidays in the South of France. The four went for dinner back in London and, says Natalie, 'spent hours laughing and talking'.
Shaznay adds: 'We've all had our little chats. We've all said our sorrys. We were a bunch of idiots.'
With one new album behind them - Studio 1 released in 2006 - and another due this year, they now realise they can enjoy career success together along with friendship and family.
'It's all about friendship for us,' says Melanie. 'It should always have been about caring for each other first and the band second. It wasn't like that in the beginning but it is now.'
Depois farei a tradução da matéria se algum brasileiro fizer me envie por favor.
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