Sassy purveyors of pop The Saturdays head to Cambridge this summer on their debut tour.

Louise Cummings catches up with Frankie Sandford to chat about being part of the girl band of the moment.

“We’re not models who can’t sing – we can all sing, we can all dance and no-one’s telling us what to do. We’re all different because we’re just ourselves, and that’s the way it should be!” says The Saturdays’ most vocal member Frankie Sandford, with an air of ‘girl power’.

Certainly the effervescent five-piece, with their vibrant outfits and day-glo tights, have made a name for themselves since they exploded onto the music scene last year, thanks to their feel-good brand of pop. Their debut single, the Yazoo sampling If This Is Love, cracked the Top 10 last August, while their subsequent singles from the album Chasing Lights – the infectious electropop track Up and the catchy ballad Issues – were big hits, proving the girls were more than just one-hit-wonders.

“It’s a bit mental really because when we first got together we had a couple of months when we weren’t really doing anything, so it was quite a slow process, and now suddenly it’s all starting to kick off and it hasn’t really sunk in yet to be honest,” says Frankie. “There are so many things we want to do we still feel that, although we’re doing really well, we are just scratching the surface.”

The girls are signed to Fascination Records – a sub-division of Polydor – and were handpicked because of their various musical and dance backgrounds. Both Frankie and Rochelle were members of S Club Juniors (back in 2002), while Vanessa performed in the West End production of The Lion King, Mollie was a member of the band Fallen Angelz and Irish Una was in a rock band back home.

For 20-year-old Frankie from Upminster, there was no doubt that she would end up singing or dancing, given her obvious talents growing up. “I was always into dancing and went to a weekend stage school – the same one as Rochelle. I never really wanted to be famous or in a pop group really; I think I imagined I’d end up in the theatre, then I got into S Club Juniors, so I kind of fell into music and now I can’t imagine doing anything else,” she smiles. Right from the start, The Saturdays haven’t taken themselves too seriously, declaring themselves ‘pure pop and proud of it’. “There is no other way of describing our music really,” says Frankie, “We haven’t tried to be edgy necessarily, we are pop and we admit to that, so I think that’s why people have been so nice about us and we have credibility.”


Full story in Cambridge Style - May 2009.

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