SO THERE we were, yapping away like there was no tomorrow, getting on famously and all the rest of it, and I was just beginning to think that I d get out of this conversation with my dignity intact, when suddenly Melanie Blatt and Shaznay T Lewis of All Saints decided to tell me about their long-standing pornography obsession.
I saw this great one recently called Anal Witness, announces Mel, licking her lips. Brilliant production values, amazing camerawork, fit bodies, the lot. You should have seen the woman in it, she was really going for it. I kept rewinding back to the best bits. It was great!
Okay, I ll stop. Mel actually said nothing of the sort, although it would have made my job a bit easier if she had. For the record and let this be the last time All Saints are a bunch of shy, retiring bridesmaid types who don t watch industrial amounts of porn videos on their tour bus. And that s official.
Indeed, when I put it to the two of them that numerous stories have been circulating in the media regarding their band s viewing habits, their furiously blushing reaction would make Mary Whitehouse proud.
Nooooooooo!!! squeals Melanie at the top of her lungs. That came up in only one interview! We were so shocked and naive and young and innocent about it. We watched some porn in Germany once, and that just completely freaked us out, and we had to tell everybody about it. So now we re seen as raving perverts!
And why shouldn t that be the case? Anyone who s heard the All Saints album will know that there s plenty of evidence pointing in that direction. Shaznay, you wrote 90% of the lyrics on the album, so presumably you re responsible for deathless couplets like I need a man to be a real man . . . You can bring it on with the rough stuff and give me your love, I don t wanna be tamed .
Hahaaaaaaaaaaa!! she guffaws. Yes, that s one of mine. Do you like it?
Eh, cough.
All the dirty stuff is hers, laughs Mel. That comes from the deepest, darkest part of her mind! It s part of everyday life, y know, everybody thinks like that . . . well, Shaznay does, anyway (laughs).
I think it s just normal behaviour for girls of our age. But my God, we re really getting a bad rep here. No, we re not like that at all. We re not always up till all hours watching porn. Sometimes we watch documentaries about flowers, as well!
Melanie Blatt, 22, is half French and half Jewish. She speaks with a slight but noticeable Gallic accent, and possesses the filthiest laugh I have ever heard in my life. A stage school veteran, she was one of the founder members of All Saints when they initially got off the ground in 1993-94.
Shaznay T Lewis, also 22, is half Jamaican and half Barbadian. She is the main creative force in the band, writing 90% of the songs, and is referred to by her bandmates as the shy one , although she s far more talkative than this description suggests. She prides herself on my phone sex line voice , and once played football for Arsenal s girls team (of which more anon).
Although Canadian-born sisters Natalie and Nicole Appleton provide the majority of the vocal backing harmonies, Mel and Shaznay share most of the lead singing on All Saints material. Both of them, incidentally, are ridiculously friendly, belying their slightly hard-faced image.
Although they are now part of an enormously successful, cash-consuming, world-eating enterprise known as All Saints plc, Shaznay and Mel have been at this pop star business since 1993, when they formed the band with an (unnamed) third member. By the time they finally hit paydirt with I Know Where It s At last August, they d experienced an infinite amount of let-downs, hitches, failures and frustration. As Bob Dylan might say, they ve seen the three days.
I met Mel when I was 17. God, it feels like ages ago. We got a deal with a record company who just wouldn t help us, and eventually we brought out a single in 94. It was a cover of Silver Shadow (an old number by a soul outfit called Atlantic Starr JO B).
Shaznay and I came to Dublin for one of our first gigs a couple of years ago, elaborates Mel. We were doing one of the Smash Hits roadshow tours. At the time we were nothing, we were nobodies two losers trying to do our thing (laughs). But we did go down well, considering we didn t have any promotion behind us.
So what happened to the third member?
We don t know . . . muses Mel. She sort of disappeared! Don t know where she is!
She d do well to keep a low profile, in the wake of recent events.
Shaznay: That s it, she s probably been in hiding since the album came out! I m not sure if she went solo or not. She just wasn t happy in that situation. At the time we had a record company that wasn t helping us out, not giving us the push that we needed.
After that, nothing tangible happened for a year or so. I d cry myself to sleep sometimes, admits Mel. It was awful. At one point I was just going to head off to France and not come back. I d had enough. But I stuck it out cause I knew we had something special.
They certainly did. Presently, the Appleton sisters came on board, by which time the other two had written and demo ed enough material to get another deal, this time with the London label. Recording soon commenced.
When a pre-release copy of I Know Where It s At arrived at the HP offices last July, it had a little London Records press office sticker on it which proclaimed: This song is going to be a biggie! How right they were. Built around a four-note piano riff lifted from Steely Dan s The Fez , it possessed a monster of a chorus, and went straight in at number three in the UK singles chart. Game on.
That one was followed by Never Ever , which you surely all know inside out by now. It reached pole position in the top 40 some nine weeks after its October release, which has to be some kind of a record. It also gave All Saints their first number one, though probably not their last.
Then came the album. All Saints was released last November, and is now well on the way to selling its millionth copy.
We ve been so lucky to get a second chance, admits Shaznay. If the story of our career so far was one of Tarantino s Hollywood film scripts, you wouldn t believe it.
I suppose not, seeing as you wouldn t bother reading it in the first place.
Being a pop star is hard work, comments Mel. Actually, it s really, really cool it s just that it s so tiring. We re visiting a hell of a lot of countries in a very small space of time, and just meeting all the fans is great, really wonderful. We don t get to perform as much as we d like to, but . . . it s a different life.
A difficult life, laughs Shaznay. It really is a lot of hard work. The whole thing s enjoyable, and we do appreciate it, but naturally you get tired, and tiredness tends to take over everything else. And we get almost no time off at all.
What do they like most about their new lifestyle?
Getting into clubs free, says Shaznay, with admirable honesty. I m not wild about being recognised in the street, though. It depends how I feel that day, y know what I mean?
Have they been tempted to indulge in any celebrity hob-nobbing?
Not really, rues Mel. We haven t had time to. Whenever we go back home, it s only for an hour or a day or whatever, and then we re so busy sorting out our own private lives. So we haven t had much time to go to any parties.
Since last July, All Saints crucifyingly heavy promotional schedule has included interviews with virtually every media publication in the UK except for Angling Monthly. While leafing through their press pack before the interview, I note that the questions they get asked most frequently are along the lines of What kind of men turn you on? , Who was the last person you snogged? , and What s your favourite cheese? .
These girls are earning their money, no question about it.
They ve also made several appearances on that bastion of fine television, TFI Friday, on which they ve had to get to grips with Chris Evans and his, eh, distinctive approach to interviewing female guests. And they even presented The Big Breakfast for a week, late last year.
The Big Breakfast was actually all right! exclaims Mel. We were kind of, you know, apprehensive about it. But when we did do it, we d just come back from Japan, so the timing wasn t too bad because our body-clocks were on that time-difference anyway, so getting up at three in the morning wasn t that bad. Although we had to work for the rest of the day, which was a killer.
But the actual show was really cool. The producers didn t really make us do much. We ate breakfast (laughs), that was all we did! They had us doing Jim ll Fix It-types of things and we got it all wrong, and it made me look like a dummy, and that s not what I wanted to be when I grew up, was it? The guests weren t that exciting. We had a dentist on; that was as interesting as it got. And there was another bloke who was a world authority on spiders. Yeeuccchhh!
There s little doubt that your CD shelf will be an emptier, colder place without a copy of All Saints on it. Certainly, there s rather more to the record than two big hit singles and ten fillers. Apart from a seriously cack-handed cover of the Red Hot Chili Peppers Under The Bridge , you won t find a single bad track on it. At first I reckoned that the accolade Best Debut Album Of 1997 sounded a bit hyperbolic, but having given the matter a bit of thought, I can t really think of anything that surpassed it last year.
In any case, there are enough potential hit singles on the album to ensure that All Saints don t have to go into the studio again until late 1999. They sound completely unlike any other girl group you have ever heard, a whole universe removed from the sanitised, schmaltzy balladeering of, say, Eternal.
The way our whole sound started was with a producer called K Gee, explains Mel, who did I Know Where It s At . And together we sort of developed this sound. Unfortunately, we re not technical enough as people to do the music ourselves. But what you hear is exactly what we wanted to hear in the first place. So, you know, we re very influential on each other . . . what s the word? . . . I was going to say suron, which is French, but then you wouldn t know what I mean (laughs). Anyway, Shaznay wrote 90% of the album.
Shaznay: Yeah, I can t really produce, so I just do the lyrics and arrangements. But I can t do music yet.
Her use of the word yet suggests that it s something she intends to rectify in the future. So who actually came up with those weird little noises and silences which are all over the album?
Well, I was responsible for some of em, says Shaznay. K Gee did the others. It depends on which ones you re talking about.
Bootie Call would be an obvious example.
No, that one s down to K Gee, she replies. He s good at putting those strange little noises down. We re more into making weird sounds with our voices. We prefer doing that instead of using instruments. Like I said, we just haven t got the aptitude for it yet.
The kind of bands with whom All Saints share a common lineage groups of cute girls singing uncomplicated pop songs are usually cannon-fodder for music critics, but I ve yet to read one bad, or even mediocre, review of the album. And Shaznay and Mel admit to being surprised at the warmth of the reception it received.
I wasn t sure, y know? says Shaznay. We d spent five years trying to get things right and trying to get a deal. And you can get into a situation where you kinda wonder whether your music would be accepted, because, y know, record companies love to find straight-up pop acts which we don t see ourselves as. So we were very surprised.
Were they worried that All Saints might get a rough time from the press because of their let s be honest sex kitten image?
No, because it s not really much of an image, it s just us, replies Shaznay. To be honest with you, I thought we d get picked on because of the whole girl band thing four girls singing, that kind of stuff but nothing to do with image, because there is no image, really. If people pick on us because of the way we are, that s awful! (laughs)
When the visual image in question consists of tattoos, ill-fitting tracksuits and visible bra straps, however, it s inevitable that the band in question will be treated in a different way than the pristinely-garmented likes of Eternal.
Mel: I ve got two tattoos. There are some musical notes on my shoulder, and I ve got one on my waist, the side of my ribcage. It s a dragon that was a big un. That one hurt. The first one was about a year and a half ago, and the latest one was done while we were doing The Big Breakfast. Only three of us have tattoos.
Who s the odd one out?
Natalie, says Mel. Because she s chicken. (starts making alarmingly loud fowl noises) Buck-buck-buckaaaaaeeeiii! She s yellow, she s got yellow all over her. A yellow streak down her back.
Perhaps the tattoo studio could make it permanent for her.
Yeaaahhhh, snorts Mel, laughing disgustingly, even by her standards. Good idea, I must mention that to her and see what she says. But I know she won t go for it. Hahahaaaaaaaa!!
Life in a band like All Saints is not without its drawbacks, as Shaznay and Mel are quick to point out. Sure, you do make obscene amounts of money (eventually), and you do have blokes of all ages slobbering helplessly over you, and most importantly you do get into clubs free.
But the reverse side of the coin is manifested in things like having to get out of bed at 6am every morning, having to mouth inanities for half an hour on Live And Kicking, and, worst of all, having to read the ridiculous things that the tabloid media write about you, be they harmless or otherwise.
Mel: For our own part, I think we ve been pretty honest. We ve been very real. The tabloids have lied about pretty much everything. I ve read plenty of fabricated things about myself, like my new house that I haven t just bought (giggles). That was a good one. I wish I d just bought a house!
There have been loads, reflects Shaznay. There was a story which said I was going out with one of the members of Boyz II Men that was bloody embarrassing. I do know the guy, and I felt really bad about the whole thing. Y know, I had to fucking ring him up and say Eh, they re printing stories that we re dating when we weren t. So that was terrible. Yeah, there ve been quite a few.
Yes, I wouldn t be too thrilled about being romantically linked with a member of Boyz II Men either. Surely, though, Shaznay and Mel realise that they re getting off pretty lightly in comparison to some acts?
I know, but really, there s no dirt to dish on us, y know what I mean? replies Mel.
I was reading The Sun the other day (just for the racing results, honest), and a news item about All Saints ongoing legal dispute with their ex-manager happened to catch my eye. More sinisterly, below it was a small piece of text which read as follows: Did YOU know All Saints before they were famous? Ring this number NOW!
That was disgusting, snorts Shaznay, before abruptly contradicting herself by unleashing yet another horrifically filthy torrent of laughter.
I know, sighs Mel, somehow managing to find about four syllables in the word know . It s just so pathetic, but that s part of it. You have to deal with that. It was to be expected. We re not that stupid. We re not like Oh, my God, I m gonna cry . We live with it, it s alright.
It must seriously mess with people s minds, though, to read that sort of stuff about themselves in a national newspaper.
Oh yeah! shouts Shaznay. Listen, money talks, and everybody s got a price, and I just hope that I can trust my friends not to do that. And probably if it does happen, whoever does do it will be somebody I knew eight years ago, and now doesn t know anything about me, apart from my name.
One particularly gruesome skeleton in Shaznay s closet that Rupert Murdoch s minions didn t have to fabricate was the fact that, to her eternal shame, she played football for the Arsenal girls team a few years ago.
It was only for about five seconds, she laughs. It was when I was in secondary school. The Arsenal female scouts came to our class and they were looking for girls who d be interested in joining Arsenal FC, so what they did was, they came to one of our PE lessons and asked us to have a game of football. They watched everybody and then they picked out me and a bunch of my mates. But we never went to any of the training sessions we d just turn up to the matches and lose all the games horribly (laughs). And after three games I didn t bother with it any more.
Are we to take it that she follows good old Arsenal?
No . . . I m actually a Spurs fan.
Oh well, we all have our problems.
(laughs) Oh, shut up! I love Spurs, I always have done. To tell you the truth, I don t watch their games or go to see them play any more, but I keep up with how they re doing in the league table. I ve heard it s going badly even though they brought J|rgen Klinsmann back, but I m still loyal, I m still devoted. Who do you support? Man United? Oh, for God s sake!
I ll let that pass. Okay then, girls, finally, here s the million dollar question literally. Visualise yourselves in a year s time. You re sitting in the South of France and you ve made a million pounds. Each. What will you do with it?
I ll buy that house that The Sun reckons I ve already got the keys to, smiles Melanie.
I ll spend it, says Shaznay, deadpan, before cracking up. Hahahaaaaaaa!! n
All Saints will be performing at the Childline 10th Anniversary Benefit Concert at the Point Theatre on Saturday 21st February. Other acts on the bill include Boyzone, OTT and The Carter Twins, and proceedings will be hosted by Denise van Outen and Dustin.