Sweet tooth

Sugababes
It’s rarely dull when a groomed girl group engages with the festival experience. When it doesn’t work it’s a painful mismatch, when it does it’s a valuable drop of glamour in a predominantly white male indie gene pool.

But the Sugababe babes have no end of guts, moxy, oomph and chutzpah, plus an unfeasible and indefinable gorgeousness. They coax the crowd’s goodwill early on with the smoky funk-pop of ‘Overload’ and ‘Blue’, and while the sound is undoubtedly sequenced and sequinned, the presence of a real live plexiglassed drummer – plus a bunch of musos who know when to keep their chops in their pants – adds bite.

So, they do panto patter, they do bump and grind, they do ballads that translate into Latin, they do the sublime ‘Stronger’, with its feel-so-bad-it’s-good chorus and killer vocal vamps. And then they do ‘Freak Like Me’, which is up there with ‘Teen Spirit’ and 'Anarchy In The UK' in terms of classic singles.

You could say they got away with it.