The village vicar looked out of the village vicarage and rubbed his eyes. Now he had seen it all. Sugababes in the local pub, a former member of All Saints in the patisserie and, today... was that? Yes, it was. Girls Aloud hotfooting it across the fields. He didn’t mean to pry, but what exactly was going on at the cottage next door?
“I think the village is learning to accept us,” says the vicar’s next-door neighbour, Brian Higgins. “They like having pop stars wandering about.” He thinks about this. “Not that we’re trying to encourage it, you understand. We do try to be discreet.” And the vicar? “Oh, he’s all right. His kids love the music.”
Brian Higgins is British pop’s alpha talent. Kicking off his career by writing Believe for Cher — the one with the wobbly vocoder voice effect that topped the charts in 24 countries in 1998 — ensured he would never have to do a day’s work ever again. But, as we shall see, not working isn’t really his style. His company, Xenomania, is behind the new dirty pop sound — and some would say the best music this country has produced since the Britpop years. Electro-rock barnstormers No Good Advice (by Girls Aloud) and Round Round (by Sugababes) are just two. Higgins is a writer, producer and music director, and he is the man today’s sharpest pop stars come to. And “come to” means hoofing it out to leafiest Kent, to a Miss Marple-style village where Higgins and his girlfriend, Sarah, live in a pricey-looking cottage. “We couldn’t do what we do in London, no way,” says Higgins. “Too many distractions.” Not that calm is the order of the day at The House That Cher Built: the place is awash with pretty girls in three-inch stilettos (pop stars, present and future) and pasty young men in three-day beards (songwriters, musicians and engineers).
Sarah gives a brisk tour — two industrially soundproofed floors coughing with mixing desks, microphones and framed chart pages from the trade magazine Music Week — finishing up at a box room tucked away at the front of the house. “And this is our bedroom,” she says. It’s the only room in the house not given over to the writing, recording and making of pop music. How on earth do they get any peace? They must have to go on holiday just to be alone. “Holiday?” says Sarah. “We haven’t had a holiday for three years.”
“We call Brian ‘Big Bastard’,” says Niara Scarlett, one half of the pop group Mania, the latest to come endorsed with the Xenomania quality stamp. “It’s like boot camp. When I first came here, Brian was like, ‘You’re the sort of person who’d be happy with a No 38.’ I was, like, ‘Yeah, I probably would.’ And he was like, ‘Well, I wouldn’t.’” Mania — all brassy thongs and potty mouths — make the Spice Girls look like sixth-formers at Cheltenham Ladies’ College. It’s clear that visitors are at liberty to treat Xenomania HQ as their own, helping themselves to biscuits from the kitchen cupboard and addressing Sarah with a sharp slap on the bum. (“She’s got the cutest arse in the house!”) Indeed, Giselle Sommerville, Mania’s second member, reveals that, during downtime, Mutya Sugababe is not to be trifled with when she’s playing Xbox games, while Nicola from Girls Aloud recently caused a kitchen calamity by burning the soup.
By now, everyone knows that pop stars don’t always write their own songs. Kylie’s and Britney’s talents, for example, lie elsewhere, and it’s up to their record companies to go shopping for songwriters who can drum up a Can’t Get You out of My Head or a Toxic. But Brian doesn’t farm out tunes to whichever record label waves its chequebook the most. Xenomania helps to write, record and play the songs, but everything, to some extent, is a collaboration with the artists. Before Higgins lets clients through the front door, they have to (a) have talent, (b) have a pathological passion for pop, and (c) be willing to combine (a) and (b) with (d) a ball-breaking work ethic. “If Keisha from Sugababes didn’t do music, I don’t know what Keisha would do,” says Higgins, who claims he works 16 hours a day, six days a week. “Nadine from Girls Aloud is one of the finest singers this country has produced. But I’ve never seen her referred to as such.”
Unsurprisingly, Higgins’s platinum ears are in demand. He gets, and rejects, requests for songs from all over the world. A timetable on the kitchen wall reveals that New Order, Texas and Saint Etienne will be visiting Kent this summer. Could Higgins help, ooh, let’s say, Victoria Beckham? “I don’t think so,” he says breezily. “Because, ultimately, music is just an accoutrement to everything else she does. It’s not in her lifeblood. If we don’t feel someone’s pulling their weight, the session’s finished. We have kicked people out.”
“I remember when he’d finished working on a song of ours, Burnt Out Car,” says Saint Etienne’s Bob Stanley. “He drove from Gatwick to my flat in Tufnell Park (in north London) at three in the morning, he was so keen for me to hear it. And he wouldn’t even stay for a cup of tea.”
“He has ridiculously high quality control,” says the pop journalist Peter Robinson. “If you look at other really good pop songwriters — Cathy Dennis, for example — for every Can’t Get You out of My Head, there are two stinkers. Everything Brian does is an A-side.”
This meeting took place in May, when new releases from Girls Aloud, Mania and an even newer singer called Eve were still a couple of months away. While all the above girls out-shouted each other around his house, Higgins slipped into a studio behind the kitchen to play a new song called The Show. Girls Aloud’s future No 1 belted out enthusiastically around the room. It sounded terrific. “Do you think so?” said Higgins. “I get so nervous about everything. I thought everyone would hate Round Round. After Pop Idol, pop music has become so devalued that I want everything we do to be astonishing.” He looked exhausted. “I hope we can set a new standard. I really do.”
Mania’s first single, Looking for a Place (RCA/Xenomania), is out tomorrow
