Hello everyone. I’m Coco Khan, covering for Gwilym this week, and I’m officially calling it. Summer is here.
No, I’m not a meteorologist or an astronomer – rather, I rely on a measure I’ve developed over many summers: the UKG Index. The more UK garage you hear – through passing car windows, pumping out of festivals, or floating on the breeze from a nearby barbecue – the more likely the mercury is climbing. And this year the sound of summer has arrived early, and with some exciting news: a Mis-Teeq reunion.
For the uninitiated, Mis-Teeq (Sabrina Washington, Su-Elise Nash, Alesha Dixon) broke into the mainstream in 2001 with their debut album Lickin’ on Both Sides. Some of garage’s most visible ambassadors, they took the sound from underground raves and pirate radio into the charts and on to Saturday morning TV, with hits such as All I Want, Why? and One Night Stand. A second album followed featuring the global hit Scandalous, before their meteoric rise abruptly ended when their label, Telstar, collapsed into bankruptcy in 2004, and the band broke up the following year. Dixon, of course, went on to become a national treasure via Strictly and Britain’s Got Talent.
Yet despite two major revivals of UK garage – first in the 2010s, when producers such as Disclosure and Jamie xx folded the two-step of their youth into indie and electronica, and now via TikTok-fuelled Y2K nostalgia – Mis-Teeq never performed together again.
Then, last month, fans noticed a brand-new Mis-Teeq Instagram account, featuring nostalgic footage of the group in their heyday and quickly gaining thousands of followers (given I saw it the day it went live, I can only assume that “ageing millennial” was the group it was targeting). Rumours swirled. And then, last week, it was confirmed: for one night only, the group would perform at Wembley Arena to celebrate 25 years of Lickin’ on Both Sides. Naturally, they’re calling it One Night Stand.
Some might call this cynical nostalgia capitalism – the music industry’s preferred method of extraction once an artist’s creative peak has passed; a cash grab dressed up as fan service (and often at prices most fans can’t afford – though, at the time of writing, prices had not yet been announced). But I can’t help but be excited, not just for a new generation falling in love with this homegrown British sound but to finally see some women making money out of it.
It has long been a problem in music that some vocalists – particularly female vocalists – earn surprisingly little given the impact of the culture they create. Under the standard label model, royalties flow to songwriters and producers; vocalists get less credit and, therefore, less money, sometimes just a one-off performance fee. Dance music has particularly poor form here because the human voice is not the primary instrument – unlike in other genres – but merely a percussive element chopped up in the background, reduced to interchangeable hooks and five-second samples. And with women, especially Black women, underrepresented in both production and contract discussions, the making of club floor-fillers has too often come at someone else’s expense.
As a garage lover myself, this particularly hurts given how much the genre was defined by women’s voices. If I said “I’ll bring you flowers in the pouring rain”, you’d immediately hear singer Leanne Brown of Sweet Female Attitude in your head. Yet despite the track Flowers racking up nearly 97 million streams on Spotify, Brown made comparatively little money from it. She has since retrained as a teacher. Then there’s Jodie Aysha, vocalist on bassline smash Heartbroken, who alleges she has been short-changed on royalties by six figures (at least).
Mis-Teeq were in a stronger position than many of their peers. All three members had at least some writing credits. But even given that, things did not run entirely smoothly: Washington reportedly sued Dixon and Universal over royalties disparities, although a reunion being on the table suggests the settlement must have been handled well enough.
Still, it is hard to reconcile the size of Mis-Teeq’s cultural footprint and what they actually got out of the band – at least for Nash and Washington, whose visibilty doesn’t quite match up to what we’d expect for a group that sold 12m records (for comparison, Girls Aloud have sold 8m).
And so – while I cautiously await to see the ticket prices – I’m glad this reunion this happening: a belated chance, one hopes, for the group to enjoy the spoils of their own work. That so many other women in garage haven’t is scandalous, and not in the good, Mis-Teeq, kind of way.
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