It is 9 a.m., but Siobhán Donaghy's hair is immaculately styled and her face perfectly made up.
She has been up for three hours, promoting her debut solo single, the curiously titled Overrated, on breakfast TV. "I've done worse things," she says. "I remember when I was in the Sugababes, doing TV shows that were broadcast at six in the morning. You had to get up at 3 a.m. I remember thinking, what's the point of this? No one's f------ watching it - I wouldn't."
Donaghy talks like this a lot, acidly comparing her present situation with her former position as a third of the teenage girl band Sugababes. Her conversation comes peppered with expletives, as if she is testing the boundaries of her new life away from the PR-controlled world of manufactured pop. It is also shot through with a cynicism that seems faintly shocking from a 19-year-old former teen pop star with a major record deal.
Donaghy left Sugababes under a cloud, walking out in the middle of a Japanese promotional tour in 2001. Her former bandmates claim that she excused herself to go to the toilet and never came back. "I hate her for running away and leaving us," said Sugababes vocalist Mutya Buena last year. "Why couldn't she have had the guts to tell me to my face what her problem was? No guts, that girl."
Donaghy makes being in Sugababes sound like a particularly grim cautionary tale about the music industry, one filled with bad management, manipulation, personality clashes and teenage alienation, leaving her clinically depressed at 17.
Unconventionally beautiful and endearingly unspun, she seems unlikely girl-band material, which may have been the problem from the start. She signed her first management deal with Ron Tom, best known for discovering All Saints, when she was 12. "I didn't really know what I wanted to do with my life at that stage," she says, as if every other 12-year-old has a perfectly mapped-out career plan. "I knew I loved singing, and I kind of went along with it. I haven't got pushy parents. My mum was like, right, you want to be a singer, we'll support you. My dad didn't want me to do it."
Her manager paired her with Buena and the duo performed a music-industry showcase, an experience Donaghy describes as "shit". "I used to get so nervous that I couldn't sing; my voice would just crack up. Mutya was like this fantastic, full-on R&B singer, but I'm not good under pressure." Donaghy claims her management's solution to her stage fright was to inform prospective producers that she should not be allowed to sing on any records. "I had no self-esteem. I lacked self-confidence already, being a teenager, and they just battered me." Her problems were further compounded when Buena's friend Keisha Buchanan joined the nascent Sugababes. "We had nothing in common at all, and we went on not to get on."
Sugababes were quickly signed to London Records. Their debut single, Overload - on which producer Cameron McVey insisted that Donaghy sang lead - reached number six in July 2000. Their debut album went gold. But subsequent singles failed to make the top 10 and band tensions became the subject of rumour. The internet gossip newsletter Popbitch claimed Buena and Buchanan bullied Donaghy out, even inventing a code so they could talk about her in front of her.
Buena has said the stories are "rubbish". Donaghy will say only that she doesn't "really have to mention anything, because people know what happened". Either way, she left. "I knew I was going to leave for months," she says. "I was unhappy, we weren't getting on. I thought people might grow up and we'd all get on, but I'd waited three and a half years and it hadn't happened."
She returned to her parents in Ruislip, north London. "I didn't know I was massively depressed, I just didn't want to get out of bed. When I went on antidepressants I was really ashamed. I didn't tell my mum at the time. I was taking medication for my skin, which is notorious for making teenagers really aggressive. I still suffer from depression, but these days I just want to make it on my f------ own."
When London Records dropped Sugababes - who, with former Atomic Kitten member Heidi Range, went on to have two number-one singles last year - Donaghy's contract was retained. "McVey's got kids my age and he knew what was going on in the band from way back when," she says. "He got me back writing, told me it would be therapeutic, got me in the studio again." Her debut album is feisty pop-rock. A world away from the R&B influences of Sugababes, it has a peculiar character of its own, with unlikely lyrics about Christmas turkeys and chromosomes. Last weekend she performed at the Glastonbury Festival in England, ironically at the same time as her former bandmates.
She is strangely comfortable with her second crack at pop celebrity. "It's a bigger workload, because I have consent on everything that I do. If it all goes tits up, everybody's f------ looking to you for answers. If you can take the responsibility for your own mistakes, it's fine, and I can do that now. It's more natural."
- Guardian service
Alexis Petridis
Overrated is on London Records
