Pop star turns on paparazzi

As girl band The Saturdays tour Ireland and Britain, singer Mollie King regrets her loss of privacy,says Ed Power

BACKSTAGE in Birmingham, The Saturdays’ Mollie King takes a deep breath. She is describing life as a pop star. It seems scary.

“We’re at the stage now where we have paparazzi outside our homes,” she says. “It’s really disturbing actually. You want to nip out for a pint of milk and there are all these photographers there. You’re not going to go out all glammed-up when you’re running down to the shops, are you? You’ve got to live a regular life.”

A few weeks ago, the glamorous girl-band singer went for a walk with her boyfriend (model and entrepreneur David Gandy) and their dog. A pap was behind the bushes, snapping away. The next morning she was all over the papers, looking, she says, ‘rough and ready’.

“There was all this stuff like ‘oh, Molly has no make-up on, oh Molly’s in a tracksuit’. That’s ridiculous. I’m walking the dog. You don’t wear stilettos and lip-gloss walking the dog. I am a normal person. I am allowed take my dog for a walk, you know,” she says.

In a few hours, The Saturdays will play the biggest date on their Ireland and British arena tour, at Birmingham’s 16,000-capacity LG Arena (the tour wraps up at The O2 in Dublin this Monday). After four years of honest slog, The Saturdays are in pop’s big league. New album, On Your Radar, went to number one, the tour is close to a sell-out, and their faces are seldom out of the gossip magazines or the tabloids.

The 24-year-old Londoner has a powerful sense of things running full circle. The Saturdays last performed at the LG Arena in 2007. The circumstances were very different. “It was one of our first tours and we were supporting Girls Aloud,” King says. “It was all very new to us. I remember being extremely ill. All of Girls Aloud came into the dressing room to sing happy birthday to me. It was an amazing moment. It’s all come flooding back just now.”

King says despite bemoaning the paparazzi and tabloids, she is not ungrateful for the success. But there is a dark side of fame. Even more hurtful than the media scrutiny, she says, are the derogatory comments, especially on the internet. She tries not to partake of the snark. But sometimes she can’t help herself.

“It can be quite stressful. I have done my best to toughen up, not let it bother me. In all honesty, how can you be anything other than hurt when you read nasty comments? Of course, it’s always the mean ones that stick in your head instead of the good ones. There are lots of amazing things about this job. But there is a tough side as well. That’s why I’m glad I’m in a group. Otherwise, I’d be getting all the abuse on my own. Nothing can prepare you for something like that,” she says.

The Saturdays were manufactured by Peter Lorraine, previously editor of Top of the Pops magazine. The five were selected after auditions in London. Apart from Frankie Sandford and Rochelle Wiseman (ex members of teen group S Club 8), they had never previously met one another.

The Saturdays’ first arena tour was supposed to be a moment of triumph for the group, whose hits include Higher and Ego. However, things almost came unstuck when their Tipperary singer Una Healy announced she was to be a mother. She would be six months pregnant when the live dates came around.

Initially, the girls felt they had two choices. Either they toured without Healy or slowed things down and treated fans to an evening of tasteful ballads. In the end, they decided on a third option.

There would be a full-on Saturdays show with Healy sitting out just one song, a risque number featuring lots of steamy dancing. The sight of a heavily-pregnant woman bumping and grinding against a backing dancer would jar, everyone agreed.

“Una is working really hard,” says King. “She is being sensible and not over-doing things. At the same time, we know fans want to see a proper Saturdays show, which involves us up there dancing.”

The concert has its occasional moments of sauciness, she says. But nothing nearly as x-rated as Rihanna’s recent tour, which saw the singer romping in a simulated sex dungeon and bounding around in a bikini.

With a fanbase that includes a considerable number of under-10s, there are limits to how far you can push things.

“We dress as Santas at the end because of the time of year. We don’t do sexy Santas as it would not be appropriate. We like to dress in a feminine way. We’re aware there are very young children in the audience as well. So we can’t be too outrageous,” King says.

Girl groups tend to flame out rather than fade away. After a few years, internal rivalries inevitably prompt a schism. By all accounts, the rest of the Spice Girls thoroughly loathed Geri Halliwell at the time of her departure.

All Saints didn’t get on from the beginning. If rumours are to be believed, Nadine Coyle won’t exactly be showered with Christmas cards from the rest of Girls Aloud this year. Stuck in a tour bus with each other for hours on end, do The Saturdays secretly fantasise about strangling one another? “We genuinely do get on,” says King. “I’m a very talkative person. I love being in other people’s company. I would be so lonely if I didn’t have the girls with me. We have our own hotel rooms, we go to bed on our own. So it’s not as if we don’t get any time alone.

“That being said, when you’re on tour, you’re all away from home. It’s nice to have each other. We’re all going through this together.”

* The Saturdays play O2, Dublin, Monday. The album On Your Radar is out now.