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Hello everyone. I’m Coco Khan, covering Gwilym this week, and I’m officially calling it quits. Summer is here.
No, I’m not a meteorologist or an astrologer – instead, I rely on a measurement I made this summer: the UKG Index. The more you hear UK garage – wafting through car windows, blaring festivals, or wafting in the breeze from the nearest barbecue – the higher the Mercury rises. And this year the sound of summer has come early, and with exciting news: the reunion of Mis-Teeq.
For the uninitiated, Mis-Teeq (Sabrina Washington, Su-Elise Nash, Alesha Dixon) debuted in 2001 with their debut album Lickin’ All Sides. Some of the most iconic ambassadors of garage, they took underground sounds and pirate radio and charted them all the way to Saturday morning TV, with hits like All I Want, Why? and One Night Stand. A second album followed which included the international hit Scandalous, before their meteoric rise came to an abrupt end when their label, Telstar, collapsed in 2004, and the band broke up the following year. Dixon, of course, became a national treasure through 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 steps of their youth into indie and electronica, and now through TikTok-fuelled Y2K nostalgia – Mis-Teeq never did it again.
Then, last month, fans saw Mis-Teeq’s new Instagram account, which features nostalgic photos of the band in their heyday and gained thousands of followers (given that I saw it the day it launched, I can only assume that “aging millennials” was the target group). Rumors spread. And then, last week, it was confirmed: for one night only, the band will perform at Wembley Arena to celebrate 25 years of Lickin’ all sides. Naturally, they’re calling it One Night Stand.
Some may call this trickery capitalism – the way the music industry likes it when they finish the artist’s art; extorting money dressed as fans (and often at prices fans can’t afford – although, at the time of writing, prices had yet to be announced). But I can’t help but be happy, not just for the new generation who are in love with British home sounds but finally see other women making money.
For a long time there has been a problem in music that some singers – especially female singers – get a little weird because of the culture they create. Under the most common model, payments go to songwriters and producers; singers get less credit, and therefore, less money, sometimes only one payment. Dance music doesn’t fare so well here because the human voice isn’t the primary instrument – unlike in other genres – but the background music, reduced to alternating choruses and five-second samples. And with women, especially women of color, underrepresented in production and contract negotiations, producing club fillers often comes at someone else’s expense.
As a garage fan myself, this especially hurts me because so much of the genre is defined by women’s voices. When I say “I’ll bring you flowers in a storm”, you can hear Leanne Brown of Sweet Female Attitude in your head. However, even though the song “Flowers” has racked up nearly 97 million streams on Spotify, Brown has made little money from it. He has been there ever since retrained as a teacher. Then there’s Jodie Aysha, singer of the bassline smash Heartbroken, who claims to have changed a little for a salary of six figures (at least).
Mis-Teeq was in a stronger position than most of his peers. All three members had a writing background. But even given that, things didn’t go well: Washington reportedly sued Dixon and Universal wage gapalthough the reunion at the table shows that the settlement must have been handled well enough.
However, it is difficult to reconcile the growth of Mis-Teeq’s culture with the output of the group – not least Nash and Washington, whose appearance does not correspond to what we expect from a group that has sold 12m (in comparison, Girls Loud has sold 8m).
And so – while I wait carefully to see the ticket prices – I’m glad this reunion is happening: a delayed opportunity, one hopes, for the band to enjoy the spoils of their work. That many other women in the garage do not have a shameful, and not good, Mis-Teeq, kind of way.
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