Sugar & Spice

 

She might look like the favourite daughter of a Gulfi prince – wide eyes, smooth deep-brown skin, hair the colour of Turkish coffee with caramel streaks applied during a no doubt expensive session in the salon – but there is a devilish streak to Amelle Barrabah that has meant she’s seen more action in supermarket tabloids than OK magazine. The latest member of the Sugababes has not only been thrust into the spotlight as part of the most successful all-girl British pop band in history, but she has been a one-woman headline machine when nowhere near a microphone.

 

She has had fights with other girls in bars, seen her boyfriend attacked with a machete, her car vandalised endured the delusions of her younger sister Samiya who claimed the same boyfriend raped her and, as a result, has been as familiar with the insides of police stations as recording booths. Just turned 24, Amelle is all confidence, confrontation and contradiction; she’s sexiness on a short fuse, combining Arab sensuality and a deeply English attitude. And that’s why we all slightly crazy about her.

 

At least she offers a tiny promise to try and edge some Arabic influences on to the future material. Hey, if it works for Hillary Duff, who considers mainstream a compliment, then there shouldn’t be too much trouble squeezing a tabla on there. “I’ve got some ideas, like a hip-hop-Arabian fusion. There’s got to be a few of those kinda tracks on the next album.” 

 

It’s real turnaround for Amelle, whose search for a break in the music industry was becoming somewhat desperate – “I was stalking record execs,” she confesses with a laugh that’s only half in jest – when she was called by the Sugababe’s manager two years after he saw her showcase in America. When original singer Mutya Buena left the band, Ron Tom remembered the Middle-Eastern-looking performer and invited her to join, completing a multi-ethnic line-up. “I’d dreamed of breaking into the music business for years,” she says, “but never did I dream of waking up one day to be the third Sugababe. When he told me they wanted me to join, I couldn't believe it. I literally couldn't talk. I thought I was having an asthma attack".

 

“I had loads of odd jobs before that, even working a chip shop while at college. I’d been a waitress and worked in a call centre. A year ago, I was working as a PA in a hotel in Farnham. At first I thought I wouldn’t be good enough for the band and the fans would be chucking things at me and stuff. I really did, but surprisingly they haven’t yet…”

 

Of course, with the band comes the attention, and not always the attention you want. Britain is home to perhaps the most venomous tabloid press on the planet, with entire magazines and large sections of the newspapers given over to celebrity gossip and the kind of “gotcha” much-raking that will place an up-skirt shot of underwear – or lack of – as someone gets out of a car on an entire page. One too many drinks in the club? Expect a flashbulb in your face when you try to leave. Going on holiday? A telescopic lens will be in the bushes somewhere trying to find a bare breast or a slice of cellulite as you sunbathe. While Amelle admits she has taken some time to adjust to the pervasive presence of the paparazzi, she hasn’t exactly helped herself.

 

Within a matter of weeks of joining the group in the spring of 2006, they supported the newly reformed Take That on their mammoth tour of UK arenas, playing to tens of the thousands of slightly tragic women who’d failed to outgrow a decade-old teenage obsession. New to the group and therefore all but anonymous, Amelle felt she had been “snubbed” backstage by portly lead singer Gary Barlow; hey, she might well have been a PR, a journalist, a back-up singer – how was he to know? Instead of swallowing it and politely explaining later that she was in the most important female band since the Supremes, she went nuts in the press. “He was up his own arse,” Amelle blabbed during a radio interview. “He was like ‘see you later love and why are you even speaking to me?’” It might well have been true, but if you’re taking on a guy who’s record sales rival Michael Jackson, there’s only going to be one winner.

 

Then it seemed to get worse and worse. In May 2007, her 18-year-old sister was attacked by a “vicious” group of girls in the Bar Med nightclub in Guilford – hardly surprising if you’re unlucky enough to have been – and Amelle launched in, took on all-comers and came away with a handful of someone else’s hair extensions and a police record. “The other girls should be the ones punished, not me,” she insists. “I am the innocent party here.”

 

Then, in an incident that is best describes as bizarre, another sister Samiya accused Amelle’s long-time boyfriend, Freddie Fuller, of gang-raping her with three other men – even though he was 30 miles away at the time, and the parents of the other men were there the whole night and even shared a cup of tea with her the following morning. The same sister had also accused Fuller’s friends of filming her in the bathroom and putting the tapes on YouTube. Her best defence when the story was proved to be an utter fabrication was “It must have been a bad dream.”

 

The pair split for the three months until the truth emerged despite endless tabloid speculation, but even when reconciled the headlines kept coming. Fuller, who might not be everyone’s ideal choice for a son-in-law, nearly had his arm chopped off in a machete attack by a man police believed Fuller had fought with 18 months previously after groping Amelle in a club. Then Amelle was arrested for a second time when she went psycho on a neighbour’s car after more trouble with little sister Laila.

 

The trouble almost cost Amelle, by now a firm newsroom favourite, her place in the band. She acknowledges she had to make some changes to keep her out of the wrong kind of spotlight. “No, I don't want to get into trouble anymore. I realised I had to leave home and move to London. I love being in the band and if people are jealous, I don't want anything to do with them. I just want a quiet life.

 

Amelle has certainly learned the hard way about being in the public eye, and the expectations of being an attractive woman in a performing industry. She admits she isn’t confident about her body – how many times do we have to tell you, Amelle, it’s fantastic – and admits that the band is always under pressure to wear less. They even succumbed one, doing a “nude” shoot that, on closer inspection, merely involved sheer, skin-coloured leggings from the waist down. “Our music is strong enough, we don't need to show too much,” she counters. “It doesn't go with our personalities. I wouldn’t feel comfortable in some of the clothes Girls Aloud wear. I just wouldn’t be able to do it. There’s little bits that I don't want people to see… like my wobbly thighs.”

 

But the Sugababes are hardly sex free. The very first song that Amelle performed on contained the rather unsubtle lyric: “my engine’s running hot/can you come and fix it for me”, and there has always been a high cheek factor. “Virgin Sexy”, for instance, has the interesting couplet: “Cuz I'm virgin, virgin sexy/If you want me, just text me.” Which might be otherwise dubbed the ballad of the Middle Eastern mall.

 

Unfortunately for the band’s huge male fanbase, the only skin we’ll be seeing is of the “thick” kind. Amelle plans on keeping a lower profile in the future, and not responding to every slur – real or imagined. “There’s no other way you can handle yourself or survive in this industry,” she sighs. “I’ve definitely found that out. If anyone says anything bad about you or says things about your private life in the papers, you've just got to learn you can't take it personally, and that they don’t even know you… So screw them, who gives a sh*t about them?.”

 

Of course, she did at first. She was joining a media sensation, and one that had already seen two members leave for alleged “differences”, and that in private the band members all hate each other. She herself thought there must be an element of truth to the rumours simply because they were in black and white and sold at a newsagent. “It just goes to show you can’t know anything about someone till you meet them.”

 

But you get the feeling she would have put up with Cruella de Ville and Margaret Thatcher as co-stars if it meant she could sing for a living. “If I didn’t have music I would be a bitter old woman who resented everyone,” she says, laughing. And we wouldn’t have these photos and a fabulously three-dimensional story.

 

 A full version of this article appears in NOX 23.