SUGABABES - "Push The Button"

(#1019, 8th October 2005)

A third album with the Heidi-Keisha-Mutya line-up, a fourth number one: for a group whose membership shuffles are notorious, you can lose sight of how consistent and successful the Sugabaes’ heyday was. Look to the credits, though, and “Push The Button” marks a transition that’s just as vital - as ominous, maybe - as the member switches. 

Xenomania, the songwriting and production team behind the first two comeback albums, have stepped back: “Push The Button” is co-written with US producer Dallas Austin, who became the main external force behind the more modish R&B-pop sound of Taller In More Ways. Austin was a pragmatic creator with a solid record in helping acts find the right sound - he’d worked with TLC, been involved with Pink’s shift from pop to rock, and Gwen Stefani’s move in the other direction. The Sugababes didn’t just enlist his services, they went over to the US and stayed at his studio there for a while, hob-nobbing with other acts.

Nobody was so crude as to come out and say it, but you suspect that international success, and US hits specifically, were on the mind of Team Sugababes. If so, it only partially worked - “Push The Button” was a huge hit in a dozen places, but America remained immune. Back home, the press poked at stories about rifts and bullying within the group, and their workload and schedule proved too much for Mutya Buena, a new mum suffering from postnatal depression; she left the band in December, and was rapidly replaced.

So a lot was riding on “Push The Button”, but you can’t hear it in the music - it floats above its context, on the updraft of its rippling synth lines, one of the lightest and breeziest of Sugababes records. It’s also, after the moody metaphors of Overload and the busy, riddling word-craft Xenomania enjoyed, their most direct and personal single. Keisha Buchanan had a crush on another artist working with Dallas Austin; the song was born out of that situation. 

It’s a song about infatuation, a Schrodinger’s flirtation about to be made real or rejected the moment the record ends. And it’s a song where everything in the music is pushing on that theme. Keisha may have found the uncertainty frustrating, but sonically “Push The Button” revels in it. There’s a delicious tension in the staccato throb of the keyboards and the ascending pre-chorus melody, and instead of a middle eight Austin fragments the chorus into a hall of mirrors and has Keisha break the song’s fourth wall and simply tell her prospective fella to get a move on.

“Push The Button” is a single-minded record, with none of the musical twists or surprises Xenomania were becoming known for (2005 is the year of “Biology”, their triumphant pocket symphony for Girls Aloud). At the time that made me underrate the record; it seemed flat and ordinary compared to what I’d been expecting from Sugababes.

Now I appreciate its simplicity a lot more. The original thing that made the group stand out was their disarming honesty - their moodiness was treated as a gimmick but it also felt like a natural teenage defense to the pressure of fame and expectation. Their songs back then were like moodboards, tangles of sometimes diffident or inexplicable emotion. “Freak Like Me” unveiled Sugababes 2.0, a group confident enough to wear that diffidence as cool. “Push The Button” brings the two versions together - a song in perfect poise between freakiness and vulnerability.

The Crystals wouldn’t have sung “my sexy ass has got him in a new dimension” but they’d have understood. The relationship between modern and classic girl groups is an uneasy one - the Spice Girls and most of their followers treated the classics as a source of pastiche or dress-up, enormous fun to be put in service of the more assertive Girl Power era. Sugababes rarely dabbled in sonic nostalgia but they drew more on the spirit of the girl groups - the idea that pop singles could work like the cover of a teen romance comic, dramatising a moment of dilemma, anguish or romantic crisis. “Push The Button” is a peak of that, the singer making herself vulnerable for one moment on which her night - or maybe her world - turns.

8 out of 10