No-one had heard of the Sugababes and neither the word ‘living’ nor ‘room’ could describe our living space; sofa criss-crossed with masking tape, TV balanced on a toilet, a pyramid of Superstrengths in a shopping trolley. Ralph sucked on his joint. ‘Aren’t they sort of, like, Floydy?’ Sugababes.com confirmed that the girls were not ‘Floydy’, nor would they be comfortable in a shabby house with two unemployed alcoholics and a bi-polar with anxiety episodes. But Fraggle-Ralph rang the number and you know the rest: street blocked with do-not-cross tape, counsellors crackling through loud-hailers, milk-faced publicist Sellotaped to a chair, and Fraggle-Ralph bawling, ‘Sugababes now!’ waving his .22 about. At night the pigs blasted thrash-metal from a helicopter. Some of it sounded all right. The publicist kept crying, that was the problem.
