I’d love to still be with Girls Aloud, says Nadine Coyle

Her recent single, Go To Work, marked her return. A sleek, dance-lead future classic that sounded simultaneously retro and forward-thinking, the record was recorded and produced by experimental pop alchemist Brian Higgins (Xenomania).

Go To Work was a high-energy, deliciously vampy ode to making your man work for your affections and featured powerhouse vocals that were instantly recognisable as Nadine.

Nadine says: “When you’re constantly writing you write a lot about relationships and so it was like ‘what else annoys you about being in relationships?’ and we came up with this idea of writing about them being lazy and not getting up in the mornings.”

Under the watchful eye of Brian Higgins, Girls Aloud racked up an incredible 21 UK Top 10 singles, 20 of those consecutively. If each member of the band – who sashayed their way through a 10-year, five album career – had a role, then Nadine’s was The Voice. Often demoing the songs with Brian ahead of the other girls during the band’s tenure, it’s always been any discerning pop fan’s dream for the pair to collaborate again on Nadine’s solo material.

After a false start with Nadine’s Xenomania-free 2010 solo debut, Insatiable, that dream is now a reality. Nadine isn’t launching Girls Aloud 2.0, or even Nadine Coyle 2.0, her new material, finally, is the real Nadine Nadine.

Going into the sessions with a completely open mind, Brian and Nadine slotted back into their respective comfort zones, Nadine belting out majestic pop songs while Brian and his coterie of production geeks weaved various lyrics and melodies together to make chart gold.

As Nadine says: “We weren’t trying to make it sound like Girls Aloud, we weren’t trying to make it sound the opposite, it was just a blank canvas. It’s exciting.”

Nadine’s excitement at reuniting with Brian is tangible. It bubbles to the surface again and again. “This whole project began when Brian Higgins and I got back in contact and decided it was the right time to go back into the studio. We wanted to work together and were in a really good place.

“We created Go To Work, which is a sassy thing. I guess I was saying that I’d been off and had the baby and done other things, but now it was time to get back to work. And so that was that song. It’s a very lively number. Then there was On Fire, which is really in your face. It was just kind of dynamic, like an assault on the senses. Then there was Gothic, which was much more laid back and reflective. Then there was Something in your Bones, which has a sexy, dance and groove to it.”

Nadine had been due to go on the road to play songs from her new album but had to pull the tour at the last minute. She hasn’t ruled out a return at some point in the future and told fans on her website: “I am so sad to say I’m not able to do the tour at this time.

“I am so sorry and really wish things were different but for many reasons it is not meant to be.You deserve the best show possible and with such big venues and very little dates it was becoming impossible to achieve what we had wanted to do.

“Everything is a lesson and this is definitely one for me. Thank you for your continued love and support!!!”

It’s not just Nadine’s enthusiasm for restarting her partnership with Brian that stands out. It’s also her appetite to be back out there, pushing hard to win back fans.

Lest we forget, as well as charting improbable highs with Girls Aloud, she also endured astonishing lows.

The band broke up after a show at Liverpool’s Echo arena on 20 March 2013. Nadine – one fifth of the genre-bending, pop-reshaping rabble – was getting ready for the final night of the band’s reunion tour. She was in hair and make-up going through her nightly ritual but rather than taking delivery of a good-luck bouquet, Nadine received some news via the band’s PR and manager – the other girls wanted to call it quits. They weren’t looking to take a hiatus, which they’d already done in 2009, they wanted a proper split. Girls Aloud worked to majority rule and Nadine was out on her ear.

“It was shocking. We’d signed a new deal and recorded what was basically another new album.” She marched into the venue’s green room, ignoring video directors there to record the tour for posterity (a DVD), and confronted recent Celebrity Big Brother winner, and closest ally in the band, Sarah Harding. “I said, ‘Do you want to break up the band as well?’ and she was like, ‘Oh f**k it, I can’t be arsed with it, I hate everybody.’ That last show, all emotion was switched off as far as I was concerned, with any of them.”

The band announced the news via a Tweet, which Nadine disassociated herself from. She told fans: “You should know by now I had no part in any of this split business. I couldn’t stop them. I had the best time and want to keep going.” She’s not spoken to any of them since, with the exception of Sarah.

The same had been true when the band first took a break in 2009. “One of the heads from our label came to a London show [on that year’s Out of Control tour] and none of the girls were really speaking to each other, and he said, ‘When you have 20,000 people out the front and no one wants to be here, that’s the time to take a break’.”

Given the abrupt nature of the Girls Aloud second split, in 2013, Nadine was left with a sense of unfinished business. Her desire to make very startling, very aggressive pop was just bursting out. She wanted to do something spectacular. She also wanted to make sure she remained a good mother, having given birth to her daughter, Anaiya Bell, not long after the band’s split.

“I’ve got a great appetite for this. I’ve got this sense of having some time off and I’ve digested everything that’s happening. It was five years ago that I was last working with Girls Aloud and since then I’ve had four years to raise my daughter. I love being a mum. I absolutely love it. She’s such an angel and I am so thankful to have her. My outlook has changed. You have to make adjustments. I was always on the go with travelling and going around the world. I commuted from LA to London and I had a restaurant in LA and I was constantly going to New York and Ireland. I was travelling around. It wasn’t fair to bring her to different time zones, so I stopped that. Now there’s stability in my life.

There were things that I used to be stressed out about for no reason. But being a mum, I have to be everything and I’m enjoying it.”

Nadine’s career hasn’t simply been based around Girls Aloud. She’s also a serial entrepreneur who is unafraid to grasp new opportunities. As well as forming her own record label, Black Pen Records, she served as a guest judge for an episode of the series America’s Next Top Model. She owned an Irish pub in Sunset Beach, California, where she lived for nine years. It was named Nadine Irish Mist. She also bought another Irish bar O’Malley’s and a Mexican restaurant in Florida.

“When a wonderful opportunity comes along you have to say ‘OK, can we do this? Can we physically make it work?’ Things have to be a passion and for me, I love to cook. That was the main focus point for the doing the restaurant. It’s something that I loved. It was on the beach with fresh food from the harbour. It was so so wonderful.” Inevitably, not a day passes without thoughts turning to Girls Aloud. It was an important time of her life. But though she considers those times frequently, or is reminded of them, they are no longer an obsession and she’s now moved on.

“I think Girls Aloud was a really, really great time. It was so wonderful to have songs that I was so passionate about and to be able to have song after song and tours and albums and great visuals.

To do that at that age was remarkable. We would do three shows in a night to gain experience to be out there and be with the fans. We were working at a pace gave us a really good sense of working hard. I knew what it took and I couldn’t do it now. I couldn’t do three unis and three clubs now. It’s not possible.

“It was all about people listening to us. I just wanted to make songs that were part of people’s lives.” Starting the band on the ITV talent show Popstars: The Rivals, in 2002, gave her an entry into the music business.

For a while, she was close and happy with Cheryl Cole, Sarah Harding, Nicola Roberts and Kimberley Walsh. Releasing seven certified albums, of which two reached number one, was beyond her wildest dreams. And receiving nominations for five Brit Awards, winning the 2009 Best Single for The Promise, was also remarkable.

Brian Higgins and Xenomania were always at the forefront of that, bringing an innovative approach to mainstream pop. And it was little surprise that the group became one of the few UK reality television acts to achieve continued success, amassing a fortune of £30 million by May 2010. Guinness World Records listed them as the ‘Most Successful Reality TV Group’ in the 2007 edition. They also held the record for ‘Most Consecutive Top 10 Entries in the UK by a Female Group’ in the 2008 edition, and were credited again for ‘Most Successful Reality TV Group’ in the 2011 edition. The group was also named the United Kingdom’s biggest selling girl group of the 21st century, with more than 4.3 million singles sales and four million albums sold in the UK alone.

“Being in Girls Aloud was a great way to start the career. We were surrounded by those people like Louis Walsh, Pete Waterman and Geri Halliwell, which was great. I’m from a small town, Derry, in Northern Ireland, where there’s not many opportunities like The Brit School or the stage schools in London.

“We broke records and created a bit of history, which will be there for ever.

“It was inevitable that we’d split. By 2009, we’d worked constantly and we hadn’t had more than three or four days off in seven or eight years. The pace was intense, so it was a good time to take a break.

“For me it was also about having nobody else deciding what I was doing. I was at home with my parents when I was a kid, then I was in a band with a record company where there people telling us what to do and constant obligations. I wanted to be an adult and make my own decisions. I was 25.”

Given the acrimonious nature of the band’s split in 2013, would she ever turn her back on the band if the call came to give it a whirl one last time?

She doesn’t hesitate: “I would never ever say that I would never do anything with the band, hopefully, we can always have something to go back to when the time is right.

“To be truthful, I didn’t want to break up in the first place. So I would have been sitting here with the other four. I was happy to continue.”