Sugababes star Keisha Buchanan has revealed she was replaced as a member of the girl group in 2009 over text.
The 39-year-old singer attracted thousands to the Sugababes’ Glastonbury set in June with the rest of the current and original line up of Keisha, Mutya Buena, and Siobhán Donaghy.
Having met as children, the three girls were only 15 when their single Overload was released, and Keisha is now looking back on the early days of her career.
‘I didn’t leave, I was replaced,’ Keisha revealed of her 2009 exit in an episode of The Receipts podcast. ‘They told me that the band was disbanded. They said they didn’t want to continue.
‘I got a text message and it was pretty much just saying they weren’t happy with the band anymore, and so that’s what I understood it to be.’
Keisha was in LA shooting the music video for About A Girl when she found out she was being replaced by Jade Ewen and cast out of the group – of which she was the only original member at that point, as Heidi Range replaced Siobhán in 2001 and Amelle Berrabah replaced Mutya in 2005.
‘I’ll never forget I saw this paparazzi and I thought who are they for, because at the height of my career I was going on the bus, tube, everything,’ she recalled.
‘Then when I got in my taxi and arrived at the house everyone was acting like something was going on, and the front of the newspaper it was like, “The Sugababes have disbanded here is the new line-up.” I wasn’t told so it was really difficult.’
Keisha then explained how as a 25-year-old this made her question everything, including her friends within the industry and her own identity, which had been so intertwined with the group since she was a child as they formed at the age of 12.
After just a year in the spotlight the ever-changing group had its first shake-up when Siobhán left.
‘It was a really hard time because I think Siobhan and I weren’t really close when we were younger, it was such a shakeup,’ Keisha remembered.
‘I feel like we didn’t really have the infrastructure around us to be like, “Okay, you’re special, you’re special, you’re special,” I think that’s quite disappointing because if you’ve got younger cousins or sisters, you know when the kids are squabbling you bring them together not apart.
‘But unfortunately we didn’t really have that so it just wasn’t a nice atmosphere. So obviously after she left quite quickly Heidi came in.’
While they are now back to the original trio, Keisha noted that during that initial ‘shakeup’ period, it was as tricky for the girls as a band as it was for the fans.
She said: ‘You don’t have months and months of someone saying that they want to leave, so while the fans are going through it, we’re also trying to figure out what’s next but when we came back, we came back with a number one Freak Like Me.
‘From there, it just went commercially massive.’
The next line-up overhaul came in 2005 when Mutya left the group, which cut particularly deep for Keisha as the pair had been together since they were eight or nine years old at school in class. Despite this though, working together caused them to distance.
‘I was a mess. That cut me the most,’ Keisha said, adding: ‘We were bestie-besties growing up together then in the band over the years we became more so colleagues.
‘But it can’t just be colleagues because we knew each other beforehand. The sisterly love was always there and never changed. ‘
24 years after they originally bagged their first hit single together Keisha, Mutya and Siobhán are performing together as the original iconic trio once more.
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