Music

All Saints say they were pressured to go topless on TV

by Dan MacRae

Very good pop outfit All Saints (who are still very good in comeback form) revealed in a recent interview the sexist steeplechase they had to barrel through in their late ’90s heyday.

Chatting with the BBC, the combo of Shaznay Lewis, Melanie Blatt, and sort-of Canadian sisters Natalie and Nicole Appleton shared some details of the double standard they had to face on account of being a female pop quartet. One bit of bullshit the “Never Ever” tune vendors had to wade through was the producers of the UK chart show Top of the Pops trying to bully the group into appearing topless.

“They were filming images of us to use as a backdrop and they wanted us to take our tops off,” the band told the former TOTP broadcast outlet.

All Saints say they wanted no part of that brand of presentation, but were pressured by the program to give at least the illusion of nudity. If they didn’t? They’d be axed from the show.

“The girl that worked with us was in tears because she was trying to fight our corner,” recalls Natalie. “We ended up having to compromise with the producers. We dropped our tops to here [indicating her armpits] so it would look like we were topless.”

It wasn’t just sexist prodding like the TOTP incident that the band noticed as unfair. Melanie noted that they were treated far differently than the boy rock titans of the time.

“A lot of Britpop groups at the time would act very arrogantly and very stroppy, but that was never seen as a negative thing,” explained Melanie. “We weren’t half as bad – but if we didn’t want to smile one day, or we weren’t really interested in doing an interview, we’d be labelled as stroppy cows.”

Not that you needed reminding, but now’s as good a time as any to grab the All Saints tapes out of storage from your parents’ garage.

[h/t The Guardian]