‘I went to LA to work with Britney and wrote Girls Aloud’s first number one’

After forming back in 2002,Girls Aloud are back on everyone’s radarafter announcing their 2024 comeback tour. Following the tragic death of band member Sarah Harding in 2021,the group revealed that their tour will “honour” Sarah’s life and it'll be a "magical" experience.

From Sound Of The Underground to Biology, during the 2000s and 2010s, Girls Aloud dominated the music charts thanks to their infectious sound and spent a whopping 164 weeks in the Top 40 of the UK Official Chart.

And behind many of those tracks is Miranda Cooper, who formed the songwriting and production team Xenomania alongside producer Brian Higgins.

“Girls Aloud’s world was pretty much my world. We were young women, they’d just moved to London and we were all experiencing success, love, heartbreak, etc,” Miranda tells OK!.

“In soundtracking their life, I was also soundtracking my life. I felt like I was really able to express myself through the girls.”

Having co-written Girls Aloud hits such as The Promise and Love Machine, Miranda says that writing for the group was a “unique” experience – the magnitude of which she only grasped when she was able to look back on the time.

“Writing for Girls Aloud was such a unique experience. At the time I had my blinkers on and writing the hits was all a blur, but looking back, Girls Aloud changed the face of pop music,” she says.

“We had New Order come to work with us because they loved the Girls Aloud songs. The Pet Shop Boys and Franz Ferdinand did too. They all realised that what we were doing was trying to disrupt the safe pop sound. I feel incredibly lucky. Whenever I see the girls, there's so much history for all of us. It's a very special legacy.”

During her career, Miranda has also co-written songs for the likes of Sugababes, The Saturdays, Britney Spears and Kylie Minogue.

“2002 was a pretty special year for me. I’d tried to be a popstar myself and failed. I spent quite a long time being deeply unsuccessful. Finally, the first record I put out was Round Round by the Sugababes and it went straight to Number One,” she explains.

“The second one we put together was Sound Of The Underground. I also went to LA to work with Britney Spears. To this day those records stand up. Whenever I hear them I dance. I dance to a lot of my records.”

More recently, Miranda has turned her attention to the world of musicals and has created music for the Fantastically Great Women Who Changed the World musical, which is on tour across the UK until March 2024.

Telling the story of women from history including Frida Kahlo, Rosa Parks and Amelia Earhart, Miranda says it was “incredible” to be given the chance to give a voice to these amazing figures.

“It was incredible to be inspired, educated and engaged with these women's stories. It was amazing to be given the opportunity to shine a new light on some of these stories and to humanise these women that we know from the history books,” she says.

“Moving into musicals has been a real gift. There's all these different elements that have to work perfectly, and you really can't have an ego and that for me is really exciting. I feel as hungry as I did when I started pop music.”

Fantastically Great Women Who Changed the World is touring the UK until March 2024. For more information, visit fantasticallygreatwomenthemusical.com

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