The Girls Aloud Show ★★★★★

When the solo careers of a successful group grind to a halt, it’s usually a safe bet to wager that we won’t be waiting too long for a purse-fattening comeback tour. Girls Aloud (last active in 2012 for, well, a reunion tour), have more reason than most, however, to take to the road again. Having, tragically, lost member Sarah Harding to cancer in 2021, this new show is dedicated to celebrating all that the five girls achieved together. 

If not the most commercially successful act to come out of an exhausting procession of pop talent shows, Girls Aloud were certainly the best. Their extreme fortune was to have ace songwriters Xenomania on their side during their purple patch, penning for them a parade of quirky ditties that saw melodies as bizarre as they were brilliant competing for airtime with tremendously bonkers lyrics. 

Of course, with a greatest-hits rate like the one enjoyed here, there will always be grumblings about the tracks missed. Their utterly heinous version of I Think We’re Alone Now, mercifully, doesn’t bother our ears. However, the glorious Pet Shop Boys co-penned The Loving Kind was also nowhere to be heard. (The girls themselves don’t rate it, apparently!) But just about everything else you’d expect is played for maximum dancing effect. Sound of the Underground, Call the Shots, The Show, No Good Advice and Biology are all present and correct and all sounding utterly glorious. 

While the staging and production were exactly as you would expect (screens, catwalks, gowns, podiums, confetti, pec-laden dancers etc.), it was also what was demanded of a show punting such a peerless collection of glamour pop.

Given that she is, by some distance, the highest profile member, it’s a huge credit to Cheryl Tweedy that there were no scene-stealing antics going on here. Each girl got equal airtime and the show was all the richer for it. All four were in fine voice throughout (although, it was no surprise that Nadine Coyle and Nicola Roberts did most of the heavy vocal lifting) and it was clear that, despite the nature of how they were formed, that they work perfectly as a unit.