B*Witched still bedazzled but no longer bewildered
B*Witched are back in blue denim and coming to an Electric Picnic near you...
B*Witched blazed to the top of the charts in the late Nineties with a slew of dangerously catchy songs such as C’est La Vie and Rollercoaster. Unlike many contemporaries from these islands, they achieved top ten success in the US and sold over six million records worldwide before their split in 2002.
In 2013, twins Edele and Keavy Lynch, Sinéad O’Carroll and Lindsey Armaou were persuaded to reform for the ITV show The Big Reunion, documentary series that prompted the return of among others, Blue, Atomic Kitten and Liberty X.
Subsequent spin-off concerts and tours have seen them remain together as a unit. They are a little older, a lot wiser and only just a bit cynical about a business that treated them with little respect.
‘I love the way you say a little older and a lot wiser,’ 39-year-old Armaou laughs.
‘I wouldn’t use the word “cynical”,’ Edele says. ‘Just savvier... Things have changed such a lot compared to when we were around the first time.’
Shockingly, after becoming the first female band to see their first four singles go to number one, they were dropped by their record company – and it still rankles.
‘The head of our record company changed and the new guy didn’t look on us as his baby, so he let us go,’ says Edele, 38, who is now a mother of three.
‘It’s only understandable in the sense that the record companies were downsizing, and they were looking to clear acts from their rosters. We got to know why people compare life in a pop band to being in a bubble... It was literally 18-hour days of travelling and working and not seeing our families. It consumes your entire life, so when it suddenly ended and real life, as we used to know it, reappeared it was a huge shock.’
All four attempted solo careers with limited success. Edele and Keavy formed Ms Lynch which later rebranded as Barbarella, but the charts eluded them.
Edele says big brother Shane was busy with Boyzone, so they never really spoke to him about their travails. Keavy confessed to suffering from depression, but later trained as a counsellor.
In between spells in the Celebrity Big Brother house and Ireland’s Celebrity Apprentice, Edele found success as a songwriter with the Xenomania music production company.
While there, she’d write songs that would later appear on albums by Sugababes and Girls Aloud.
She says: ‘You would walk into the house and there were maybe five or six different studios. There were so many different rooms; there was one room where people focused completely on lyrics and it was just called The Lyric Room. It was only when you took a break for lunch and met everyone that you realised how many people worked there.’
Lindsey was also knocked back in her efforts but found some solace with a career change.
‘I really wanted to stay in music as well and I threw myself into the writing and production side of things,’ she says.
The good news for fans of the fab foursome is that they have been working on new material and hope to release an album as soon as is practical.
n B*Witched perform on the Electric Ireland Throwback Stage at Electric Picnic.
‘I really wanted to stay in music and threw myself into writing and production’