Onstage, girl groups make it look easy, but the demands of relentless touring and predatory
managers, combined with talent, extreme youth and the ready availability of drugs and alcohol
often make for a volatile atmosphere.
Brit foursome All Saints came on the scene in 1997 with their self-titled debut album.
All Saints became the third best-selling girl group album of all time.
But unlike the 90s superstar Spice Girls, All Saints started playing together in their
teens and lived hand-to-mouth until a label finally signed them.
From then on, the hits came fast and furious, including their top single "Never Ever."
With popularity came the pressures of life in the spotlight, for which the band was ill-prepared.
The feisty energy that differentiated All Saints from the more demure Spice Girls turned toxic.
Battle lines were drawn, with sisters Natalie and Nicole Appleton squaring off against bandmates
Melanie Blatt and Shaznay Lewis.
The media dubbed the band "Brawl Saints."
They broke up in 2001.
During a 2016 appearance on the U.K. talk show Alan Carr: Chatty Man, the reunited quartet
came clean about the breakup.
Nicole Appleton said fights occurred whenever the whole band was hungover.
She added,
"We're very honest with each other, that's the thing."
"But we didn't take the honesty very well back then.
That's what it was."
Atomic Kitten exploded onto the scene in the late '90s with European Top 10 hits like "Right
Now" and "See Ya."
But for every single that hit the charts, tabloids worked overtime reporting on drama
inside the Atomic Kitten camp.
Singer Kerry Katona dished about being punched from behind by bandmate Liz McLarnon before
a show.
In her New Magazine column, she recalled,
Katona, who quit the band in 2001 to raise a child, wasn't exactly enamored with fellow
vocalist Natasha Hamilton either, who claimed Katona stabbed her in the back.
Jenny Frost replaced Katona and stayed with the band until it split in 2004.
When rumors of a 2012 reunion surfaced, Katona wanted in.
But Frost declared to Closer,
Still, the group chose Katona over Frost.
"Like we're Atomic Kitten again."
But it wasn't long before she was back in her bandmates' burn books.
In 2017, she announced plans to perform in India without informing her colleagues.
Shortly after that, with more bad blood between them, Katona left for a second time, and,
in 2021, Frost rejoined the group.
If there was a ground zero for mayhem in girl group history, Danity Kane would be dead center.
From the band's 2005 inception as part of the MTV reality series Making the Band to
its management by rapper Sean "Diddy" Combs, himself no stranger to controversy.
Singer Aubrey O'Day blamed much of the toxicity on Combs, whom she claimed was intense and
sexist toward the group.
"Now that's what I'm talking about.
Y'all did a great job today, ladies.
Same time, same place tomorrow.
Go straight home and get some sleep, y'all."
She told Variety,
After three years, Combs reportedly found O'Day's arrogance too much to handle and fired
her and fellow vocalist D. Woods.
Combs commented on the O'Day firing to Us Weekly, saying:
The group dissolved in 2009, but the bad blood continued.
A 2013 reunion ended with an in-studio catfight between O'Day and vocalist Dawn Richard over
vocal mixing issues.
Richard elaborated on the situation in a radio interview with The Breakfast Club, saying,
They tried another reunion in 2018, this time as a trio that included O'Day, Richard, and
Shannon Bex, who eventually dropped out to go solo.
Danity Kane, by now a duo, disbanded in 2020 without any drama.
Destiny's Child had a legacy of impressive hits, selling 60 million albums and singles
worldwide, while collecting two Grammy awards.
"Nobody really realizes that it took us 8 years to get a record deal.
They think that we were just this overnight success."
But in the '90s, during the group's climb up the charts, word was that vocalists Beyoncé
Knowles and close friend Kelly Rowland were receiving preferential treatment.
No surprise, as Knowles' dad managed the group, but the situation didn't sit well with remaining
members LaTavia Roberson and LeToya Luckett.
They discovered they'd been replaced by Michelle Williams and Farrah Franklin after seeing
their successors in a video for their 1999 hit "Say My Name."
In an interview with Kempire Radio, Roberson recalled expecting a band meeting to settle
their differences, but then,
After five months, Franklin, stressed over the group dynamics and favoritism, quit during
a promotion blitz in Seattle.
She told VladTV,
"When I went into the room for us to have a group conversation, it was like everybody
just started ganging up on me."
Williams, on the other hand, claimed she had no issues with Knowles and Rowland.
She told The Sydney Morning Herald,
But after a break to work on solo projects, which were so successful that they no longer
needed each other, Destiny's Child disbanded in 2005.
Cobbled together by media mogul Simon Cowell on the 2012 U.S. version of The X-Factor,
Fifth Harmony became familiar faces thanks to their Top 10 hit "Work From Home."
The girl group served as a talent incubator for ingénue Camila Cabello, who stood out
from the rest, according to X-Factor judge Demi Lovato.
Disappointed at Fifth Harmony's flaccid performance in one episode, Lovato said,
"You need to come out of your shell a little bit.
Um, right now, there's only one person doing it for me."
That didn't sit well with Cabello's bandmates, especially Normani Kordei, the only member
who never sang lead.
During a Galore interview, Kordei had superlative things to say about colleagues Ally Brooke,
Dinah Jane, and Lauren Jauregui, but hesitated when it came to Cabello, saying:
"And then Camila.
She is, let's see.
Camila.
Very quirky.”
The response led to Cabello fans cyberbullying Kordei, sometimes with racist posts, to the
point where she had to temporarily leave Twitter.
Kordei told ABC:
"I was getting racial slander.
Images of me being hung, whipped, beaten.
And, um, it really affected me."
Cabello evidently created some ill-feelings among the rest of Fifth Harmony when she went
solo in 2016.
A group statement on Instagram read,
The rest of the message focused on how the group was setting its sights on the future:
Before Girl Power and the alt-rock Riot Grrlz movement, the Go-Go's set the bar for girl
groups everywhere.
They were the first female act who played their own instruments and wrote their own
songs to hit number one on the Billboard charts.
They dominated radio and MTV with hits like "We Got the Beat," "Our Lips Are Sealed,"
and "Vacation."
And it all seemed to happen in a flash.
Guitarist Jane Wiedlin recalled,
"In the course of a year, we had gone from playing dive bars to Madison Square Garden."
The stress of sudden fame resulted in singer Belinda Carlisle developing an eating disorder
and dependence on alcohol and cocaine, while guitarist Charlotte Caffey wound up with a
heroin addiction.
The group dominated the airwaves in 1981 but crashed back to earth by 1985, victims of
the whirlwind of recording, touring, and promotion.
Guitarist Jane Wiedlin had already left the group.
Then Carlisle and Caffey announced The Go-Go's had broken up, but left management to deliver
the news to the drummer Gina Schock and guitarist Kathy Valentine.
"Her and Belinda called Kathy and myself into management's office."
"And I was like 'This is not good.'"
"It's not good."
Schock told LA Weekly,
"It wasn't really done in a way that's proper after working with someone for all these years.
But it's fine with me."
Girl group theory maintains that a successful all-female band requires an element of eye-candy.
So it made perfect sense to morph a Los Angeles burlesque dance troupe into a singing outfit
called The Pussycat Dolls.
It worked.
From 2005 to 2010, the act churned out dance hits from "Don't Cha" to "Stickwitu," and
even became regulars on the U.K. version of The X-Factor.
One member who particularly enjoyed the attention was Nicole Scherzinger, who dominated center
stage and sang most of the leads to the detriment of the remaining lineup.
Fellow vocalist Kaya Jones lamented to TMZ,
Sherzinger was reportedly especially hostile to relative newcomer Melody Thornton, who
was perpetually stuck in the background.
"I always aspired to be a solo artist but I grew up on a budget.
You can't say no to like a major opportunity like that."
Thornton told The Mirror,
But Thornton got hers at the 2006 American Music Awards when she upstaged Scherzinger
with a show-stopping vocal ad-lib.
When they were first assembled by eccentric manager Kim Fowley in the 1970s, L.A.'s teenage
band, The Runaways, could barely play their instruments.
They were stuck with a trashy jailbait image.
But time and perspective have changed all that, with pundits pointing out their impact
on future femme outfits from L7 to Courtney Love's group Hole.
Despite being managed by a sex-crazed megalomaniac, The Runaways held their own, producing four
albums and evergreen cult hit "Cherry Bomb."
The band had a rough road, and the girls wound up hating each other, often as a result of
Fowley's manipulation.
According to Autostraddle, singer Cherie Currie and guitarist Lita Ford were often at each
other's throats.
The band almost literally starved on the road and coped with touring with a constant supply
of drugs and alcohol.
But the most horrifying account came from bass player Jackie Fox.
In 2015, she told Huffington Post that Fowley, who had since died of bladder cancer, drugged
and raped her during a tour, while singer Currie and guitarist Joan Jett looked on.
"People are focusing on the fact that Joan and Cherie were there, and they're not focusing
on, yeah, there were about twelve people there."
Traumatized, Fox stayed silent about the incident.
She explained why to Huffington Post:
The bad feelings continued long after The Runaways broke up in 1979.
Ford, who pushed for a reunion tour in 2018, took shots at Jett, who has since enjoyed
a lucrative career, for holding out on the opportunity.
She griped to the Daily Mail,
The most popular all-female group of all time, The Spice Girls, milked their Girl Power slogan
all the way to the bank, selling more than 80 million records worldwide and producing
hits like "Wannabe" and "Viva Forever."
"We knew we wanted to be the biggest band in the world.
We never entertained that we might not do it."
Throughout the '90s, Posh Spice Victoria Beckham, Scary Spice Melanie Brown or Mel B, Baby Spice
Emma Bunton, Sporty Spice Melanie Chisholm or Mel C, and Ginger Spice Geri Halliwell
were everywhere.
But all that femme-infused glory couldn't keep the superstars from occasionally turning
on one another.
The two Mels once came to blows, as Mel C told the Mirror:
Scary also started a row with Halliwell when she told Piers Morgan that the two had a thing.
But the most frequent fighters seemed to be Beckham and Brown, who went ballistic when
Posh refused to lend her one of her designer dresses.
In 2018, the Daily Mail reported Beckham had become the object of scorn among the rest
of the band when she backed out of a previously announced reunion tour.
"You need to know when it's time to actually say, 'That was great.
We achieved a lot.'
And everybody moves on."
With each performer slated to earn $8.8 million from the junket, apparently Beckham was the
only one who didn't need the cash.