Natalie and Nicole Appleton won’t rule out recording a follow-up to their 2003 duo album, ‘Everything’s Eventual’.
Having found global success as one-half of All Saints, the Canadian siblings pushed forward as a double-act following the band’s split in 2001 and dominated the charts with their first two singles, Fantasy and Don’t Worry.
As the LP turns 20 this year, it’s being reissued on vinyl for the first time ever, giving the girls the opportunity to look back on their success away from the group that first made them stars.
“We just wanted to be in the studio,” Natalie tells RETROPOP’s July 2023 issue. “We didn’t want to stop performing – that wasn’t even a choice. We just wanted to keep on going and who better to do it with than my sister?”
It was Natalie who set the wheels in motion on ‘Everything’s Eventual’, working first with songwriter Damian Aspinall on the classic Don’t Worry. “He’d written a couple of tracks, which we arranged, and then we co-wrote a lot of songs together. That was the starting point,” she shares. “Then Gareth Young sent us a couple of tracks that just worked. As soon as I heard them I thought they were perfect – and one of them was Fantasy.
“I knew that was a good starting point and from then on, we worked with Gareth and Damien. We didn’t know what we were going to do, but things just naturally happened. The songs were good and working with Marius de Vries was great. He’s a fantastic producer. So that gave it a real edge; his input mixed with the pop-rock songs and the ballads. So it all just mixed nicely together.”
Signing with Polydor Records, the album campaign was accompanied by a BBC fly on the wall series, ‘Appleton On Appleton’, which got up close and personal with Natalie and Nicole, both in the studio and at home with their families.
“I loved that! That was one of the very first reality TV shows, if not the first in the UK. The first one I remember was ‘The Osbournes’ and then I thought, ‘Maybe we should get a crew to follow us around doing what we’re doing now’. And that was it,” says Nicole. “It was so much fun and my sister Lee filmed it all, so it was really intimate. So she was able to come into our homes and do everything.
“Afterwards we got a call saying, ‘Do you want to do a follow-up show?’, and back then we were like, ‘No thanks’, because we like our privacy as well. But it’s great that we’ve got all that to look at and to remind ourselves what happened and what went on.”
Would they still turn down letting the cameras back in now? “Nat and I did a lot of interviewing in that documentary where they were asking us questions about it, so it’d be nice to sit and do something like that now and then gel it all together,” she smiles.
After an extended run with All Saints from 2016 to 2019, during which time they released two hit albums and toured extensively, the band is “on a break”, but that doesn’t mean the Appletons are going to kick back and relax. And given the overwhelming response to the reissue, it’s made Natalie and Nicole consider their next move.
“I think things are just gonna happen naturally,” Nicole teases. “We’d love to do festivals or maybe a small tour, just to remind everyone about the music. If it happens, it happens, but we’re not actively out to do anything unless it happens organically.”
Could that also include new music? She hints: “It would be lovely. We’re so overwhelmed to be coming out with the vinyl because we still can’t believe it’s been 20 years, so we’re just taking all that in. But I think it’d be a lovely progression and something to maybe think about as all this happens.”
‘Everything’s Eventual’ is out June 16 via Demon.
Read the full interview in the June 2023 edition of RETROPOP, out now. Order yours or subscribe via our Online Store, use our Store Finder to locate your nearest stockist, or get Digital Copies delivered direct to your devices.
