It’s spring 2008 and Girls Aloud remain not only the Best Pop Band In Britain but the most visible, drunk, tabloid-hounded, spectacularly paid and pan-dimensionally loved. Their latest award, on March 20, was Capital Radio’s Fabulous Award for being, simply, Fabulous. Over on TV, they’re shrieking, sobbing and swearing like sailors through The Passions Of Girls Aloud. Right now, they’re all dressed up in doilies like fondant fancies on a cake tower in the 17th Century, frolicking up the charts with their latest glam-kitsch, hilarity-pop winner, Can’t Speak French, which you can hear them singing in français on this very site.

In May comes their latest tour and before any of that, they’ll be beaming, extensively, from advertising portals everywhere via the low-cal Kit-Kat ‘Senses’ bar they’re being paid, reportedly, £10 million between them to endorse – and this after triumphant campaigns with Sunsilk, Ultimo and Samsung. All of which makes it even more spectacular that Louis Walsh saw so little worth in the band he inherited from Popstars: The Rivals in 2002 he comprehensively abandoned them from the out-set. Early last year, Nadine and Kimberley sat in a photo studio in London wearing fluffy white bath towels and contemplated how Girls Aloud had created their decade-defining, record-breaking career with negligible help from the man who “mentored” their TV invention.

“We finished the show and it was literally ‘you’re on your own’,” explained Kimberley. “Louis was our manager on paper but he just never got involved. We only knew Louis as a person who managed Westlife so we thought, ‘Yeah, of course he’ll be good’. And he just wasn’t ever there. When you do one of those shows and you sign a contract, they’ve got you, he can just sit down, take the money and do nothing. We had to pick up the phone and ring the record company people direct and we didn’t even know that was out of the ordinary. We didn’t know any different. We were young girls, we couldn’t afford to be getting lawyers involved and all that.”

“I think the record company actually felt sorry for us,” added Nadine, puffing on a sneaky fag. “We had to learn loads of business things usually an artist would be protected from.” Then came Kimberley again, as efficient as a school-teacher. “We needed to know what song we were releasing next and what the video’s gonna be like and who was meant to do our hair and make-up tomorrow. So it was, ‘Oh shit, there’s nothing booked, right, that needs to be done,’ and that’s exactly how it was. And is. We know every single thing that’s going on and we have done from day one.”

In their first two years, they spoke to Louis “maybe twice on the phone”, finding their only ally in Brian Higgins, their “sixth member”, and the founder of Xenomania, the poppy, shiny production wizards also behind the Sugababes.

“It was literally, ‘Here’s the producer’”, says Kimberley. “And nobody else was there. And that’s why Brian’s like the sixth member because he had nobody else to talk to, only us.” “It was a battle all the time”, adds Nadine. “Yeah, we’re manufactured, but we went down to the studio and we’d be, ‘We don’t like that song’, and got into altercations. We decided to do [Sound Of The] Underground. We were No.1 for a month straight and then getting songs from all these other producers and we were, ‘Nah, don’t like it’. We waited from December to May before releasing a second single because we knew it had to be our strong point or we might as well kiss our careers goodbye.”

“And that’s when we found No Good Advice”, says Kimberley, remembering their brassy second single, the dirty, poppy, scuzzy offspring of My Sharona and Kids In America. “We knew it was strong enough to come back with.”

Two years later in 2005, their success now established, the record label insisted they bring in an actual, working manager, and they found one in the shape of Hillary Shaw, who used to manage Bananarama. By early 2007, Louis was gone without the girls knowing, officially, if he was ever sacked or not. And today, they’re the best and most boisterous pop band in Britain, a kaleidoscopic tangle of the good-time British provinces; a five-pronged beanstalk which first erupted through a landscape dominated by the holographic pop weeds of Westlife, Steps and Blue.

“Everyone was reserved and sweet and we weren’t,” chortled Nadine in the unmistakeable Derry accent that to my mind has always made her the Ian Paisley of Pop. “But we had nobody saying, ‘Actually, you can’t go out ’cos it’ll look bad’. We just decided what we were gonna do.”