All Saints look to the future

You can't keep a good band down. You also, it seems, can't keep a bad one down, or a disappointingly reformed one. On their MySpace, All Saints insist they'll be carrying on, even until you hate The Beach as much as you hate the new stuff:

Hi everyone

First of all the four of us just want to say that we're really sorry you didn't get to know about the recent news i.e. the split from our label before anyone else. It really wasn't that clear cut for a while and we wanted to let things settle for a while and give ourselves a break. As usual the press seems hell bent on repeating their negative reporting and we just felt it was time to say something official.

As you know we are so happy with the way our single "Rock Steady" went in November. We couldn't have wished for better and it just showed that we still have our fans supporting us as well as picking up some new ones along the way.

Of course we're really disappointed that things didn't work out with our album, Studio 1 on Parlophone. We've just hit some very weird turns along the way with some of the media which is such a shame for our fans as we know you love our music. It's funny how things go with certain people's perception of things - the negativity has been astounding to us all as we've only ever been honest about ourselves and more importantly just wanted to make and perform great music.

Our heartfelt thanks go out to you all. It's great to read all the positive comments on our myspace and on the messageboards.

We're going to continue making our music and we'll keep you in the picture as things go...

It's all the media's fault, it turns out. The nasty old media, ruining things for the fans by reporting the album is poor, and that its sales are disappointing. We're trying to sift some logic out of why a group of four intelligent, media-savvy women would think that the media would bury stories that portray their comeback in a dismal light on the basis that they "just want to make and perform music."

It's like suggesting that Harold Shipman should never have been vilified in the press because he was into what he was doing. The comeback (All Saints, not Shipman's) was ill-conceived, miss-timed and half-hearted - did they really expect nobody to say so because they meant well?

[Thanks to Michael Moran for the link]