sugababes
Another summer of superb evenings at The Jockey Club's July Course in Newmarket came to a fabulous finale on Saturday night.
Another summer of superb evenings at The Jockey Club's July Course in Newmarket came to a fabulous finale on Saturday night as Mutya Buena, Keisha Buchanan and Siobhán Donaghy, having successfully reclaimed the right to use the Sugababes name, delivered a feast of nineties pop classics to an ecstatic post-race crowd from the stands overlooking the famous Rowley Mile.
With the sun shining, the trio took the stage just after 6.40pm and delivered a blistering cavalcade of hits, going all the way back to September 2000 and their debut single, Overload, for the opening number on their Newmarket setlist. With a live backing band, and a crowd singing along to almost every song, Buena, Buchanan and Donaghy managed to turn the clocks back 25 years for many revellers in the audience, and delight many of their subsequent generations too.
How many other bands could deliver a seventeen song show like the one that Sugababes pulled out of the bag for last night's Newmarket crowd? With ten top-ten hits in their setlist, of which six reached number one in the UK singles charts, Sugababes are nothing short of a pop phenomenon, and this was nothing short of a phenomenal performance, Just three new songs were included – Today, Jungle, and Shook, and also two covers – a gorgeous version of Lorde's What Was That, and a lovely laid back version of Sweet Female Attitude's Flowers.
The evening ended, just as the sun was beginning to dip beneath the trees, with three absolute crowd pleasers that had been held back right until the end – Freak Like Me, Push The Button, and the beautiful sentimentality of About You Now.
Opening support came from Natasha Bedingfield, who won the crowd over early on with the title track of her 2008 album Pocketful of Sunshine, ahead of a cover of Portishead's Glory Box. Before performing Single, the first of the three top ten hits taken from her 2004 debut, Bedingfield asks for the mobile phone from young Irish fan Aoife who is standing next to me at the front of the stage, and proceeds to film the crowd as she sings the song. One Natasha Bedingfield fan is going to have a very special souvenir of that performance. The set concludes with Bedingfield's own children on stage for These Words and Unwritten, possibly her two best loved tracks, and a heartwarming way to endear herself to this Newmarket crowd.
So that is it for this year's Newmarket nights. Once again, congratulations to The Jockey Club for a superbly well organised day of racing and live music, and let's do it all again in 2026.
