I'm lying on a sofa with my eyes closed. Some very loud music is playing through my headphones. It’s a bouncing, maximalist pop track with lyrics about loving your body and jiggling your tits. When I open my eyes, I am not in my own flat like I usually am in this scenario. Instead, Little Mix’s PR is smiling expectantly over me, his face lit up by a carousel of TV screens which are playing non-stop music videos around us. “The girls want to know your thoughts,” he mouths ominously, gesturing towards my headphones. Before I can reply, though, I’m being ushered through the glossy corridors of the Sony offices and into a side room, where Little Mix are bundled together like a pile of limbs and styled hair.

First, some backstory. Little Mix won The X Factor in 2011 – back when it was still a viable pathway to success – and have gone on to make an estimated £12 million . They’ve released four albums, with another one on its way, smashing records previously held by The Spice Girls. They’re also the first British “girl band” to have experienced this sort of mega-fame under the glare of social media. While it might have once been fine to release some catchy songs and shout “girl power” a lot, pop groups are now expected to be shining bastions of wokeness and liberation on every social platform, while also not upsetting the Radio 1 normie mum crowd and weekend tabloid readers. It’s a weird balancing act – but one that Little Mix appear to have mastered.

“I love your dungarees!” Jesy tells me, before turning to Perrie, who is in the middle of gossiping about another musician’s recent wedding. “You should have seen his suit, it was exactly how you’d imagine,” she’s saying, sipping tea from a mug like someone’s camp mum. As soon as I turn the recorder on, though, it’s all business: they swivel their pristine, highlighted faces towards me and calmly await my line of questioning. They might come across like every single girl from your school in the home counties, but at this point, they’re also professionals.

Now aged between 25 and 27, I had expected the four of them – Perrie, Jesy, Leigh-Anne and Jade – to be weary, maybe even a little exhausted, like they have been in previous interviews . Instead, I am greeted by a chorus of enthusiastic screams. I later find out this is the first piece of promo they’ve done in ages.

When they first won The X Factor, though, they weren’t so well prepared. In fact, they weren’t prepared at all. “We were so self-conscious when we first started out,” Jesy tells me. “We were thrown into it without any expectations, we didn’t know what was going to happen, we didn’t know we were going to get abuse hauled at us for the way we looked. It was actually scary. It was horrible.” Perrie nods: “I didn’t know – none of us knew – the stuff that would come with [fame], do you know what I mean? We love performing – that’s our favourite thing in the world. But everything else… We didn’t know we’d get scrutinised, or hated for wearing a crop top and skirt; we didn’t know any of those things.”

It wasn’t just the fame they weren’t ready for, but also the absurd amount of money that filled their bank accounts overnight. Each of them come from regular families, in regional towns – so this wasn’t wealth they were used to being around, let alone knowing what to do with. They were given an advance immediately after winning the show, and Jade tells me most of hers was gone within the first few months (“I went to Marbella, lived the dream, didn’t save a penny”). Perrie went to the Apple shop and bought all her friends and family laptops. Jesy splurged on clothes. “Do you remember when we got paid for the Marks advert and we thought it was so much money?” she asks the others. “I remember going to All Saints with my mum and sister – All Saints is really bloody expensive – and I was like, ‘I can shop in All Saints!’” Perrie laughs: “I remember going to Primark with my mam and going crazy.”

If they could go back, I ask, what might they have told themselves? How could they have possibly prepared for what was to come? There’s a pause, and then Perrie leans in: “I would have said, ‘you’re not ready, go home’.” The others laugh, shifting in their chairs. “I’m being deadly serious!” she says, “We were all so young – we were between 16 and 18. Is that a bad thing to say? That’s not a bad thing to say, is it?” she glances at their PR, who shakes his head. She continues: “The idea of being a pop star to me was singing and being loved and idolised and signing autographs and being rich, and as selfish as it sounds, I wanted that. I didn’t want something mediocre. I wanted to be ambitious. But at the same time, I think at the age of 16, auditioning for something that my mum forced me to do… I didn’t feel ready.”

Without knowing whether their popularity would suddenly wane, they swiftly rented the best flats they could find in London, and shared them two and two. “Me and Jess had a fuck-off penthouse in Putney,” remembers Leigh-Anne. “It was fucking sick. We come from nothing, so we appreciate everything.”

Do they still have moments when they’re like… ‘wait, what am I doing here?’ “No,” murmurs Perrie, “It’s been too long for that.”

*

To truly understand the success of Little Mix, we need to first rewind two decades, and look at the Spice Girls. Much has already been said about how the 90s girl group revolutionised British pop. Earlier this year, ex-Music Week editor Selina Webb put it like this to The Guardian: “The tried and tested way of breaking a band was to get excited about the music first, but with the Spice Girls, you got excited about them as people first.” They were relatable and charismatic, and they released a string of huge, evergreen pop hits – it was about that combination and order. As pop critic David Sinclair wrote in his 2007 book, Spice Girls Revisited: “By the time they were ready to face the world, there was a sensational chemistry at work between the five Spice Girls, founded on a genuine bond.”