Sugababes was tough.. I had one day off in a year

Book lays bare partying and struggles

- MARK JEFFERIES

Performing songs from the age of seven at weddings and birthdays, Mutya Buena and her dad Roberto would be rewarded with a big glass filled with coins and notes from grateful guests.

Just six years later, in 1998, she would be a Sugababe, part of one of Britain's biggest girl bands and able to buy her parents a house with the proceeds of her first contract.

But fame came at a price and she now realises that at one point she had only one day off in an entire year.

In her new book Real Girl, 40-yearold Mutya says: "Some of the adults we dealt with cared more about our worth than our wellbeing.

"As long as we were making money for them, they couldn't give two sh*ts about what was going on in our heads or our hearts as children." Things had started off so well when Mutya sang at those parties for the London Filipino community.

Aged nine, she appeared on Michael Barrymore's TV show My Kind Of People, singing Whitney Houston's The Greatest Love of All.

Fast forward a couple of years and Mutya had met Keisha Buchanan and was still singing - but also smoking cigarettes stolen from her mum on the way to school.

Her career may never have begun had her dad not been working in an Asian food shop in Acton, West London.