Manufactured pop group Hear’Say are miming to pre-recorded answers during interviews, Untitled Document can reveal.

Although the five winners of the ITV audition/gameshow hybrid are able to sing live, record company executives are said to be unhappy with their interview technique, and have requested that they merely open and close their mouths in response to questions, while a tape recording of actors providing pre-arranged answers is played.

“They’re all great little singers,” said the group’s manager, Chris Herbert, “but we’re just not happy with the way they talk. They’re working very hard with an interview coach, and we hope that one day they will be able to discuss their success live, but until then, we’ve agreed that this is the best solution.”

Herbert admitted that during early interviews, the band members displayed a variety of vocal abnormalities which the record company felt would have a negative impact on sales. We gained exclusive access to tapes of some of these interviews, and discovered:

SUZANNE swears like a drunken trooper in a mess hall and ends every sentence with the words “full stop”;

KYM has a speaking voice similar to Frank Bruno’s, and cannot pronounce the word “promotional” correctly;

MYLEENE’s voice rises in pitch constantly as she speaks, and she cannot manage a sentence longer than fifteen words without her ears starting to bleed;

NOEL cannot do a Welsh accent properly, despite living in Cardiff for most of his life and having Welsh parents;

And if DANNY’s speech is recorded and played backwards, it contains messages from Satan telling young children to take drugs and steal hatchbacks.

“It’s sad, really,” says interview coach Christine Chambers, who is helping the band to overcome these problems. “They are pop singers, and they should be measured on their performance in that area only. But we live in a media-driven society, where in order to gain success they must give good interview.”

Others are less forgiving. Blur frontman Damon Albarn, who insists on speaking live even on shows like T4’s Planet Pop, where miming is encouraged, said the revelation was typical of the modern music industry. He also pointed out that he started by being interviewed for student ‘zines, working his way up through NME and Melody Maker, to get to where he is today.

“Nasty” Nigel Lythgoe, producer of the Popstars TV show, appears to have done one and could not be reached for comment.