was sold in 2000. After eighteen months, he decided to found Xenomania as an independent production company based in Westerham in Kent, outside London, because it is "somewhere where concentration would be easy [and] no one 'pops' in." Higgins met Miranda Cooper at the 1996 Eurovision Song Contest when she was a backing dancer for Gina G, while Matt Gray had started his musical career in the 1980s, writing music for the Commodore 64 home computer. Nick Coler programmed The KLF's singles and Tim Powell started out in 1989 "doing hardcore rave stuff". Higgins attempted to launch Cooper as a solo artist under the stage name Moonbaby but failed to find success. "That's when we started writing for other people", according to Cooper. "I'd had writer's block for myself, but as soon as it was for somebody else all these songs popped out." Moonbaby's "Here We Go" would later be recorded by both Lene Nystrøm Rasted and Girls Aloud. 2002–2004: Commercial breakthrough Higgins says, "We developed this sound of electronics and guitars fusing together but this was in the late Nineties when R'n'B lite dominated pop music and we had to wait for our opening." When British girl group Sugababes were dropped by London Records, they recorded "Round Round" with Xenomania, which Higgins says was "fusing electronics and guitars and tempo changes and melody shifts, so that the chorus was the only repetitive melody whereas traditional pop structure repeats verse melodies." The song would later become a UK number-one single for Sugababes in 2002. Higgins praised Sugababes for the "crucial role" in Xenomania's subsequent success—"To me they represented something superior to what was out there. As a result, the Sugababes undoubtedly brought the best out of us as we always felt under pressure to produce results that would do justice to their voices and overall talent." Xenomania were approached to create the debut single for a girl group formed through the television talent show Popstars: The Rivals. The eventual winners, Girls Aloud, recorded "Sound of the Underground", one of sixty songs that Higgins and Cooper had written with the aim of launching their own girl group. Higgins said Girls Aloud were "a blueprint for a girl group that we'd had in our minds for ages, one that was individual rather than generic, with a sound that blurs the edges between pop and indie. We know that people aren't really interested