In 2001, at the height of their fame, S Club 7’s reputation as squeaky clean, child-friendly pop puppets went up in weed smoke. Apparently bored with promoting their future wedding-disco staple Don’t Stop Movin’, the UK band’s three male members – Paul Cattermole, Bradley McIntosh and Jon Lee – were arrested in Covent Garden in London for sharing a joint. The briefest moment of rebellion saw the band rechristened “Spliff Club 7” by the tabloids, while the BBC – which aired S Club’s various spin-off TV shows on which the band would debut shiny, multi-platinum hits such as Bring It All Back, S Club Party and Reach – distanced itself from the controversy. A mooted endorsement deal with cereal brand Sugar Puffs was immediately nixed.
Twenty-three years later and Rachel Stevens, who, like band members Jo O’Meara, Hannah Spearritt and Tina Barrett, wasn’t present during the still-quite-PG-13 drugs bust (for which the three men received a caution), can just about laugh about it. “It’s so funny,” she says. “I mean, it wasn’t funny at the time. We were marketed to a young audience, and we really felt that responsibility. That’s a lot on teenagers who are making mistakes, and we did it publicly.” Did she ever partake? Silence.
We are seated in a north London bar and Stevens, now 46 and looking demure in a cream suit, takes a sip of her Diet Coke as if still weighing up the potential fallout. “I’ve had the odd little cheeky one,” she smiles. “I quite fancy one now to be fair. Could you imagine, me and you? Wouldn’t that be fun?” I start envisioning a completely different, more relaxed and snack-heavy afternoon. “Next time, Michael, I’m up for it.”
It’s been a tough few years for Stevens. In her new autobiography, Finding My Voice, she talks about the benefits of a more practical coping strategy: therapy. It was there for her when her marriage of 13 years to the real estate mogul Alex Bourne broke down in 2022 (the pair have two daughters), and again when Cattermole died suddenly of heart failure a year later. His death came shortly after the announcement of an S Club 7 reunion to celebrate their 25th anniversary and the kind of success that saw them land two Brit awards, a top 10 single in the US and sales of more than 10m albums worldwide.
It was the band’s long-term assistant who first raised an alarm when she couldn’t get hold of Cattermole on the phone. “Paul was always the person who would come back to her first – I was always the last,” she says with a smile. “I was reassuring, but I did think it was worrying. Then, a couple of days later, we were all on a group call and that’s how we found out. It was so hard.” She takes a deep breath. “It was lovely spending time with him and getting to know him now, and not as kids. We hadn’t got together loads before he passed away, but the times we did he was really excited.”
She smiles the biggest grin when I ask what he was like. “Oh my God, he had a wild energy. Fun, funny, quirky, an eccentric sense of humour. But sensitive. A very spiritual soul. That’s one of the driving forces behind my book – we see people in the public eye and we make up our own minds, but no one knows what that person is going through. There’s so much depth to all of us, and we all have a story to tell. We don’t all live a charmed life.”
After a short delay, the decision was made to continue with the tour. “We were all processing what had happened, initially,” she says. “We had to stop and be there for each other. We were mindful of his family. We were never going to not do the tour, it just became a special tribute to him, and for him, and for the fans.” While mental health and duty of care wasn’t at the forefront of the music industry in the early 00s, this time the band, minus Spearritt who chose not to join the tour after Cattermole’s death, were offered group therapy. Spearitt has since said she was pushed out of the band. “I’m not going to go into that,” Stevens says briskly. “All I will say is that I respect her decision, everyone has their own reasons, and I wish her well.”
Stevens has always struggled with interviews. In the book, she puts it down to being too much in her head and wanting to protect herself. As a child growing up with her parents and two brothers in Southgate, north London, she was always referred to as the pretty one, the shy one, the nice one. When girls bullied her at school, she was told they were jealous of her looks and that it was best to smile and ignore it. “A lot of attention was put on how I looked, and how we looked as a family,” she says. “I was an overthinker, a worrier, and I suffered with a lot of anxiety. I’d be so in my head all the time, but I didn’t talk about it.”
When she was 15, her parents separated but it was never discussed as a family. A year later, in a bar, a waitress informed her she had a half-brother, a fact her dad had kept from her. When she confronted him about it, he lied. Strangely, in the book she says she didn’t feel as if she had anything to rebel against growing up, despite the evidence to the contrary. “I got so conditioned to just going, going, going, and not really acknowledging things, and not having an outlet to ask questions,” she says now. “I had to feel like I was in control. I was always the designated driver. The thought of being out of control from drinking was too much for me.”
In some ways S Club 7, the band she joined when she was 19, was the perfect escape. Formed in 1998 by manager Simon Fuller, shortly after he was given the Buffalo-branded boot by the Spice Girls, they were the most controlled of all the acts riding the late 90s and early 00s pop boom. “Looking back, I think S Club was very strategically arranged,” she says delicately. “Simon had just had that experience with the Spice Girls and it didn’t end well, and I think the psychology behind it was: ‘I’m going to put this together and I’m not going to be put in that position again.’” She quickly softens that blow with a clarification: “Not consciously, maybe. It was very manipulated, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. It makes sense. It was a big machine.”
Either way, S Club 7 acted as a cocoon from her “fragmented” family life, “an escape from where I was”. New worries plagued her, however. While the other six members had been found via a gruelling audition process, Stevens was fast-tracked into the band by Fuller after being spotted in the Sony building while visiting her brother, who worked in the cafe. Impostor syndrome quickly mixed with a battle for an identity. “Among all the fun and the excitement and experiences there was this inner heaviness and sadness. I was really struggling with my feelings. I just kept playing the role.”
That role mimicked the one she had played in her family: “She’s nice, she’s sweet – it was about how I looked.” As a kid, she longed to be a superstar like her idol Kylie Minogue, and would talk about it constantly. “I was strong and driven and fiery and passionate, but I ended up becoming a very dulled-down version of myself because it was: ‘Keep going, put the smile on.’ I look back at interviews and think: ‘Who is that person?’” To lighten the mood, I ask what her overriding memory was of those early years in the band, hoping that the warm glow of nostalgia has taken hold. There’s a long silence. “If I’m really honest, the thing that comes to mind is anxiety,” she says with a sigh. “I was consumed with it. I was nervous all the time. Always worried. Feeling insecure. I just didn’t feel safe.”
One dark cloud that always covers the sunshine of S Club 7 is the perceived lack of money the band earned in their heyday, given their exhausting workload (between launching in 1999 and splitting in 2004, they released four albums, starred in four series of their TV show, oversaw the launch of mini-mes S Club Juniors and released a feature film). Both Cattermole, who quit the band in 2002 leading to a name change to S Club, and Spearritt would later talk about making millions for others while they struggled financially.
“It’s a tricky one,” Stevens says. “We were young, we were 100 miles an hour; here, there and everywhere, so you put your trust in accountants, lawyers. Looking back with what I know now …” She stops and quickly changes direction. “It was what it was. I don’t look at it in a negative way. We were very lucky to have the opportunity we had.” Does she think they were paid enough for the work they did? “I don’t want to go into that. I’m someone who looks at things cup half-full.
“People do things for a reason, and I want to learn and grow from every experience.”
We talk about Seeing Double, their 2003 film written by Fuller’s brother Kim, in which an exhausted and increasingly belligerent S Club are replaced by robot replicas who never tire and never complain. “Kim saw [our lives] and it was like art imitating life,” she says. “There was that feeling, I think, of just: ‘Do what you got to do.’” Is that what they wanted – this version of you that just did what you were told? “They’re your words, Michael,” she smiles cheekily, “not mine”.
After 11 UK Top 5 singles, including four No 1s, the end of S Club was a fairly muted affair. After finishing the promo for their last single, Say Goodbye, they got into their own cars and went their separate ways. “It was a weird moment,” she says. “But we were kids and it was a lot. I think everyone needed to process.” Four months later, however, Stevens launched her solo career via 2003’s excellent Sweet Dreams My LA Ex, a No 2 hit. It was later joined in the runner-up spot by the exquisite electro-glam shuffle Some Girls, a song about the perils of the casting couch that alludes to blowjobs but somehow became a Sports Relief charity single. The latter was taken from 2005’s second, and so far final, album, Come and Get It, which peaked at No 28. She swiftly parted ways with her label.
With her pop career over, Stevens was adrift. She moved to Los Angeles where she briefly dated the actor Stephen Dorff (“He was so hot. What else do we need to know? He was hot”), and started auditioning for TV and film roles. At one point, she got down to the final two to play the assistant Rose in Doctor Who, but lost out to Billie Piper. In 2009, she married Bourne, with their wedding delayed so she could appear on Strictly Come Dancing (she finished second). Years later, in 2022, she swapped dancing on hardwood for Dancing on Ice. She finished 10th, having broken her wrist in training, but it was on the ITV talent show that she met her current boyfriend, American professional skater Brendyn Hatfield.
Her initial return to TV triggered more talk about her appearance – in 2009, she won Rear of the Year (in Finding My Voice she jokingly refers to that as one of her greatest achievements), while in 2014 she was crowned Sexiest Woman of All Time in now defunct lads’ mag FHM’s 20th anniversary list. She bristles at the idea that the lists were degrading: “It was of that time. Everyone has a voice. It was a bit of fun. Why not? FHM for me was always about expressing sensuality instead of sexuality and everyone expresses it in different ways.”
The first S Club reunion took place in 2015, but the 12-date tour seemed more of a perfunctory cash-in than a passion project. “It was interesting looking back having done [a reunion] again now,” Stevens says diplomatically. Does she still struggle to say no to things? “Not now. Then, for sure. It’s not just about me, either. It’s a band. I didn’t stop to weigh anything up, which was very me.”
Having just completed a US tour, and a performance at the Isle of Wight festival, S Club’s slate now looks empty. So what is next? “I’m not sure yet. I don’t know. I want to be in the moment. We’re all looking at opportunities, so we’ll see,” she says with a shrug. Is it difficult not to slip back into that role of nice, quiet, smiley Rachel Stevens every time you go back into that bubble?
“It was triggering at times,” she says, “but I have that inner resilience and strength now. I didn’t have that then.”