As jobs go, being in a girl band has to be up there with ice-cream taster, rollercoaster designer and being Cher. But what do you do when it’s time to mothball the double denim and Buffalo boots? If you need to work, chances are you will look for something reliable that’s more rewarding than having your bum digitally reduced so you’re fit for public consumption.
“I wanted to do something where people don’t constantly decide if you’re good enough,” explains Mariama Goodman, veteran of girl groups Honeyz and Solid HarmoniE. “To be in a career where if you work hard you do well.” That career was midwifery. Goodman explains that she didn’t want a desk job, she wanted to meet people and face different challenges every day: a bit like a pop star, but without the croptops. “I was always completely fascinated with babies and childbirth,” she says, “so I applied and got accepted. It was a shock to the system to start buying pencil cases when you’d been doing what I had been, but I went back to university and got a first.”
The euphoria of performing on stage has been replaced with the longer-lasting satisfaction of helping people, but in a way she still has big hits: there was the time she delivered a baby in a car park, in minus 5C in the middle of winter. “The dad had to shove the baby up his jumper to keep it warm, while the mum was having a haemorrhage on the back seat,” she says, terrifyingly. Suddenly forgetting your words at Party in the Park doesn’t seem like quite such a big deal. “At the end of that shift I felt very good about myself,” she laughs.
Kelle Bryan was in Eternal, the biggest girl band of the 90s until the Spice Girls, so going back to education was hard. Not simply because of the funny looks she got, but because she wasn’t sure she could hack it. “I joined the band at 15 and didn’t get to do further education, and to be fair I never thought I’d be able to, because at school I was always told: ‘You’re black, you’re stupid, you’re this, you’re that, you’re the other.’ Then I did my masters in artistic professional development, and was like: ‘Actually I can do this.’”
It took Bryan a while to get her business up and running. “I was an absolute hustler,” she laughs. “I started with a pay-as-you-go mobile, fax machine and faked that I had an assistant.” She assures me that the assistant who set up our interview is real. “When I needed to make landline calls I would run to the telephone box, I’m not kidding you, and answer the phone: ‘Good afternoon, Red Hot Entertainment [the name of her former company].’”
Fast forward 10 years and Bryan’s business Advocate Agency is legit: she discovered the new Jasmine for Disney’s live-action remake of Aladdin and gave Ricky Norwood his break on EastEnders. “I was always told that I would amount to nothing when I was younger, so I’m a big supporter of people who wouldn’t otherwise be given the opportunity. That’s where I’ve made my niche,” she says.
When Jacquie O’Sullivan, the woman who replaced Bananarama’s Siobhan Fahey in the group in 1988, found herself back in the real world she says had a “mini breakdown”. Her mother died, her boyfriend left her and she lost her house. “I couldn’t get out of bed,” she recalls. It took a while but the thing that helped her through all the loss was yoga. “It really changed my life,” she tells me at breakfast, minutes after I take a class with her in Covent Garden. “I gave up all the naughty stuff I was doing, I stopped wanting to get drunk and I stopped smoking because I wanted to get up to go to yoga the next day.”
But the chakras were shaken when O’Sullivan went to an ashram to become a teacher, “I couldn’t stop crying,” she says, shaking her head. “I thought I was going to be cutting a few poses and that would be it, but I was up at three in the morning, I had to meditate for two hours, my food was served on the floor, and I was fresh from London, the big ‘I Am’.” She found the constant chanting eye roll-inducing at first, but by day three she was finally kissing goodbye to her pop star persona. “They said: ‘Who’s judging you, but you?’ So I let it all go and it was amazing. For the first time, I felt free.”
O’Sullivan qualified as an instructor years before it was trendy and still teaches yoga flow in central London and at juicing retreats around the world: Gary Barlow, Alesha Dixon and Jason Donovan are regulars.
Every one of the women I spoke to seemed content with their new lives. While a cynical reader might believe that they secretly pine for their girl band glory days, the reasons they give for leaving the groups often sound potent enough to put them off pop for good. It all comes down to girl power: who has it and who doesn’t.
“I distinctly remember my first meeting with the Honeyz,” recalls Goodman, when she was the new girl replacing founding member Heavenli Denton in 1999, “and one of the girls who was an inch shorter than me saying: ‘Well she can’t wear heels, because she can’t be taller than me.’ Then a bit later she said: ‘You just don’t seem grateful enough to be here.’” Goodman still can’t quite believe the cheek, but this seems to be a recurring narrative: the manipulative double jab of ‘How much do you want it?’ and ‘What are you prepared to sacrifice to keep it?’
“It got to the point where I was crying on my way to work,” sighs Goodman, “and obviously that’s not what you dream of.”
Bryan reveals that as strained as it was, she eventually fell into a routine. “I was almost numb. You put your game face on, don’t you? Go to work, do your job, come home.”
When O’Sullivan’s feelings of being the outsider got too much, a self-fulfilling prophecy, she made things worse. “I was a feral young girl, I’d come from a band with a punk mentality (girl group the Shillelagh Sisters) and literally didn’t wash, I was so wild, and when I joined this band that felt like a machine, I didn’t deal with it very well. I was self-medicating, not turning up for interviews, and at the end it got so bad that Hillary [Shaw], our manager, would be ringing round hotels to see if I was there, cos we were supposed to be flying off to do a show.”
It becomes clear that some of our worst assumptions about girls in girl bands are true. When I ask Goodman to describe her time in Honeyz she says one word: “Drama.” Bryan claims that in Eternal the Bennett sisters controlled everything. “I think they would agree that they come from a very strong family with a firm set of core beliefs – and coming into that was tough,” she admits.
Drama may be the name of Bananarama’s excellent comeback album from 2005, but O’Sullivan is keen to stress that there was none between them, not exactly. “What I didn’t know when I joined the band, was that Sara [Dallin] and Keren [Woodward] had known each other since they were kids,” she explains. “We never had horrible words ever but I was there to fill the space, and I got the impression that they would’ve much rather gone on as a duo,” which of course they did later, although fans have a fondness for the “Jacquie years” and so does she. “I hold no grudges. I didn’t take any responsibility for myself and how I was acting back then and now I do. If I saw the girls I’d be happy to give them a big hug.”
Goodman doesn’t have much time for anything beyond her nine to five, but her experience in girl bands comes in surprisingly handy. “There’s still a hierarchy in the NHS,” she says, lowering her voice, “but I never respected that as a thing, because when you’ve just come off stage at the O2, I’m not going to be intimidated by some junior consultant.”
