S Club have opened up about the day their bandmate Paul Cattermole died, detailing their panic as he stopped replying to messages.
The group, which first rose to fame in the Nineties and Noughties with hits such as “Bring It All Back”, spoke about the loss of their friend in their first interview since his death.
Cattermole was found dead at his home in Dorset in April, aged 46, in the midst of the group planning their reunion tour. In June, it was confirmed that Cattermole had died of heart-related issues.
Jo O’Meara, 44, said she and Jon Lee, 41, were the first two to hear the news that Cattermole had died, from their management.
“I think I just went completely silent at first. It was awful,” she told The Sun.
Lee added: “It was like someone had punched me in the stomach.”
The group talked about the panic they felt as Cattermole stopped replying to messages from management and the rest of the band.
Lee said: “We’d done a Zoom call with him, all of us, on the Monday. Then our management had messaged him a few times and it hadn’t shown that it’d been read on WhatsApp.
“So it was like, ‘Is he all right?’ But then it was like, ‘Yeah it’s Paul. You know, sometimes he doesn’t answer his phone.’
“Then the next day I phoned him and messaged him.
“Everyone was trying to get hold of him… and no one could.”
S Club 7 in 2001— (Getty Images)
Rachel Stevens, 45, talked about how grateful she was to have had Cattermole back in her life in the months before he died: “To have that time together was really special. We all reconnected again as who we are now. Paul felt part of it. We all felt part of it.”
“His presence is so strong. It doesn’t feel like he’s gone. It feels like he’s still here. We miss him dearly, though,” Bradley Macintosh, 41, added.
The band have rebranded as S Club, instead of their original name S Club 7, because they are now a five-piece following Cattermole’s death and the withdrawal from the group of Hannah Spearritt, 42, who had dated Cattermole in the 2000s and briefly in 2015.
S Club said that Cattermole’s family gave them their blessing to go ahead with the reunion tour, which will kick off in October.
