Ain’t no fall out like an S CLUB fallout! How the 90s supergroup’s reunion for 25th anniversary tour descended into chaos

For greying pop fans who enjoyed their golden years in the late 1990s and early 2000s, it was a Valentine’s Day gift like no other.

On February 14 this year, the champagne corks were popping at impresario Simon Fuller’s Chelsea offices when, after months of negotiations, the news broke that all seven members of the chart-topping 90s band S Club 7 had agreed to reunite for a landmark 25th-anniversary tour.

Bringing them all back together, decades after they dominated the airwaves with hits such as Reach and Never Had A Dream Come True had been a tough job for Fuller, 63.

The show business Svengali not only created S Club 7 in 1998, he also launched the Spice Girls, managed the careers of David and Victoria Beckham and Pop Idol star Will Young, and even helped to mastermind the ABBA Voyage series of concerts, which are currently packing in the crowds in London’s Docklands.

For five years, until they split in 2003, S Club recorded four studio albums, released 11 singles, sold more than ten million albums worldwide, and collectively raked in £50 million as a brand.

But 20 years is a long time out of the industry, and many in the band had struggled in the intervening period.

Rachel Stevens enjoyed arguably the most successful post-S-Club career, coming second on BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing contest in 2008 and enjoying some fame as a solo artist.

But Jo O’Meara saw her career nose-dive after a notorious ‘racism’ controversy during her stint on Celebrity Big Brother in 2007, in which she was accused, along with others, of engaging in bullying behavior against Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty (O’Meara says she is a different person today). She also suffered a back injury that required four grueling operations.

Jon Lee — who starred in the West End production of Oliver! as a boy before joining S Club — was living ‘off the grid’ in Cornwall, apparently not even owning a mobile phone, and it took Fuller’s team months to find him.

Tina Barrett, another bandmate whose solo career never took off, readily signed up, as did Paul Cattermole, who was so broke after the S Club money ran out he was reduced to selling his Brit Award statuette on eBay for a reported £3,000 in 2018.

Bradley McIntosh, who has worked as a music producer, writing tracks for boyband JLS and former Sugababe Mutya Buena, was also on board.

But mother-of-two Hannah Spearritt — who found modest success as an actress in TV series such as Primeval, Casualty, and EastEnders after the band split — initially refused to join the tour, citing a lack of childcare. She agreed to join only when Fuller offered to pay for nannies to come along.

Having failed in his bid to arrange a global reunion tour of the Spice Girls in 2019, Fuller was thrilled to have signed the S Club deal.

Yet just six months on from that happy announcement at London’s Soho Hotel, sources claim plans have ‘descended into utter chaos’.

Another candidly describes it as a ‘s***show’.

A third insider whispers: ‘It was supposed to be a wonderful, glitzy, nostalgic comeback for the whole group and Simon.

‘Some of S Club had been struggling financially over the years, so to earn some money was a welcome relief.

‘They sold out a lot of the concerts, outfits were being planned, as were rehearsals. It was to be a 25th anniversary to remember.

‘Now it’s a mess.’

S Club may have had a hit song called Bring It All Back — but Fuller could be ruing the day he decided to make good on that promise. So where did it all go wrong? First, in April, Paul Cattermole died suddenly of natural causes at his Dorset home, aged just 46.

Fuller said he was a ‘beacon of light for a generation of pop music fans’ — but he vowed the tour would still go ahead.

The band was quickly renamed ‘S Club’ for the ‘Good Time Tour’ — a tribute to one of their hits, which had been among Cattermole’s personal favorites.

His death was tragic enough. But more damaging still, Spearitt — who had known Cattermole since 1994, when they were both members of the National Youth Music Theatre, and who had dated him for several years — has since gone to war with her fellow surviving bandmates.

Just two months before the sold-out tour is due to start — culminating in a final-night spectacular at London’s 02 — her attendance now seems all but impossible.

In May, Jon Lee posted a group video on the band’s Instagram page, saying curtly: ‘You have probably noticed that there are only five of us here today [sic], and although Hannah will always be part of S Club 7, she won’t be joining us on this tour. We wish her all the best for the future.’

The reason was a tell-all newspaper interview that Spearritt had given only nine days after Cattermole died.

Now 42, Spearritt had been just 17 when Fuller recruited her to the band, and she soon became one of the group’s most popular members.

Her on-off romance with Cattermole began in 2001 and lasted until 2006, long after S Club had split. They reunited briefly in 2015, only to split for good months later.

Accepting a five-figure sum to tell her story to The Sun, Spearritt laid bare her heartache.

‘I was told: “Paul has sadly passed, Paul has died,” ’ she recalled. ‘I couldn’t make sense of it and had so many questions. I was trying to process it, but I just couldn’t.

‘He was my first true love. I think it was something that grew from a solid friendship. I’m glad I had that first time around. I was completely in love with him — probably more so than he was with me.’

The controversial interview is said to have breached an unofficial agreement by the band not to speak publicly about Cattermole’s death until its cause — later revealed to be heart failure — had been officially established. Interview requests to the group’s PR company, Dawbell, had been flatly declined.

Sources close to S Club 7 said Spearritt’s interview was ‘the last straw’, generating what insiders describe as ‘serious ill feeling’ towards her.

One tells the Mail: ‘There was a lot of upset over the interview. There was an agreement in place that no one would talk — then Hannah went off and spoke about Paul.

‘It caught them unaware: they thought they were a group, that they were tight. There was fury — people were asking: “How could she do this?” It didn’t seem right that she’d take a big sum of money to talk about their friend.’

The widely read interview was followed up in the U.S. media — prompting yet more bitterness and eventually leading to that bombshell Instagram video from Jon Lee, announcing that Spearritt would not be joining them on the tour.

For her part, Spearritt is said to have been ‘blindsided’ by the decision to ‘bin’ her; the Instagram post was reportedly the first she knew of it.

Fuller’s team has reportedly ordered her fellow bandmates not to speak to her. The Mail can now reveal that Spearritt has instructed lawyers to fight her case, threatening to mar S Club’s comeback tour with a potentially ugly — and expensive — legal action.

Friends of Spearritt have described her treatment as ‘incredibly hurtful’, insisting: ‘She can do what she likes. Paul was her boyfriend and she is entitled to tell her story.’

The interview may have been the final straw, but the first cracks between Spearritt and her bandmates had emerged during early negotiations on the tour last year.

One insider tells the Mail that Spearritt began acting as though she was a ‘union rep’ to squeeze as much money as possible out of Fuller.

On the face of it, there’s nothing wrong with her seeking to get the best possible deal. But the suggestion is that her hard-headed negotiations threatened to jeopardize the entire project.

Several members of the band have suffered money troubles in recent years. As well as auctioning off his Brit Award, Paul Cattermole was once so broke he is said to have thanked a TV company for giving him a shirt to wear during a broadcast.

In January, Spearritt claimed she had been homeless over the previous Christmas, and had been forced to move — with her fitness instructor partner Adam Thomas and, their two children — four times in six months, even sleeping in an office after their landlord sold the home they had been renting.

‘People think we [the band members] must all be millionaires, but sadly it’s just not true,’ she said.

‘It was what it was and we enjoyed ourselves at the time.’

She added that even in their heyday, the band’s wages had been nothing ‘compared with the money being made’.

But her determination to extract as much cash as possible from the tour irritated her fellow bandmates Lee, Barrett, and O’Meara, who had been looking forward to singing to the fans again as much as enjoying a decent payday.

Sources have told this newspaper that Fuller has ‘not exactly been generous’ with the fees he is giving the remaining singers — but they added that the excitement and chance to relive the ‘good old days’ had been incentive enough for most members of the group to get back together.

One says: ‘It all became irritating. The rest of the band was happy to have a bit of fun and earn a bit of cash, but Hannah wanted much, much more.

‘Because Fuller was insisting that all of them got on board or the reunion wouldn’t happen, it was a bit shaky for a while.

There were weeks when some of the group feared they would lose the opportunity and it worried them. It caused much ill feeling.’

Sources close to Fuller — who has represented tennis legend Sir Andy Murray and Formula 1 ace Sir Lewis Hamilton — say the tour was meant to be ‘a joyous occasion’, but now he could find himself battling Spearritt in court.

One friend said: ‘Simon always knew that getting seven people together was going to be a challenge.

Even back in the day, there were many difficulties within the group. But he thought that he was through the worst of it . . .

‘He has had to deal with Paul’s tragic death and now there could be a huge legal case.

‘Hannah signed a deal with him and now she isn’t involved. She is insisting that wasn’t her choice. It could get expensive.’

With Spearritt out of the picture, S Club insists the show must go on. Their first concert is booked at Liverpool’s M&S Bank Arena on October 13.

There will, they say, be a ‘huge tribute’ to the late Cattermole. Last month, Tina Barrett told how the remaining band members believed his spirit had joined them when they filmed the video for their first single in 20 years.

‘We were all sat down and a butterfly came from nowhere,’ she said. ‘It was a bright, beautiful butterfly that flew down and went off.

‘I don’t know why, but I just thought: “That’s Paul.” It came from nowhere.’

A touching story. But it is unlikely to be enough to quell the storm of controversy raging around this highly anticipated pop reunion.