Paul Cattermole, S Club 7, and the Lie of the Pop Star Dream

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | April 10, 2023 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | April 10, 2023 |

Last Friday, it was announced that Paul Cattermole, best known as a member of the British pop band S Club 7, had passed away at the age of 46. No cause of death was given at the time of writing this piece, but police said they did not view it as suspicious. Cattermole had been in the British press in recent weeks after S Club 7 announced plans to reunite for their 25th anniversary tour. Additional dates had already been added due to high demand. I know more than a few people who bought tickets. His death has already inspired talk of the S Club curse, which has been a minor part of British pop culture lore for the past two decades. To reduce a man’s passing to a quirk of clickbait-friendly doom does him no favours, nor does it tackle the true problem at the heart of it all.

If you’re a Brit my age or somewhere around it then S Club 7 were probably a big part of your youth. They were a big deal for a brief moment in the late ’90s and early 2000s, a polished bubblegum pop act designed to appeal to young people with catchy, non-offensive tunes. The band, with its somewhat-vague title and large membership, was always intended to be a multi-pronged brand, akin to the Spice Girls but designed to appeal to boys as much as girls. They were created by manager and businessman Simon Fuller, who brought together Team Spice (indeed, he decided upon starting a new band quickly after being sacked by the Spice Girls in 1997.)

After auditioning 10,000 hopefuls, he compiled a group of seven young, bubbly, cute people who could appeal to as wide an audience as possible. Each member was given their own colour and an exaggerated version of their real personality to create a definable type. Hannah was bubbly. Rachel was hot but kind-of dim. Bradley was the joker. And so on. Their rise to the top of the charts was buoyed by a TV series, Miami 7, a Monkees-inspired sitcom that followed the band as they tried to make it big overseas. More series followed soon afterwards, as well as other TV specials, and a movie. A kids’ version of the band, S Club Juniors (later renamed S Club 8), kept the dream alive for a few more years. Paul left the group in June 2002, and they broke up soon afterward. They’d get together again for charity commitments and a 2015 reunion tour. Disparate members would perform for university and nightclub gigs.

Various members of the group would appear in the media over the years to detail their personal and financial troubles. Right before the band’s reunion announcement earlier this year, Hannah revealed that she and her family were essentially homeless after being evicted from their home before Christmas. Paul had already declared bankruptcy in 2014, and had attempted to sell his Brit Award in 2018 to pay the bills (the eventual winner never paid up.) In a 2018 interview with the TV series Loose Women, he admitted to being desperate for work and thanked the show’s producers for giving him a shirt to wear that day. Jo O’Meara effectively ended her career when she appeared on Celebrity Big Brother and took part in racist bullying towards the actress Shilpa Shetty. She had only gone onto the series because she said she was at risk of losing her home.

Simon Fuller’s net worth is around £445 million.

S Club 7 was seen as a cautionary tale for far longer than they were ever a hit band. Like many former popstars, they appeared on a lot of reality shows and did a lot of interviews talking about the realities of post-fame life. I’m reasonably sure all seven members of S Club have been the subject of ‘look how broke and sad this former celebrity is’ clickbait. Cattermole, post-7, was often brutal in his candour about life in a manufactured band. He talked about how little money they made compared to their manager thanks to being considered contract employees. It was Paul who always seemed like the most self-aware band member, the one who knew that they, a bunch of 20 year olds with no long-term prospects, were essentially dancing monkeys to Simon Fuller. This was a band designed to succeed for one person only.

Of course, it was never just S Club 7. TLC famously detailed how they’d been screwed out of their earnings, despite selling 10 million records, and they did so at the Grammys. This was essentially the norm in the ’50s, as Elvis Presley and Bo Diddley can testify to. The trainee system of K-Pop renders even the most beloved musicians saddled with enormous debts. Couple this with the perils of the Spotify era, with dwindling royalties and the smothering costs of touring, and it’s a minor miracle anyone actually makes a living from music. In fairness, very few actually do. There are more S Clubs than Taylor Swifts, more jobbing musicians trying to scrape by than megastars with money to burn.

The dream prevails, even as history becomes dominated by figures who were decimated by the system that set them up to be heroes. Once upon a time, people whose fame had passed could move on to so-called normalcy but now such actions are seen as signs of abject failure, something to be turned into finger-wagging articles by the same tabloids who mined them for content. I’d argue it’s far worse now thanks to omnipresent social media and a shortened cycle of celebrity via reality shows, influencers, and so on. It’s all to easy to get people to give themselves over to the promise of fame, and no amount of awareness over the exploitative nature of it will put off those who want it bad enough. Managers will still take all their money, fans will demand everything from their idols, and a new younger model will be brought in once the profit margins tighten. Alas, it won’t change as long as capitalism is built on such manipulation.

At the very least, I hope Simon Fuller never gets a moment’s peace for the rest of his life.