Sarah Harding was nervous about reuniting with her Girls Aloud bandmates.
Sarah Harding
The 39-year-old singer admits she was so racked with "nerves" before she met up with her fellow 'Sound of the Underground' hitmakers - Cheryl Tweedy, Nicola Roberts, Kimberley Walsh and Nadine Coyle - amid her cancer battle as she was worried they would all turn up "looking fabulous and glamorous" and she felt she wasn't.
She shared: "I was so happy when Peter [Loraine] suggested organising a couple of days away so that all of us could be together. I guess you could call it a Girls Aloud reunion. The plan was for us to go to Soho Farmhouse ... I did have my reservations and fears about the reunion get-together, though. It was going to be the first time we’d all seen one another in about eight years. That in itself was nerve-wracking enough, but the fact that I felt and looked the way I did made it worse ... The steroids I’d been taking made me look bloated, and I’d lost my eyelashes due to the chemo. As the time for the reunion drew closer, I was picturing them all turning up looking fabulous and glamorous, while I looked … well, like I did. Not myself. Not my best."
Sarah insists she wasn't worried about them "judging" her but she felt the girl group had always been based around a "sexiness and glamorousness" nature.
Writing in her book, Hear Me Out, in an excerpt shared to Glamour magazine, she added: "Going through cancer is bad enough, but the side effects of all the stuff that’s supposed to make you better can sometimes be as difficult to deal with as the disease itself ...
"It’s not that I thought they wouldn’t understand or be judgemental, of course; it’s just that when we were together as a group, part of our thing was the glamour. As a band, we all had our own styles and looks, but there was a sexiness and glamorousness about Girls Aloud that I just wasn’t able to rise to then. Still, I wasn’t going to let that stop me, so a few days before the trip I went shopping to get some new outfits. A friend of mine has a boutique near Mum’s place, and she was happy to help me out, finding some new gear."
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