S Club 7 are getting set to party again. Photo / Supplied
Late-90s teen pop act S Club 7 are reuniting for a new tour to celebrate the group’s 25th anniversary.
S Club made the announcement on British chat show The One Show today, marking the first time all seven members have been seen in public together since their last reunion tour eight years ago.
The group — who made it big with hits like Bring It All Back, Don’t Stop Moving and S Club Party — will embark on a UK arena tour in October.
All members of the group are now in their 40s, with the eldest, Tina Barrett, due to turn 47 a month before the tour kicks off.
And fans were shocked by Tina’s appearance in particular — noting that the group’s eldest member barely seems to have aged a day in over 20 years.
Many fans have taken to Twitter to express their shock about the star’s seemingly reverse ageing, with one saying, “Tina from S Club 7 aged in reverse”, while another person tweeted, “Tina from S Club 7 is the female Benjamin Button, she looks younger now than she did 15 years ago”.
A third person said, “Tina Barrett from S Club 7 is 46?! She looks like she’s still in her 20′s”!
While this new reunion is billed as a celebration of S Club’s 25th anniversary, they’re a little early — they didn’t actually release debut single Bring It All Back until June 1999.
From there, the group became a cheesy pop success story, helmed by former Spice Girls manager Simon Fuller. There were four studio albums, a TV series and even a movie before S Club split in 2003.
During that time they scored an unbroken run of 11 top-five UK singles.
But in recent years, members of the band have been open about their fading fortunes, and how little money they were left with, despite the group’s massive success.
One member, Hannah Spearritt, recently revealed she and her family were left homeless last Christmas, struggling to make ends meet.
“We were not on a good wage compared to the money being made,” she told The Sun of her time in the group.
“People think we must all be millionaires but sadly, it’s just not true. It was what it was and we enjoyed ourselves at the time.”
She also confessed she was reluctant to sign on the dotted line for the S Club reunion until she could negotiate a good deal for herself, saying: “At the moment it’s S Club 6.”
Hannah’s bandmate and former boyfriend Paul Cattermole opened up about what life was like in the band in a 2019 interview, claiming their relationship had been arranged by the group’s management.
And S Club’s lead singer Jo O’Meara recently endured months of gruelling back surgeries, saying last month that she feels lucky she’s able to walk at all.
S Club’s last reunion, in 2015, was simply for a quick, 12-date UK tour. It will be interesting to see whether they’ll stick around for longer this time around, and parlay their reunion into the sort of second life for the group that their contemporaries like Steps and the Sugababes have managed to pull off in recent years.