Girls Aloud have vowed that the spirit of Sarah Harding will very much be felt on their upcoming reunion tour.
On Wednesday evening, Nadine Coyle, Nicola Roberts, Cheryl Tweedy and Kimberley Walsh announced plans to hit the road in 2024 for a new tour dubbed The Girls Aloud Show.
The four stars have also insisted their late bandmate will still be part of the celebrations, with Nadine claiming that Sarah’s vocals will “remain the same” on their signature hits.
Sarah famously had stand-out lines on tracks like Something New, Whole Lotta History and the chart-topping The Promise, as well as delivering the opening solo on the very first Girls Aloud single Sound Of The Underground.
“Her vocal parts are big parts like ′walking primrose’ – she is the actual walking primrose,” Nadine told the Heart breakfast show. “And ′take a walk on the wild side’, she’s got some iconic Sarah’s bits.”
“They will be Sarah’s bits,” Nadine added. “Why would we [change them]? They are her bits.”
During the interview, the group also spoke about Sarah’s absence, with Cheryl admitting: “We’ve done a few things now in the lead up to this, and it’s all felt bizarre.
“Even this morning, getting dressed. Sarah was always the one who would be 10 or 15 minutes late anyway, we’d all be waiting, and we all still feel like we’re waiting for someone else. The whole thing is very strange to be honest.”
Nicola agreed: “I came down this morning into the lobby and they were waiting for me and I still instinctively was like ‘someone still isn’t here yet’. It took me a second to check myself and be like, ‘that’s why it feels like that’. And it does still feel like that all the time.
“You never quite knew what you were going to get with Sarah. It was always high intense energy, ‘oh my god, we’re going top be late!’, ’where’s the car?’, ’where’s my lip gloss?’, ‘where’s my eyelash curler?’.”
Kimberley added: “We always talk about how much she loved Girls Aloud. She loved it. It was just the best time ever for her, we spoke so much about it the few months before she passed away and how much she loved it.
“She made us watch old videos, the things we’d done together, she always said we had an amazing time together. She would love that we were doing this.”
Cheryl previously revealed that plans for a Girls Aloud reunion tour have been years in the making, but they were put on hold when Sarah first became ill.
“She passed away a year before the anniversary and it just didn’t feel right, it felt too soon,” she told British Vogue. “But now, I think there is an energy that does makes it feel right.”
“The tour has got to be inclusive of Sarah because she’s such a massive part of our make-up,” she added. “It will never feel like the old Girls Aloud again but we’ve reached a point where we feel ready to celebrate all of it. Sarah included.”
However, the band have insisted they have no plans to record any new music as part of their reunion, instead choosing to focus on their “rich back catalogue and all the ground-breaking success they have achieved as a band.”
As Cheryl put it: “We couldn’t [record new songs], because Sarah wouldn’t be included in that newness. This is about celebrating the 20 years we’ve all had.”
Heart Breakfast with Jamie Theakston and Amanda Holden airs every weekday from 6.30am.