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When she joined Atomic Kitten as a teenager in 1999, Natasha Hamilton thought she’d landed the best job in the world . But faced with punishing tours, frayed friendships and worries about her weight, the reality was very different. Now, the original Atomic Kitten star is taking part in a new BBC documentary called Girlbands Forever , to reveal how her years singing Whole Again left her in pieces, both mentally and physically. “I’m hoping with this documentary that people will realise it was all smoke and mirrors,” says mum-of-five Natasha. The Liverpudlian singer was just 16 when she auditioned for manager Martin O’Shea and 80s pop star Andy McCluskey, who were looking for a singer to join Kerry Katona and Liz McClarnon in their girlband. “It was difficult even at the beginning,” says Natasha. “Liz and Kerry had been together a good 18 months and they were thick as thieves. On the second audition day they put me with the girls so I went to their flat to learn some dance moves and just being an excitable 16-year-old, when Kerry was teaching me the moves, I was like, ‘Oh, what about if we did this?’ Kerry didn’t like that. She went back to Andy and Martin and said, ‘I don’t like her. If she’s in the band, I’m leaving.’ “I remember crying my eyes out because I just knew this was the opportunity that I’d been waiting for because it was backed by Andy and he had proper studios and there was money behind it.” To Natasha’s surprise, Andy and Martin were so impressed with her vocals and her ideas that they stuck by her. “They actually backed me,” says Natasha. “They said, ‘Well, she is in the band, Kerry, so if you wanna leave, leave.’ They just called her bluff.” Despite their rocky start, the pair soon became close friends and Kerry moved into Natasha’s family home and started calling Natasha’s parents Mum and Dad. “We ended up slowly getting a bit more pally,” says Natasha, 43. “I was like the little sister that she tried to look after. We went on holidays together you know so we kind of went from that initial butting heads to being the best of friends.” But before Atomic Kitten’s biggest hit Whole Again reached No1, Kerry had quit the band and was replaced by Jenny Frost. Without Kerry, Natasha felt like she had the weight of the band on her shoulders. “I can specifically remember going home one time after being on tour and both of the girls had been poorly, but the show kept on,” recalls Natasha. “When the [other] girls were sick, we still did all our gigs because I would cover their vocal parts. Whenever I was sick the show would have to be pulled. So I had this mega load of pressure for me to always perform. I can remember being sat on the living room floor and crying. And my mum and dad going, ‘What’s wrong?’ I just explained, ‘I’m struggling.’ So my mum phoned Martin and had some very strong words, as a Scouse mum would. “She was saying, ‘You need to look after my daughter more. She’s just as important as everyone else, stop putting all the pressure on her shoulders.’” With a gruelling schedule and constant shows, Natasha’s weight plummeted and whispers of an eating disorder grew. However, she maintains she never had an eating disorder in the band, blaming her weight loss on her intense schedule. She does, however, admit the band would take fat-burning supplements, which back then contain now banned substances. “If we were doing a video shoot there’d be certain fat-burning supplements that we would take to try and get like a six-pack,” says Natasha. “No one forced us to do that, but obviously body image was very skewed back then. And it was the time they used to call it the Lollipop Head and the Size Zero. Not that I ever wanted to be a size zero but we did do fat-burning things like that. We got six-packs in three days. I would never do that now.” When she was 19, Natasha fell pregnant with her first child, Josh, and kept the pregnancy secret at first. However, when she got in trouble with her manager for falling asleep in the recording studio, and then later fainted in a shop, she was forced to come clean. Bandmates Jenny and Liz were pleased for her. “They said, ‘Are you happy?’ And I said, ‘Yeah,’ and they gave me the biggest hug,” recalls Natasha. Natasha worked through her pregnancy and then was given six weeks off to recover when Josh was born by C-section. Too busy to attend an antenatal class before the birth, Natasha had no idea what being a mum would be like, or how much recovery she would need. “I am basically a child having a child,” she says of the situation. “I don’t know anything about pre- and post-pregnancy. I was on tour the whole of my pregnancy. So when I’m told, ‘OK, you can have six weeks off and then come back and do a show,’ I’m just like, ‘OK.’” However, going back on stage so soon after the birth, Natasha struggled. Then, fearing she would lose everything she’d worked for, she embarked on a huge tour. Nine months later she was diagnosed with post-partum depression. “The reality of it is I am going on this downward spiral of postnatal depression,” says Natasha. “I’m in pain, I’m not ready on my first day back at work to be Natasha from Atomic Kitten. It was the most horrifying I’d say performance of my life, being on stage where I thought, ‘Oh my God this is horrendous.’ “I didn’t want to be there. It was like everything was in slow-mo. I could feel everyone looking at me. I started getting really insecure and thinking, ‘Do I look fat? Am I sweating too much?’ I’m too out of breath, my ankles hurt, my knees hurt, my hips hurt, my boobs hurt, everything hurts. But I never told anyone. I couldn’t say a word to anyone because I was just frightened.” By the time Josh was 18 months old, Natasha realised she couldn’t stay in the band any longer. “ My mental health deteriorated and I just couldn’t cope,” she says. “I had crippling anxiety. In the end it just felt like a messy pile of s**t, and there was no celebration. I ended up going back home and thinking I don’t know how to function in the real world.” Girlbands Forever is on BBC Two on Saturday 1 November at 9.20pm
