The S Club Double Act

S Club are about to make the move from small screen to big screen in their feature film debut, Seeing Double. But while they are old hands at performing in front of cameras, they say they still found making the film a nerve-wracking experience.

“It’s the excitement of it being a movie,” explains Rachel Stevens. “Everything’s bigger than on the TV series and there’s the pressure of knowing it’s going to be in cinemas across the country.”

“It’s knowing we’re going to be up there on the big screen as well,” adds Jon Lee. “It’s actually quite daunting. We’re quite nervous about how we’re going to look.”

The band members found working on the film stretched their acting muscles much more as well.

“It’s made us more conscious about our acting,” says Bradley McIntosh. “On the TV show sometimes we’d exaggerate our expressions a bit but we couldn’t do all that on the film. We’ve learnt a lot.”

Hannah Spearritt adds: “If something went wrong with one episode of the TV series we could just think, ‘It’s fine, there’s always the next one,’ but because this is just one movie we wanted everything to go well. There was more pressure definitely.”

Fans of the band will get two sets of S Clubbers for the price of one ticket when they go to see the film. But don’t worry, this doesn’t mean there is a surprise appearance from S Club Juniors.

Instead the tongue-in-cheek plot has the band, who are also made up of lead vocalist Jo O’Meara and Tina Barrett, growing tired of their relentless schedule and demanding some time off from their manager. But while they’re taking a well-deserved break in Spain, they see themselves on television, performing live in Los Angeles.

It turns out the band have been cloned by the evil ‘Clonemaster’ as he plans to take over the minds of the world’s youth by cloning and controlling pop acts. The band admit the storyline is a sly dig at themselves for being a manufactured band.

“It’s taking the mick out of the whole music industry really,” says Tina. “But it’s all in fun.”

Despite four years of success that has brought with it an unrelenting schedule, the young singers say they have never wished to be cloned themselves as they enjoy their jobs immensely.

“Last Christmas we had a month off and it was the weirdest thing,” says Bradley. “We’ve been working constantly for about five years so, though we’ve had little breaks here and there, getting a month off was strange. I woke up a lot of days and didn’t really want to be sitting around doing nothing. I wanted to be at work because I couldn’t take it. I’ve got a studio so I’d be writing music but it was weird not having work to do.”

Despite the band talking enthusiastically about their jobs, there has been plenty of speculation over the past few months that they are about to split up. But the band themselves are adamant that their future, the near future anyway, is with S Club.

“At the moment we’re still together and we’ve got loads of things coming up,” says Rachel. “We’ve got the tour coming up and a single out in the middle of May, which is a cool, retro track.”

“When the fans don’t like us anymore then it might happen,” adds Hannah. “Or when we want to do something else. There will come a point when we do want to move on.”

“But who knows when that will happen?” continues Stevens. “We’ve got loads of stuff going on at the moment.”

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Credit: Irish Examiner

Posted: April 1st, 2003