We’ve just finished the first exclusive shoot and sit-down chat with Anne Nolan ahead of her latest book launch, and she’s left us feeling uplifted and inspired.
Despite going through some dark times during her 72 years, she remains positive and has a strength about her that’s rare.
Titled New Beginnings, her autobiography follows on from Anne’s Song – released in 2009 – and is packed with explosive and emotive stories.
She says, “I just wanted to write my life story, really. It’s important for my family to know who I was in time gone by.”
Anne found fame in the 70s as part of girl group The Nolans, alongside her sisters Coleen, Linda, Maureen, Denise and the late Bernie.
Since then, she’s navigated turbulent years to say the least, having battled cancer twice and endured a four-year feud with her sisters.
She’s also experienced the breakdown of her marriage to Brian Wilson, with their divorce coming in 2007.
She describes in the book how the rift with her siblings tore the family apart and says her “stomach dropped” when she was excluded from a family tour, named I’m In The Mood Again in reference to their hit I’m In The Mood For Dancing. This was one of the band’s biggest successes and the record that Anne actively sang, performed and promoted.
She explains the “overwhelming sense of betrayal” she felt, but doesn’t expect her book to cause further rifts with her sisters.
“Coleen, Bernie and Linda have all written books speaking about the fall-out. I haven’t read them but I’ve been told. And there was a book before this, with Maureen in it too, where the four of them told their side of the story,” she says.
“My book just tells my perspective of it, how I perceived it and what I thought about it all. I’m not having a go or blaming anybody.”
Her sisters have been warned about what’s to come. “I told them there was going to be a bit about the fall-out in it and they said that’s fine. If they don’t want to read it, they won’t read it.”
It seems time has been a healer and a lot has certainly changed over the years. Anne went from the sequinned heydays of the 70s and 80s, partying with Stevie Wonder and performing with Frank Sinatra, to facing countless job interviews to make ends meet.
“I went for every job”, she tells us, in a bid to bring home a steady income for her daughters, Amy and Alex. She even sold David Essex merchandise at one of his Blackpool shows. “People would come up and say, ‘Are you one of the Nolans?’ They’d ask, ‘Why are you doing this?’”
Anne eventually secured a nine-to-five office job with an insolvency company, where she stayed for 16 years. She says, “It saved my life at the time. It was regular work, a regular income.”
There have been events in Anne’s life that have changed her forever, and losing her sister Bernie was one of them. Reflecting on the death of her sister in 2013 to breast cancer, she says, “There’s not a day that goes by when I don’t think about Bernie, yet life still goes on.”
And Anne’s a testament to this. She was first diagnosed with cancer in 2000, after finding a lump in her right breast. She won her battle against the disease with her then-husband Brian by her side, but during the Covid pandemic, it came back.
“Almost 20 years later, to the day, I found the second lump,” she tells us. “I was in the shower and felt it – this time in my left breast – and sort of dismissed it, which I shouldn’t have done. The next day though, I thought, ‘It’s still there.’
“I went to my doctor, who sent me to a fantastic breast care clinic in Blackpool. I kind of knew – I could tell by the doc’s reaction. They did lots of tests and it was.”
She says she has now “come full circle” and “counts her blessings”, and tells us it was an “out-of-body experience” to know she had it again. “It’s as if you’re looking down on somebody else and they’re talking to someone else because your mind thinks, ‘I don’t want to hear this.’”
Just weeks after discovering her cancer had returned, Anne’s sister Linda was given the news that her cancer was back too.
“Mine was a new cancer, but Linda’s had metastasized,” she tells us. “This sounds weird, but we were lucky that it happened at the same time – Covid meant no one could be with you when you went for chemo, but because Linda was having it too, they allowed us to have it sitting next to each other.”
Admitting in her book that “our family was broken when Bernie died”, the pair resolved to always be there for each other.
“Linda was great because I was having really aggressive chemo so I’d be there from 9am and she’d arrive at lunchtime and we’d finish together at 5pm. It wasn’t as bad as it might have been for those who were alone – it must have been horrible.
“Cancer is such a lonely time for the person suffering – no matter how many people are around. But you’ve got to get on with it, there’s nothing you can do.”
Positive and upbeat after treatment, life feels on the up for Anne and family feuds appear to be a thing of the past.
“My sisters and I are really great friends. We’ve done three cruises together since the argument so we’re back on track,” she says.
“When you’re family, you may fall out, but even at the time when we didn’t like each other very much, we still loved each other. It’s an emotion you can’t help.
“We see each other all the time and it was something that happened in our professional lives, but we’ve never ever fallen out about anything in our personal lives. It was a shame it happened, but it happened and we’re over it now.”
Proving family can stand the test of time, the sisters rallied together in their darkest days. “When we found out Bernie’s cancer had come back, we forgot that we weren’t speaking because we were there for her,” Anne says.
Losing Bernie has made sister Linda consider how the rest of her life might pan out.
“Linda talks about her passing and we all quieten her thoughts down, saying, ‘Let’s not talk about dying and all that,’ because who knows what’s around the corner. There might be a vaccine for cancer.”
Linda has spoken out recently about trialling new drug Tucatinib – a targeted therapy which interferes with how cancer cells grow – to give her “more time”.
Anne remains candid. “We always say we could get hit by a bus tomorrow but she has spoken to us about it, like, ‘When I’m gone,’ or, ‘If I’m not here next year.’”
Life is for living and no matter the glitz and glam, the heartbreak and upset, Anne certainly knows where to find the joy in her life these days.
“I’m happiest with my daughters and grandchildren – they’re my absolute world.”
