I haven’t met many people who, within one hour, in the same conversation, would say “Vivaldi was a trailblazer” and “Amanda Holden came on my podcast and blew me away”. But until today, I hadn’t met Myleene Klass. The classically trained musician and survivor of Noughties pop band Hear’Say is now a TV and radio presenter, podcast host, author and political campaigner – and she isn’t like many people. When she was growing up, for example, her dad started a diving business. “So when everyone else was playing with Wendy houses, I was playing in a decompression chamber,” she tells me unblinkingly. This is consummate Klass: sharp, disarming, and just slightly, wonderfully absurd.
We haven’t even been sitting down for five minutes when the star lobs out the first marmalade dropper. “I kept the Hear’Say diaries. They are actually under lock and key with a lawyer,” she tells me. Hang on, what diaries? A lawyer? These must be published, pure and simple. “I think they’re just too libellous. Honestly. I really don’t think I could! I think it’d just be a litigation nightmare. Everyone’s in there. I wrote about everything, everybody we met. And you have to remember, we met everybody.”
From Kylie to the Queen, they really did meet everyone; the band, forged from 2001 reality TV show Popstars, were the most famous people in the country for about five minutes before the public got fed up and turned on them. But talking to Klass today in Shoreditch House, it’s easy to see how she became the band’s great survivor. Born to working-class immigrant parents, her mother a nurse and her father in the army, Klass grew up in Norfolk and won a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music; she was performing in Miss Saigon in the West End when she decided to audition for Hear’Say. Switched on, fierce and apparently quite fearless, she followed brief pop fame with her triumphant, white bikini-wearing runner-up appearance on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here in 2006 and became a firm fixture in the public eye with multiple broadcasting gigs and brand deals.
Conversation moves from silly to soft to serious, sometimes all in one sentence. Today she looks chic in a brown faux leather dress from her fashion line with Next (“I sell one item every 35 seconds. One item. Every 35 seconds”), her hair damp but her make-up-less face fresh, despite hosting a birthday party for her son Apollo, four, yesterday afternoon (after which he was far too excited to sleep). Coffee cup aloft as she talks, she explains that all her business acumen came from being in Hear’Say: “There’s nothing light and fluffy about it at all – you get dragged up quickly, otherwise you get swallowed up.”
So prolific is Klass these days that it’s tricky to keep up with everything she does. This month, she fronts a new Sky Arts series, Musical Masterpieces, alongside composer Errollyn Wallen, explaining the secrets behind some of the world’s most famous pieces of classical music. And she’s also just launched a podcast based on her bestselling book, They Don’t Teach This at School. “My book has become a bestseller. And it’s also saved four lives,” Klass tells me, entirely seriously. With advice on everything from personal finance to plumbing, the book also explains how to save someone from choking – advice that members of the public, fresh from brushes with death, have written to thank her for.
Her podcast guests are a selection of Klass’s close pals, from best mate Lauren Laverne to Bake Off’s Nadiya Hussain. “Nadiya’s life hack blew me away: how to sharpen your knives. She uses the car window.” Amanda Holden talked about having a blended family, something Klass related to: her daughters Ava and Hero are from her first marriage to security consultant Graham Quinn (the couple divorced in 2013), while she had her son Apollo with her partner, fashion PR Simon Motson, who also has two children from a previous relationship. “Most blended families are born from failure – a failed marriage. It’s something we find quite uncomfortable to speak about as a society and yet it’s the largest growing family unit now so we should be addressing it.”
I have a lot to thank younger Myleene for, and I don’t feel pressure to level up with younger Myleene. I really thank young Myleene. She would be high fiving me now. It’s a collaboration across the years
Klass is a doer – she wants to sort things out and doesn’t have much patience for those who don’t. “I really care about it. I really, really care about it,” she says of the practical knowledge she’s been able to pass on to others. One thing she particularly cares about is supporting women who have had a miscarriage. Klass had four herself with Motson and made a Bafta-nominated documentary about the subject, Myleene: Miscarriage and Me, in which she movingly said, “I’ve got three children, but I’m a mother of seven.”
I mention that, speaking personally, it’s only when friends have gone through a miscarriage that we’ve realised how little we were taught about it at school. “No, you weren’t,” Klass says, sounding quietly, personally furious for us all. Through her campaigning work with Labour MP Olivia Blake and pregnancy and baby loss charity Tommy’s, Klass successfully forced the government to make a series of reforms to miscarriage care law: women will no longer have to wait for three miscarriages before they receive help, and there will be access to 24/7 care. But when it was happening to Klass, she was struggling. “I couldn’t speak about it,” she says, with real sadness, “and I’ve actually got friends that are in the public eye who are going through it now. Sometimes I send them my doctor’s name, sometimes I just go and sit with them, and hold their hand.”
As a society, though, we clearly still don’t know how to speak about miscarriage. “Let’s go from a practical consideration,” Klass says. “You take time off work because you’ve had a miscarriage. Are you off work because you’ve had a bereavement? Do you get docked pay? Are you sick? Do you get compassionate leave? From an employer’s perspective, just talking pure practicalities, what’s happening? How do you back someone? How do you back the father?” she asks. “We don’t have a word for it: a mum that is no longer a mum, because they don’t have their children here.”
‘Nobody would be allowed to treat anybody the way we were treated now’: Myleene with the rest of Hear’Say at the 2001 Brit Awards— (Nils Jorgensen/Shutterstock)
A video on Klass’s Twitter whizzes through her achievements, from her campaign work to the £100k she raised for charity after winning I’m a Celebrity Legends, before asking “What are the people in power achieving?” over snaps of Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman. So, I take it she’s unimpressed with the government? “Utterly. Utterly unimpressed. I can barely raise an eyebrow,” she says, dripping with disdain before bursting into laughter. Recently she presented an award alongside Labour leader Keir Starmer and “I’ve got high hopes there”; like her, he’s a violinist and pianist, “but it’s not a duet we’ve got planned in that respect,” she teases, before adding that Starmer is apparently interested in changing musical education.
She’s keen to stress that she has no particular political allegiance. In fact, the topic, like most, makes her quite passionate. “I don’t have an agenda. My agenda is greater than yours,” she says of the politicians she’s come up against. “Because it’s fighting for babies. Dead babies. Challenge me. Let’s go,” she says, getting pretty animated. “There are women losing babies. There are women suffering PTSD. My daughters. Your future daughters,” she rails, pointing at me. “My son. I meet them every day, I hear from them every day, and I am that woman. So in a battle of egos, you can have it. I just want to win for the babies. And I did.” She’s used to being underestimated: “In parliament, people would often talk to me about their Filipino nannies as opposed to that I was a businesswoman.” But she isn’t fussed about going into politics more formally. “If you want your bins collected on Friday, my time would be best served elsewhere. I do feel for you, because I also have bin issues.”
Despite still being indelibly associated with her white jungle bikini, Klass doesn’t feel any body image pressure. “It’s still my body,” she says firmly. “I have a lot to thank younger Myleene for, and I don’t feel pressure to level up with younger Myleene. She’s still me. The girl that walked to school ashamed to be carrying a violin, the girl that endured being a mixed-race girl in Norfolk, listening to classical music, devouring it,” she says. “It wasn’t cool to do anything I was doing then, but now it’s paying off in dividends. It’s great and I really thank young Myleene. She would be high fiving me now. It’s a collaboration across the years.”
But that time in Hear’Say does feel like a different life. Does she feel like she came out relatively unscathed? “Not at all. No way. The hardest things in my life have been the things that have moulded me. I have been moulded from the fire, whether that’s been miscarriage, or divorce, or being in Hear’Say,” she tells me, before starting to laugh – “which sounds so trivial! But to throw yourself as a child into a pop band where you’re dealing with lawyers, and people are trying to sue you – someone tried to sue me because I threw a cake into the audience and they said it had a nut in it – every day there was something. Every day was relentless. And I just wanted to sing.”
A Hear’Say reunion isn’t on the cards, and while the band are still in touch, “it’s 20 years – we’re more like office workers now”. They put up with a lot of mistreatment at the time, both from the public and those working in the music industry. “Nobody would be allowed to treat anybody the way we were treated now. The things people got away with that were said to us. People were so blatant about our weight, and what I looked like,” she says, becoming mildly incredulous. “I look back and I’m like, ‘what was wrong with us?!’ We were ‘the fattest band in pop’. I could play sonatas!”
Despite that, Klass still thinks being in a pop band was “the best way to spend your twenties” – travelling the world, partying with your best mates, meeting superstars. Plus, her old outfits are now back in fashion and her daughters are annoyed she threw out all her parachute pants. But she accrued a lot of wisdom to pass on to her kids, the biggest of which is: “Make sure you’re financially independent – don’t let anyone shackle you”.
“I want my daughters to see that they can be as strong as they want to be,” she says, “and I want my son to see that strong women are there to be admired, not conquered.” It’s only been an hour, and I feel like I’ve had a pep talk, a motivational speech, and a rousing call to the barricades. Klass doesn’t hesitate. “I’m ready, I’m coming! This is how I feel every day!”
New podcast episodes of ‘They Don’t Teach This in School’ are released every week
