Arrayed on a sofa strewn with streamers, the three wide-eyed members of the UK’s great Eurovision hope are sitting in increasingly uncomfortable corsets and doing what can only be described as larking about. Sandwiched between her Remember Monday bandmates, Holly-Anne Hull has barely finished saying, “We feel like we’ve won already!” when she lets out an indignant hoot: “Hey, that’s my water!” and makes a snatch for the bottle Lauren Byrne has in her hands. A pleasant bickering follows: Charlotte Steele, it turns out, has been hoarding water bottles (two), and Holly eventually finds hers has rolled behind her on the party couch. She turns to me and says: “You see, I can’t share with Lauren because she has an incurable lip fungus.” They fall about laughing.
“That’s horrible because she’s going to put that in and I’m the only single one!” Lauren whines, and Charlotte, the peacemaker, chimes in to explain – “That’s Holly’s thing. Whenever she had to do an on-stage kiss, she’d always say right before they did it, ‘I do have an incurable lip fungus by the way.’” Such is the life of musical theatre kids, snogging on stage and making it more awkward rather than less.
