Fragile fame: when girl-bands build pop culture but the girls pay the price

Sugababes @PETROS

When we look at the golden era of UK girl groups—the slick choreography, the chart-toppers, the sell-out tours and the magazines screaming ‘Which member are you?’—it’s easy to recall only the glamour. But the new three-part BBC documentary Girlbands Forever  invites a harsher look at what fame, control, commodification and the glare of public scrutiny did to the young women who stood centre-stage.

Nineties and noughties favourites Eternal, All Saints, Atomic Kitten and Sugababes feature in the series. The doc reveals how the machinery behind the hits dictated not just the music, but also how the girls looked and how they lived their lives.

It’s no surprise then that the documentary lays bare a recurring pattern: You’re allowed to be talented, visible, and marketable but only if you fit the formula. When you deviate, you’re cast aside. That kind of conditional worth, when lived out in your teens and twenties under the spotlight, creates brittle footing rather than firm foundations.

Watching the documentary, it struck me how fragile many of these women appear, even now decades later, in a way that signals the costs they paid. The exhaustion of relentless promotion, global travel, the forced fun for cameras, and the policing of behaviour and appearance.

It hurts to see, if you’ve grown up with the music and remember the joy and the pop-magic, to now realise how much of it may have been built on unstable ground. The very traits that made these women iconic were also the things that made them vulnerable.

Why this can’t just be amusing nostalgia

There’s a dangerous impulse in popular culture to romanticise past eras of pop. “Remember them?” we say, while glossing over what was underneath. But the documentary urges viewers not to duck away from the harder truths that lay in the food control, the pregnancy shaming, the racialised and gendered double standards. “toxic pressure” notes that fat‐shaming, body policing and denigration of pregnant women were rife. 

There was a huge imbalance of power between the labels, the managers, and the girls. When you’re picked up at 16 the notion of choice becomes murky. And when the exit strategy is abrupt, or the band dissolves, what’s left for the woman who built her twenties around that machine?

The women featured in Girlbands Forever speak candidly about what fame left behind and it’s clear that the wounds still cut deep.

Kéllé Bryan of Eternal recalls being “sent somewhere in the middle of the countryside where they were controlling what we ate” because of pressure to conform to a “size 0” ideal. Melanie Blatt of All Saints says she was told, when pregnant at 23, that her band would be ruined if the image shifted; reportedly advice to terminate pregnancies was discussed.

Then there was the exhaustion. Endless tours, hotel rooms, jet lag, interviews all delivered with the expectation of permanent sparkle. Several of the women describe sleeplessness and breakdowns behind closed doors, performing under unbearable pressure because contracts and expectations left no room to stop.

Layered over all of it was the hypocrisy. Male stars could drink, misbehave, and be celebrated as rock and roll, while young women were branded “out of control” for the same behaviour. Melanie Blatt notes that Jack Nicholson built an entire career on bad-boy antics “and nobody berates him.”

What should we do with this?

It hurts because the music meant so much. These women were our identifiers (“I’m Baby Spice!,” “I’m Sporty!”) and our hopeful anthems. But now the curtain has been pulled back and I see how fragile the foundations were, I feel guilt for perpetuating this machine with my fandom. These young women hired, packaged and then discarded and I was simply going along for the ride.

So where does that leave us, the listeners who once sang their songs into hairbrush microphones and now watch them tell their stories? First, we listen. The documentary gives these women space to speak, not just to reminisce, but to finally reflect on how it really was, and we owe them the same. We recognise the cost, asking who created the culture we consumed, and at what price. If we’re part of the next generation of creators, in marketing, management, or media, we can help rebuild a kinder industry. One that offers mental-health support, real image autonomy, family-friendly timelines, and genuine exit strategies.

And we can still celebrate what those bands gave us. We can still dance to the songs, feel the joy, remember who we were when we first heard them. But we can do it with open eyes, carrying the context as well as the nostalgia, because acknowledging the cost doesn’t cancel the joy.

It deepens our respect for the women who lived it.