ARTICLE AD BOX
Country group Remember Monday face a daunting prospect at the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest – as the first all-female group to represent the UK since 1999, they enter after other Brit hopefuls have endured more than two decades of mainly gloomy results.
During the last five years, there has been bright spots with the millions of followers-strong TikTok star Sam Ryder soaring with Space Man, earning second place in Turin in 2022.
His social media stardom, theatrical staging and unrelenting upbeat personality were credited with the stunning 2022 result, and this is something that the trio of Lauren Byrne, Holly-Anne Hull and Charlotte Steele also seem to have in spades.
Watching them interact at their tea party-themed launch in the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, the girl group laughed and joked, and showed they are unlikely to be affected by haters online. The trio often use their strong voices to turn the worst social media comments into harmonised vocal songs.
As Hull, 30, says, they are “used to high-pressured environments as a band and as individuals” because they come from a musical theatre background.
Laughing, she says: “We’re so happy and we’re so loving this experience, that the odd negative comment isn’t going in… and as annoying that might be for the person (commenting), it’s going over our heads because we’re reading the good stuff, (and that’s) going in, which I guess is very ideal.
“I know some people focus on the negative, and it’s really hard (not) to do that, but we have each other as well. We’re each other’s therapists and protectors and if one’s down, the other two will lift it up, and vice versa.”
This follows last year’s UK entrant Olly Alexander, whose disco-style Dizzy came 18th in Sweden’s Malmo, telling other Eurovision contestants to get “a good therapist”, following other participants last year voicing concerns about duty of care, and a series of other controversies at the event.
The organisers, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), said some delegations “didn’t respect the spirit of the rules”, and launched a review of welfare measures for artists, after pro-Palestinian protests, complaints by Ireland’s entry Bambie Thug and the qualification of the Dutch singer Joost Klein.
Remember Monday also have a secret weapon in their upbeat entry What The Hell Just Happened?
It was co-written by Danish songwriter Thomas Stengaard – who was among those who penned the 2013 Eurovision winning song Only Teardrops – and references the key change seen in Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, as well as the US pop princess style of hitmakers Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter.
Added to this inspiration pedigree, Steele is a professional choreographer, performer, vocal coach, and dance teacher, self-styled “Eurovision superfan” and made her West End debut in Mary Poppins aged 10.
Byrne has played earnest teacher Miss Honey in the musical Matilda, while Hull has graced stages as protagonist Christine Daae in The Phantom Of The Opera.
“We all have family in Greece, France, Germany, Ireland, we have family all over and they’re all just excited as well,” Hull says.
“Our mums, especially, they’ve watched us get so many nos since doing this band, and for us to feel like we’re making it or getting close to living out our dream, it must means so much to them.”
Steele says they also “don’t even see” Eurovision as a competition, as they are having “the best time”, and are hoping to be on early in the final “because then we can just enjoy everyone else”.
They also have tonnes of experience in competition shows, having taken part in The Voice UK in 2019, where they were chosen to be mentored by Jennifer Hudson, and performing.
As Hull recalls: “If you go back through all of our kind of family videos, the ongoing theme is the three of us performing in front of our family in one way or another.”
Steele agrees they “forced” their loved ones to watch the shows they created, directed, choreograph, and wrote, with Hull giggling along with her friends at remembering how she would tell her mother to “shush” and watch the precocious displays.
Another early performance for Hull was for the late Queen on her 80th birthday at Windsor Castle, who told her she “wasn’t wearing any shoes” when she was dressed as a woodland creature, and winning My Camp Rock as a teenager.
Despite recording a music video of This Is Me after the Disney competition series, in Hull’s words “that was that” for her budding career.
Jumping in, 29-year-old Steele and 30-year-old Byrne were shocked to find out Hull’s past, with the latter joking: “I’m not your friend.”
“We’ve never had any other option,” Hull explains, while Steele says they “always knew it would be the three of us” in a band after meeting at a sixth form college in Farnborough, Hampshire – which was where their “inside joke” of saying to each other “remember Monday”, when they used to practice, started.
Byrne says they are “best friends”, and explains: “I didn’t have a lot of friends at school so it was actually really amazing when I met these two at sixth form, because they were kind of my first experience (of) a school or college environment where I felt really part of a group (along with) the rest of our kind of college peers as well.”
However, the journey took a while, with Byrne admitting they “felt torn for quite a long time” between their theatrical careers, and it took a “leap of faith” to focus full time on Remember Monday.
“We value our friendship so much, and we knew that we as individuals had things that we wanted to tick off,” she says.
“We (would) call each other crying, going, ‘I can’t do it. I can’t leave stability, and I love it, I love it in my job’ and things like that… to think that there will be a world where we didn’t do it,” Hull wonders.
“We never would have known what we would have missed out on, but just, wowee, follow your dreams, because we feel so lucky and so grateful.”
The reaction of the crowd at their first solo shows after the Covid pandemic made them certain they had made the right call as they “were singing our songs back to us”, Byrne says.
She explains: “We put on this little gig … in London. It was the biggest venue we’d ever played at the time, and we were absolutely terrified that no-one was going to come, and it sold out in like, a day or something.”
This was years after their blind audition for 2019’s The Voice UK, where they harmonised to Seal’s Kiss From A Rose, and had all the judges including Will.i.am, Hudson, Sir Tom Jones and Olly Murs saying yes to mentoring them.
Their spell on the show also brought a strange coincidence as Hudson brought Alexander as a guest coach for Remember Monday, and she has continued to champion the trio, bringing them on The Jennifer Hudson Show, where they performed Alanis Morissette’s Hand In My Pocket, in 2024.
Hull says Hudson has “looked after” them since, while laughing as she says that the American singer and actress might need Eurovision explaining to her.
She says they have “only dreamt of having a full calendar”, ahead of them having an appearance at Capital FM’s Summertime Ball, and dates later in 2025 at venues such as Liverpool’s O2 Academy2, O2 Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London, the Gorilla, Manchester, and Sheffield’s Foundry.
Remember Monday will sing at the semi-final on May 15, and are automatically qualified for the final on May 17 as a representative of the “big five” (UK, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain).
English (US) ·