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.
But she hasn’t got an incurable lip fungus. Nor has Lauren. The band are fungus-free and ready to party. The three friends have been hustling to turn their angelic harmonies and knack for a good time into a career for more than a decade. They make no attempt to hide the fact that Remember Monday is a band that really wants to make it: Eurovision is the latest in a long string of shots at the big time. All three band members grew up doing musical theatre and Holly won Disney’s UK version of My Camp Rock in 2009, a talent contest based on the Noughties era tween phenomenon Camp Rock. The trio met at sixth-form college in Hampshire and chose the name Remember Monday as that’s when the free periods they’d use to meet up and sing were (they had previously called themselves Houston, a nod to the country-leaning music they favoured at the time).
As a group, they entered BBC One’s The Voice in 2019, auditioning with a country-tinged cover of Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose” and choosing Jennifer Hudson as their mentor. They didn’t win, but it didn’t put them off continuing either. A number of enjoyable but largely overlooked country-pop releases followed, a modest fanbase grew, they toured, played festivals and visited their beloved Nashville (where they were told in no uncertain terms, “Y’all aren’t country.”) In 2023, after 10 years as a band, they finally quit their day jobs to focus on the music.
Being announced as the country’s Eurovision entry has jetted them into the stratosphere. Between Christmas 2024 and March 2025, the band were holed up writing songs to pitch to the Eurovision committee as their entry. They worked with Little Mix collaborators Billen Ted, experimental pop artist Kill J and Thomas Stengaard, who composed Denmark’s 2013 Eurovision-winning entry “Only Teardrops”. Together, they wrote 15 or so songs, thinking they’d probably opt for a ballad.
But their actual choice, “What the Hell Just Happened?” couldn’t be less of a ballad. It’s a theatrical stomper of a pop song, which is clearly heavily influenced by the poperatics of “Bohemian Rhapsody” (they actively worked to emulate its “wonderful weirdness”, Holly says) but channels about eight other Queen songs simultaneously, too. It winds in the sharp wit of Chappell Roan, the harmonies of a church choir, and even gently somewhere in the back of the mix, the twang of the country sound they’ve left behind them. “It sort of tells the story of us a little bit too,” Lauren adds. “There have been so many nights like that for us – too many maybe – you know, ending up drunk in tattoo shops getting matching tattoos...” Really? “Yes! Five! And I can promise you there will be more!”
“We’ll never forget the day that the song was released...” Holly says, and I’m expecting some kind of A-list story involving a punch bowl full of cocaine or Elton John sending them a tap-dancing monkey, but it’s a sign of the times when the unforgettable events were in fact, “little things – like, we’re now on Spotify and Apple playlists, and we have a really impressive amount of monthly listeners. We were on BBC Radio 2! We’ve never experienced a release like that before.”
I don’t know if it’s the decor – the hotel suite has been made up to look like an all-night party just ended – or something more intangible but there’s a last-days-of-Rome feeling in the air, a throw-it-all-at-the-wall vibe: doing Eurovision could be an enormous disaster but they are damn well going to enjoy the ride. Did they discuss the downsides of Eurovision – what if it leaves them forever tarred with nul points? “It was a conversation,” Lauren says. “But we’d be mad not to.”
We’ve been inseparable, genuine friends first
“We try not to think too much about the fact that there is a world where it might not go all flowers and rainbows,” Holly adds. They’re not too worried about the darker side of fame either, the mean comments and possibility of living the rest of their lives in the shadow of their glory days. “I think because we’re friends first, we’re in our little bubble and we can support each other through it,” Lauren says. “Yeah like, we were Holly’s bridesmaids,” Charlotte chimes in, “We’ve been inseparable, genuine friends first – so we don’t even really need to say anything to know when one of us is having a stressful time.” Being in their thirties probably helps too. They’re more emotionally equipped to deal with sudden fame and the non-stop workload that goes with it than a bunch of teens – and more able to speak up if something’s bothering them.
“That’s why we do feel OK about the idea of nul points,” Holly adds. “We don’t want it to happen, obviously, but if it does, we’ve got each other.”
It’s hard to imagine much bringing Remember Monday down right now. Everything is delightful and charming in this new flush of non-stop appointments and fame. They read all the comments – “Oops, they’ve misspelt that! They mean awesome!” Lauren jokes – and charmingly sing the meanest insults in cherubic harmonies on their TikTok page. They don’t even see the UK’s lack of popularity in Europe: “Maybe I’m not looking hard enough, but I’m seeing more love than hate,” Holly says, before mugging an addendum: “And I wake up every day with a spring in my step!”
There’s no doubt the band is enjoying being famous. “We’ve been recognised together AND individually!” Charlotte yelps. “It’s the individually ones that throw us off. We’re just like, surely we don’t exist as individuals.” But they’re still learning the ropes of their new reality. As seasoned yappers, they’re not used to worrying about being overheard. “We have to be careful because sometimes we’ll literally be spewing off our deepest, darkest secrets on the train and someone will lean over and be like, ‘I just wanna say I absolutely love you guys.’” Later, they’ll neatly prove this point after the interview, when I catch them loudly discussing how it went as I walk past them down a grand hotel staircase when leaving (“It was funny that she asked…”).
Years of plugging away to find themselves thrust into a sudden whirlwind of fame and glamour sounds like the plot of a teen movie – so what happens when they hit the difficult second act and all that goes away? Previous UK entrants, Olly Alexander (2024) and Lucy Jones (2017), have been in touch with sound advice. Stay present. Enjoy every second. It goes by so fast.
If Remember Monday’s song goes top five at the contest, the band and their whole 35-person team have made a pact to get matching tattoos. Five letters, “WTHJH?”, standing for the title of their entry, permanently inked onto their bodies as a reminder of the magical time when they were famous pop stars, even if it doesn’t last. Holly’s laughing when she adds the fatalistic afterthought: “Maybe we should make it if we get top five or nul points?”
Four months ago, they were sitting by the phone waiting to hear from the mysterious cabal that chooses the UK’s Eurovision entry every year. It was just before Christmas. They’d auditioned to represent the country in 2025 but hadn’t heard anything yet. “They kept saying, ‘Oh, you’ll hear in a few days’ – we didn’t,” Holly says. “Then ‘You’ll hear in another 24 hours’ – we didn’t. And we were like ‘Oh my God, are we going to go into the new year not knowing?’”
“And then the call finally came, and we were all – I mean, it was so funny, actually, wasn’t it? – because they said, ‘What are you doing in May 2025?’ and we just went,” Charlotte cocks her head and puts on a voice that implies childlike naivety – “Whyyyy?”
Interviewing pop stars in the modern age can feel as serious as sitting down with Jeremy Paxman to discuss trade embargoes and the larger economic issues of the day. Media training and the ever-present threat of going viral for saying something dumb hang over them and, often, it seems like the celebrity is actively trying to hide their true self, refusing to reveal anything that might give the reader an idea of what they might be like at home, or whether or not they pick their nose or have an incurable lip fungus.
But chatting with Remember Monday is like stepping back in time. There’s something so Nineties about a girlband just larking about, and at least seeming to be impressively unfiltered. It makes me think of Smash Hits and Live & Kicking, All Saints chatting about how satisfying it is when you yank a big bogey out, or the Spice Girls saying literally whatever pops into their heads. There’s a lot of talking in italics and yelling with laughter. It’s kind of chaotic, and silly, and warm, and really fun. Just like Eurovision.
Remember Monday will compete in the Eurovision Song Contest final in Basel, Switzerland, on Saturday 17 May
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