1. About Sarah Harding
What is it OK to say?
The death of Sarah Harding of Girls Aloud has the obvious cruelty of any young person’s death. Harding was 39, and had breast cancer. For many — both fans, and people who are simply aware of her as a cultural figure — she will be one of the first famous people they care about to die.
There’s something grotesque about the impulse to make celebrity deaths about ourselves. These are after all real people, with real families, who feel real bereavement of which the average onlooker’s remote sadness can only be a vague palimpsest. But the feelings of fans are real, too. Celebrities are markers against which we track our lives. When one of our own generation dies, and particularly when this happens before we’re accustomed to the idea of our own mortality, it is a personal affront.
Harding’s death is especially horrible because she’s someone who — despite being technically at the edge of middle age — seemed just about to get started. This is a strange thing to say given she had already achieved extraordinary success. As a contestant on Popstars: The Rivals in 2002, she had to win her place in the band, then the band had to win out over One True Voice — a task that would admittedly have been harder if OTV weren’t so forgettable that I double-take every time I have to type “Rivals”.
The difference between GA and OTV is the difference between nineties and noughties pop music. OTV served up a syruppy love song which announced them as the aspiring pretend boyfriends of tween girls everywhere; GA landed “Sound of the Underground” from writing/production team Xenomania, a perfect piece of pop music about pop music that sounded like everything from new wave to rockabilly to electro had been poured into a lamé-wrapped Magimix. This was the future. Of course GA got the number one.
And they kept on winning: other reality acts burned out fast, the thrill of taking the prize distracting them from the fact that the big fight of actually sustaining a career was yet to come (Hear’say, the previous winners of Popstars, barely limped to a second album). GA racked up not only critical success but commercial acclaim too. They were pop music that wasn’t embarrassed to be pop music, and that wasn’t embarrassing to love.
Harding was a big part of that. In her Hardcore Harding guise, she was a party girl who could mix it up anywhere. “No Good Advice” had celebrated “hanging till eleven with the wrong crowd”: she was the proof that they really did, swigging from the whisky bottle and looking good (so good) doing it. Fun! Until of course it wasn’t. She was drinking too much, addicted to sleeping pills, easy prey for the tabloids. But after 2015, she got herself straight. Unfairly, this did not return her to the career she might have had.
Her solo music didn’t take off. Acting work arrived but it was slim. Reality TV was a good showcase for her, with her warm personality and willingness to pitch in, but a stint on The Jump left her permanently injured. Girls Aloud’s reunion tour next year would have put the new, redeemed Harding fully back on the public stage. But then, she got cancer, and the cancer killed her with vicious speed.
What do you do with a story like this? It is, objectively, tragic — and it’s somehow worse because nothing about Harding’s demeanour suggested a tragic person. But Harding’s fans don’t want to see her in this light. There’s a longing to see her life as what it could have been, in preference to the more complicated and compromised story it is.
The reaction to the Guardian’s obituary was disgust: on Twitter, readers told journalist Caroline Sullivan that she had perpetrated an abomination, an insult to Harding. When I shared it, several people told me it was revolting; one demanded to know how I’d feel if this had been written about my daughter. It’s an emotive question, but an erroneous one. Obituaries aren’t written for the family (families are the audience for eulogies). They’re written for the public, and they exist not just to celebrate someone but to explain who they were and what their place in the world was. Sometimes, they are outright bitchy, but that wasn't the case with the Harding one.
Understanding Harding means understanding the way she was turned into a character by the press, and the way that character almost consumed her. (This was a time when the media gleefully enabled alcoholism on the grounds of celebrating rock’n’roll fun, all the way into the grave in Amy Winehouse’s case.) Without recognising that, it’s impossible to give Harding the credit she deserves for putting her life back together.
There are, I think, a few things going on in the desire to have only the happiness edit of Harding’s biography. Partly, it’s simply that it’s monstrous to think of someone cut off from her potential this way. The most devastating line of the Guardian obit is the last one: “She is survived by her mother.” There’s no way to rewrite that to take the edge off.
Partly, it’s that these people don’t really know what an obituary is (it’s a truth that obituaries get more interesting the older you get, and these are readers who are roughly of an age with Harding), and besides, the obituary was being read as an isolated thing on social media, rather than as part of a register section with overarching conventions.
But most of all, I think this distress is because people would like to forget the complicity of the public as an entity in Harding’s life. Did the offended readers nobly eschew jokes about Harding’s ligger days at the time? Did they avidly follow her career post-GA? Did they buy the solo stuff?
Some will have done, of course, but not by any means all. I would guess that many of those who were horrified by a journalist setting down the facts of Harding’s life were secretly horrified most of all by their own miniscule part in it.
Sarah x
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