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Modestly titled The Girls Aloud Show, the reunion tour for Girls Aloud has been one of the most anticipated music events of the year for pop fans worldwide, marking a powerful and emotional return to the stage for the beloved U.K. girl group. The outing is the band’s first since disbanding in 2013 and their first time together since the tragic loss of bandmate Sarah Harding, who died from breast cancer in 2021.
With multiple Guinness World Records for chart dominance on The Official U.K. Singles Chart, Girls Aloud has solidified their place in British pop music history. Yet, the years following their breakup allowed personal feuds, mainly between Cheryl, Kimberly Walsh and Nicola Roberts on one side against Nadine Coyle on the other. However, Harding’s death served as a catalyst for reconciliation, with one of her final wishes to bring the women back together as bandmates and friends willing to put the past behind them.
Following the reconciliation and subsequent tour announced at the end of 2023, The Girls Aloud Show tour has grossed $19.1 million from 200,000 fans filling arenas across the 20 dates reported so far to Billboard Boxscore. But beyond the numbers, the real impact of The Girls Aloud Show lies in the heartfelt moments that have defined this reunion.
From emotional tributes to Harding in the show, where the group paused to honor their late friend with tearful speeches and a poignant video montage, to a reimagined Pride concert in August that celebrated the LGBTQ+ community with vibrancy and love, the tour has been a testament to the enduring bond between these women, their fans and the critically acclaimed music from their seven LPs together.
Beyond the celebration, the tour also helped bring awareness and donations to the Sarah Harding Breast Cancer Appeal created by her bandmates in April 2023. As one of Sarah’s parting wishes, the foundation developed the Breast Cancer Risk Assessment in Young Women to find new ways to spot the disease. With its second phase of research funded by initiatives in place during the tour, the show also marked a way to honor Harding beyond the stage.
As Girls Aloud take their final bow this month, the members leave behind a legacy not just of chart-topping hits, but of resilience, forgiveness and the power of friendship. The Girls Aloud reunion felt like more than a comeback; it was a celebration of life, great pop music and the memory of a superstar friend who will never be forgotten.
Read on for the best moments from the reunion.
The Ethereal, ‘Untouchable’ Tour Opener
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Carole King is perhaps one of the most famous Taylor Swift fans in the world, and the iconic singer-songwriter joined the kickoff call for the Swifties for Kamala coalition on Tuesday night (Aug. 27).
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“I am a Swiftie, and Taylor and I are actually friends. We have had conversations backstage and I see her as sort of my musical and songwriting granddaughter. We have a lovely relationship, and I’m so proud of her,” King told the thousands of listeners who tuned into the livestream, noting that her favorite song of Swift’s is “Shake It Off” from 1989.
“I’m excited about Kamala, because so many people are excited about Kamala, and I have met her. I admire her and the stars lined up, and Joe Biden did a really gracious, hard thing to do, and I’m so proud of him,” King continued. “But this is about you. I know you have your ways of communicating and social networking and organizing.”
King then encouraged Swifties to become in-person volunteers, and take part in door knocking and phone calling to rally voters. “I’ve been a political activist years. I’ve been a caller, I’ve been a door knocker, even as a famous person,” she explained, before giving the livestream tips on how to be a good door knocker. “I’m telling you all this because if any of you are thinking of volunteering to be door knockers or phone callers, but you’re a little nervous about what you might say, please believe me, you will be working with an organizer who will give you steps,” she said. “Don’t be afraid, because there is nothing to lose and everything to gain. […] There is too much at stake.”
To conclude, King shared that because Swift helped induct her into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2021 by performing the legend’s classic, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” she will return the favor. She then delivered a “surprise song” for the Swifties for Kamala by briefly singing the chorus of “Shake It Off.” “Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play/ And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate/ Baby, I’m just gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake/ I shake it off, I shake it off,” she mused.
Swift has yet to endorse anyone in the 2024 presidential race between Trump and Harris. She is not affiliated with the group — which describes themselves as a “coalition of Swifties ready to mobilize Taylor Swift fans to help get Democratic candidates elected up and down the ballot” — but Swifties for Kamala have noted that the “I Can Do It With the Broken Heart” singer is “always welcome to show up to our party.”
Elsewhere in the Swifties for Kamala kickoff event, Sen. Elizabeth Warren spoke to the group, noting that her two favorite Taylor Swift songs are “Karma” and “All Too Well (Taylor’s Version) (10 Minute Version).” “What I love best about Swifties, you are resilient and you know how to take on bullies,” the politician explained. “You know how to be your most authentic, most joyful selves. You come together hand-to-hand, friendship bracelets on your wrists and you overcome pretty much anything that life throws at you. The Kamala Harris campaign is standing up for what’s right in the face of bullies like Donald Trump.”
She continued, “With Kamala Harris, it’s all very different. Under a Kamala Harris presidency, our future is bright. Kamala will sign abortion protections into law. She’ll take on big corporations that are screwing you over. I’m looking at you Ticketmaster on this one, and she will help level the playing field for all people. So here’s the deal. We’ve got 70 days until the election, and I’m just going to be blunt, it is going to be a tough fight ahead. We have a lot to do, and dang, there are only 24 hours in a day, or 144 ‘All Too Well (10 Minute Version)’s. But here’s the thing, just like you’ve done every time before, we will push this boulder up the hill, and we will win in November. So with that, I am looking forward to the era of the first woman president. So please get in the fight, knock on doors, make phone calls, and let’s elect Kamala Harris the next President of the United States. Swifties, you can get this done.”
Watch the full Swifties for Kamala kickoff call below.
You and I are going to live forever — or at least long enough to see Oasis reunite. On Tuesday (Aug. 27), 15 years since they last performed together, estranged brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher brokered a truce and announced 14 concerts in the U.K. and Ireland for next summer. On the new Billboard Pop […]
Representation matters, and Chrissy Teigen got to see that firsthand when her eight-year-old daughter, Luna, met Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris at the White House this summer. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news “I’m still glowing from this moment when my Luna (in her adorable […]
Flau’jae [Johnson], who’s about to start her junior season as an LSU Tiger and currently has the most lucrative NIL deals in women’s college basketball, just dropped a video with both her head coach and Lil Wayne. If you told us 10 years ago that a current college basketball player would be doing songs with Weezy and had her coach all up in her music videos, we’d call you crazy, but that’s the landscape for today’s NCAA athlete.
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Directed by Terrius Mykel, the video starts off with LSU women’s basketball head coach Kim Mulkey drawing up a play for Flau’jae and her LSU teammates in a huddle. She proceeds to go off and even shouts out her pops, late rapper Camoflauge while holding her 2023 National Championship trophy as Wayne stands next to her. “And I just won a natty, did it for my daddy/ They seein’ my face, man, I’m in the paper/ Man, I’m one of them ones, you see thе trophy/ You don’t gotta respond if you really know me,” she raps.
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The track appeared on her Best of Both Worlds EP that she released earlier this month in June and she greatly appreciated that Wayne, her teammates, and her coach were able to show up for the video. In a press release, she had nice things to say about them all.
Of Wayne, she said:“Working with Lil Wayne on the ‘Came Out A Beast’ video was a dream come true. He’s a legend in the game, and being able to collaborate with him on this track was surreal. The energy on set was incredible, and we both brought that fire to the video. This is just the beginning, and I’m excited for everyone to see what we’ve created.”
Of her LSU women’s basketball teammates, she said:“Having my teammates in the ‘Came Out A Beast’ video was a real moment for me. We’re all grinding together on and off the court, so bringing them into this part of my life felt natural. It’s cool to show that connection in a different way, outside of basketball. I’m really thankful they were a part of this moment with me.”
Of her head coach Kim Mulke, she said:“Having Coach Mulkey in the ‘Came Out A Beast’ video was special. She’s always been in my corner, both on and off the court, pushing me to be my best. Her support means everything to me, so it was amazing to have her be part of this moment. It just shows how much she believes in all of us, not just as players, but as individuals with our own dreams.”
Flau’jae can make the case that she’s the best athlete rapper out right now.
Lizzo is feeling good as hell about her mental health progress.
In an Instagram post Tuesday (Aug. 27), the 36-year-old hitmaker shared a video comparing a three-year-old clip of herself with what she looks like now. “I wasn’t gonna post this on IG but 2021 me would be soooo proud of 2024 me,” she wrote in her caption.
“And I’m NOT only talking about my body,” Lizzo continued. “If yall only KNEWWWW what I’ve done for my mental & emotional health in the last year…”
The “About Damn Time” musician went on to give fans a small teaser: “wheeeew don’t worry imma write a album about it.”
The post comes two days after Lizzo revealed that she’s taking a “gap year.” “Protecting my peace,” she added at the time, sharing a video of herself standing on a porch, serenely feeling rain fall on her skin.
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With that in mind, fans will likely have to be patient while waiting for the star’s next album, which will follow 2022’s Special. The project reached No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and spawned the Billboard Hot 100-topping hit “About Damn Time,” which won record of the year at the 2023 Grammys.
A few months after that, three of the musician’s former tour dancers filed a lawsuit against her, alleging sexual misconduct and hostile work conditions. Lizzo denied the accusations, calling them “sensationalized stories,” and the lawsuit was put on hold in March pending appeals.
The Yitty founder has since been open about struggling with her mental health, at one point telling fans that she was quitting. “I’m constantly up against lies being told about me for clout & views… being the butt of the joke every single time because of how I look… my character being picked apart by people who don’t know me and disrespecting my name,” she added in March. “I didn’t sign up for this s— — I QUIT.”
She later clarified that she only meant she was quitting “giving any negative energy attention,” and by May, things seemed to be looking up. “I’m the happiest I’ve been in 10 months,” Lizzo wrote on Instagram. “The strange thing about depression is you don’t know you’re in it until you’re out of it. I’m definitely not all the way as carefree as I used to be. But the dark cloud that followed me every day is finally clearing up. My smile reaches my eyes again and that’s a win.”
See Lizzo’s post below.
“Drugs You Should Try It” has long been a fan favorite of Travis Scott followers, and the Days Before Rodeo gem finally has an official music video more than a decade after its original 2014 release. La Flame released the trippy “Drugs You Should Try It” visual on Tuesday (Aug. 18) after DBR came to […]
When Dave Stewart released his autobiographical album Ebony McQueen back in 2022, he promised there would be more to the story — like, a story, told on film. Now it’s lights, camera, action time.
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Under the auspices of his Dave Stewart Entertainment, the Eurythmics co-founder has announced an early 2025 production start for the Ebony McQueen film, which will be set and filmed in Stewart’s hometown of Sunderland in northeast England. It will be directed by BAFTA Award winner Shekhar Kapur (2022’s What’s Love Got to Do With It?, 1998’s Elizabeth) from a script written by Stewart, Lorne Campbell, Selma Dimitrijevic and Peter Souter. It stars Sharon D. Clarke — who was also part of Stewart’s Ghost the Musical, in the title role — and Sunderland singer-songwriter Tom A. Smith as the aspiring musician guided by the spectral McQueen’s presence.
“The kernel of this idea I had very early on in (the album), and it stayed in my head,” Stewart tells Billboard via Zoom from his home studio in Nashville. “As I was writing the songs there were all these concepts or ideas or imaginings. On the album, obviously it’s me singing all the songs but in the film, it’ll be the character, and I always had that in my head.”
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The Ebony McQueen story comes directly out of Stewart’s youth, from when he was an aspiring football (soccer here in the States) player laid low by a broken knee. The silver lining, and his savior, was music.
“It’s a time in my life when it was a total disaster,” Stewart recalls. “My mum had left my dad and he was depressed and my brother had gone away from college and I was alone with my broken knee. And this amazing intervention happened where a postman came with a box from my older cousin in Memphis…with two pairs of corduroy jeans and these blues albums — Robert Johnson, people like that. I had never listened to music but I was so bored and fed up, and my dad had made a little homemade record player in his workshop. So I put (the records) on and it was one of those boom! moments where in one hour everything went from gloom and doom to ‘What the hell is this?!’ How do I do this?!’ I never looked back.”
Ebony McQueen isn’t Stewart’s first foray into film. He’d directed music videos for Eurythmics and others and made his feature directorial debut with the black comedy Honest in 2000. He won a Golden Globe Award in 2005 for “Old Habits Die Hard,” a collaboration with Mick Jagger, for the Alfie remake. Prior to all that, and more on-point, he was a principle figure in producing the 1991 documentary Deep Blues: A Musical Pilgrimage to the Crossroads, which is also at the heart of his desire to make Ebony McQueen.
“It was a very slow process,” Stewart says of the project’s gestation. “During Covid I had quite a bit of time to develop and think about the whole thing, and it became more and more like a movie than something for the stage.” Co-producer David Parfitt (Shakespeare in Love, The Father) is a BAFTA and Academy Award winner (and also from Sunderland), while Stewart met director Kapur during 1994 in India, when they had neighboring hotel rooms and Kapur heard Stewart working on music through the walls.
“We got on like a house on fire then,” Stewart says, “and he invited me and my wife to a screening of Elizabeth, so I met him again then. Twenty-odd years later we’re suddenly doing this movie together. So it started to become like a great, very small group of people rather than sitting in a room with loads of writers at Paramount or somewhere, and some executives chipping in. This is a very homemade, indie group of people who all have the same feeling about how this should be.”
Stewart has no plans to appear in Ebony McQueen himself, not even in a cameo à la Alfred Hitchcock or Stan Lee. “It’s a very short snapshot of a period in my teenage life, probably six months, and it stays in that world so there’s no need to have me, now, in it,” he notes. He is, however, writing new music for the production, including score music with A.R. Rahman — who was a bandmate in the short-lived SuperHeavy project with Jagger, Joss Stone and Damian Marley — as well as some fresh songs.
“As the script develops and changes, you need bits of songs and melodies to fit this scene or in that spot,” Stewart says. “I love creating these melodies that can also fit in this other song later on, because that’s where you write something where the worlds are colliding and coming together. So you can have a theme for Sunderland on the river but you can also use it for a character. It’s a tool that can help tell the story.”
Firm dates as well as distribution plans are still being worked out for Ebony McQueen, while Stewart remains involved in other projects; he co-produced Daryl Hall’s latest album, D, and has toured since 2023 with a Eurythmics songbook show featuring an all-female band. Who To Love, a multimedia collaboration with Italy’s Mokadelic and actress Greta Scarano, premiered at the Rome Festival last October, and he’s been busy with Artificial Intelligence experiments in the recording studio.
“I’m getting at this amazing stage of my life where I’m not winding down. I’m winding up into a world where it’s going to be more and more adventurous with AI and things you can do now with sound and light and…sound and vision, as Bowie would say,” Stewart notes. “You can do incredible things now, in all sorts of venues. I know a lot of people are going nuts about AI, for valid reasons, but it’s not like people can make it go away. I remember when drum machines came out and there was an uproar from the musicians’ union — and drummers — and now it’s just part of everything. Or when the labels were all panicking about the Internet. It doesn’t matter how hard you try and resist it; once it’s already there it’s there, and it’s just something you have to work with — and hopefully for the better.”
Carole King is officially joining the Swifties for Kamala kickoff call, according to event organizers.
“We wouldn’t be Swifties for Kamala without Midnights Mayhem,” political director April Glick Pulito wrote in an email to attendees, according to Variety. “With that… We are so incredibly excited to announce our special, surprise guest 4x Grammy winner, singer-songwriter and a Swiftie for Kamala… Carole King!”
The call will take place on Tuesday night (Aug. 27) at 7 p.m. ET. Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand and Ed Markey; Rep. Chris Deluzio and Rep. Becca Balint; North Carolina Democratic Party chair Anderson Clayton; and Swifties for Kamala team members Irene Kim, Emerald Medrano, Annie Wu Henry, April Glick Pulito, Emma Coleman and Lexa Hayes are all set to speak at the kickoff event.
While Taylor Swift herself is not affiliated with the group — which describes themselves as a “coalition of Swifties ready to mobilize Taylor Swift fans to help get Democratic candidates elected up and down the ballot” — they note that the “I Can Do It With the Broken Heart” singer is “always welcome to show up to our party.”
Swift has yet to endorse anyone in the 2024 presidential race between Trump and Harris. She endorsed Biden in 2020, and also took aim at Trump during the George Floyd protests that same year, slamming Trump’s response to the unrest.
“After stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism your entire presidency, you have the nerve to feign moral superiority before threatening violence? ‘When the looting starts the shooting starts’???” Swift wrote in reference to a comment from Trump that many took as a potential threat to protesters following the killing of unarmed Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer. “We will vote you out in November.”
Meanwhile, many other musicians have stepped up to the plate to endorse Harris, including Megan Thee Stallion, John Legend, Pink and Stevie Wonder — each of whom has performed at various campaign events — as well as Ariana Grande, Olivia Rodrigo, Demi Lovato, Quavo, Bon Iver, Barbra Streisand and more.
Taylor Swift has yet to make a cameo on bestie Selena Gomez‘s star-studded Hulu series Only Murders in the Building, but it’s never too late for the pop star to bring a little “No Body, No Crime” energy to the show. In an interview with E! News on Tuesday (Aug. 27), Gomez reacted to the […]
