Hear Me Out

by Sarah Harding

  As soon as rehearsals started, I got ‘the fear’ big time, but despite expressing concerns to my management of the time, everyone just seemed to think it would all be fine. The show’s producers were happy to have me on board, of course, because they felt I was a name that would sell the show. I don’t think anyone really thought much past that.

  By opening night, some members of the ensemble didn’t seem particularly happy about me being there. In fact, it could get quite bitchy at times. Having the lead role in a musical theatre production when you don’t come from that world seemed to put a few of the actors’ noses out of joint. I told myself it was the fact that they’d trained hard and worked for years at their craft that made it hard for them to accept me, but it hurt nonetheless. People would be charming to my face, but then I’d hear that the same people had a different opinion of me when talking out of my earshot. Then there were the looks and the eye-rolling when I messed up, which I’ll admit I sometimes did.

  The run was exhausting. We’d play one theatre for a week, and after the Saturday night show, we’d load out and travel to the next venue under our own steam. After the show, I’d always have a big crowd of people waiting outside the backstage area who wanted photos and autographs. There was no way I wasn’t going to spend time with my fans. I was quite often the last one out of the theatre with the long drive ahead of me. By the end of each week, my voice had pretty much gone. There were times when I’d end up crying once I’d come off stage because I’d lost my voice. There was one particular show in Dublin where I left the stage feeling devastated. My voice just wasn’t trained for that kind of singing, so sometimes I didn’t have the vocal stamina. What upset me most was the idea that I couldn’t sing, which was what I was hearing from some quarters. I think I proved during ten years of being in Girls Aloud that I could certainly do that at least!

  Another problem was the knee injury I’d sustained doing The Jump. I had a ruptured ACL (anterior cruciate ligament), and I was still having physiotherapy when I got the part in Ghost. I was also taking some prescribed painkillers. These pills were necessary and certainly helped with the pain, but they weren’t always the best thing for my mental sharpness, as I found to my cost.

  Despite all this, there were good times during my run in Ghost. I made three good friends during the run: Jacqui Dubois, who played Oda Mae, and is a renowned actress and singer – and doesn’t take shit from anyone! Andy Moss, who played Molly’s murdered lover, Sam, and Tarisha Rommick, who played Louise. They were lovely and supportive, and would sometimes warn me who to watch out for – the gossipers and the eye-rollers who’d been all sweetness and light to my face. Whenever it was just the four of us, it was great fun. We’d go out to a Wetherspoons for a gin and tonic after the show, and I felt like I could let my hair down and be myself.

  As well as arranging our own transport, we also had to organise our own accommodation, so in Blackpool, Tarisha, Jacqui and I decided to rent a place together. It was sold as a penthouse flat but was actually more like something out of Fawlty Towers. As we all breezed through the door, expecting something a little bit smart, we were horribly disappointed. The brown swirly seventies-style carpet was one thing, but discovering we had to feed the meter with pound coins to keep the gas and electric running was a real shocker. Looking back on it, I can laugh. It was Tarisha’s birthday while we were there, and we made the most of it, celebrating with wine and cupcakes from Tesco.

  It was in Blackpool, however, where ‘the incident’ happened, which is where some of the more colourful media stories about my time in Ghost came from.

  We were halfway through a show when I was informed by one of the stage managers that I wouldn’t be going back on for Act Two because he thought I seemed unsteady and unfocused.

  ‘You’re not in a fit state,’ he said. ‘You couldn’t do the potter’s wheel scene properly, and with the lights and everything else, it’s just not safe.’

  I’d been struggling, for sure. The raked stage, with me singing and dancing in heels, wasn’t great, and then there were about nine floors to run up if I needed to zhuzh up my make-up between scenes. And there was a lot of zhuzhing on that show, with lots of crying throughout. Believe me, some of those tears were real.

  I don’t understand why they waited till halfway through to pull me off. Why did they even let me go on in the first place if they were worried? Press reports said that I was slurring, unsteady on my feet and possibly drunk. I wasn’t drunk, and I wish I’d had someone on my side to stand up and defend me, but that was the story everyone got.

  Maybe I’m oversensitive and sometimes take things too much to heart. Still, if I feel a terrible atmosphere or energy around me, it makes me really anxious. Now, I felt like everybody was waiting for me to fuck up; waiting for my next mistake. There were times when I could actually see it coming from the wings: the eye-rolling and laughing. It was an awful situation, which doubled my stress and made me even more anxious. The thing about live theatre is, unlike other things I’d done in the past – filming or recording in a studio – there’s no second chance if you go wrong. If you fuck up, it’s there for all to see. Little mistakes can sometimes be covered up, but big ones can’t.

  At the end of my contract, I knew I wasn’t going back for the second half of the run. I didn’t want to, and I knew the producers didn’t want me to either. Andy was also only signed up for the first half but ended up going back. He’s a hard worker, and I really admire him for it, but at the end of the day, I was the only member of the cast not to go back. There were people from the backstage team that only did part of the tour, but I was the only actor. I suppose that was the reason people assumed I’d been sacked from the production. That wasn’t the case. It was utter bollocks, in fact. I finished my contract and the shows I was contracted to do.

  When I look back on it now, I feel like I was blindsided. Maybe I was naive about how hard performing for eight shows a week in a musical would be for me. The truth was, my management wanted me to do it because they thought it would be good for me, and for them, and the producers wanted me to do it because I could bring in the punters. Everybody thought I should do it, but perhaps nobody truly considered whether I could.

  Some of the songs in Ghost were tough for me because they involved vocal mixing, which is not something that came naturally to me. The mix voice is when a singer combines chest and head voice together. You have to sort of thin your chest voice out so it can switch from low notes to high notes without anyone really noticing the transition. I hadn’t been trained to do that. I could sing in a strong head voice when needed, but my natural vocal style was a powerful chest voice. I mean, give me something by Bonnie Tyler, and I’m well away. Some of these songs, on the other hand, left me struggling. In the second act, there was a song called ‘Rain’, which had a bit more gusto. In that part of the show, my character, Molly, has found out that her husband Sam’s murder wasn’t a random act, and that the psychic who’s been helping her with the case might be a fraud. There’s now anger in Molly, and this is a powerful belt of a song. I enjoyed singing it, but even then I got into hot water with the musical director. He didn’t like the rasp in my voice and told me to try to smooth it out.

  ‘That huskiness is my natural voice,’ I told him. ‘Plus, I’ve been singing eight shows a week; my voice is tired, which only adds to the rasp.’

  He kept telling me off, though, and at one point I was so pissed off I walked out of a soundcheck. Everyone knew the kind of voice I had when I was hired. In the short rehearsal period, I’d had no training or relearning to sing for musical theatre. To be honest, I think it was a case of, she’s a name, let’s get her in, sell some tickets and worry about it later.

  It’s funny: one of my fans secretly recorded me singing the big song in Ghost, ‘With You’, during one of the performances. When they sent it to me, I was happily surprised. I think I just had it in my mind that it had all been such a disaster, but it was actually a really lovely recording, and I s
ounded so much better than I’d remembered.

  Maybe if I’d had more time to prepare, it could have been an entirely different experience.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to be a singer or actress. I wanted to be on the stage and to entertain, but I never really thought about everything that goes along with it. I’m a sensitive person when it comes down to it, and I take everything to heart. I’m a big believer in spiritualists, healers, crystal healers and the like. I know it’s not for everyone, but I’ve tried many of these things that I believe have helped me on my journey. Most of them have told me, in one way or another, that I’m prone to taking on and absorbing other people’s feelings and making them my own. It’s why I don’t deal well with negativity.

  When I was in the band, I could always sense if one of the girls was in a bad mood, or something was about to kick off. My intense dislike of confrontation was such that I would feel extremely uncomfortable and agitated in those kinds of situations. It was probably because I knew that once I lost it, I really lost it. I could go from 0 to 100 in ten seconds, as if a red mist had descended. It was best not to be around bad feeling and conflict, and my constant wariness of it – being on high alert the whole time – was often exhausting. I was always trying to sort my head and body out. Nobody could accuse me of not trying to help myself, that’s for sure. I once did a strict detox in a clinic in Austria with my friend Steve, where you had colonics, lymphatic drainage, liver wraps and the like. It was supposed to clear out our systems, but we were always starving. Within a few days of being there, all the toxins and crap were seeping out of my body – but I looked bloody awful. We ended up cycling for miles in an attempt to find something sweet to eat, finding sanctuary in a doughnut shop, where, realising we were from the clinic, they took pity on us.

  One of my other excursions, to a meditation retreat, also wasn’t the oasis of calm I expected it to be.

  It all came about because I was supposed to have been going abroad to do charity work, but nobody informed me that I needed certain vaccines to be able to go. The vaccines couldn’t be organised in time to be effective, so the whole thing fell through. It wasn’t the first time that I’d had to pull out of a charity trip. In 2009, a team of famous faces, led by Take That’s Gary Barlow, were the first to trek up Mount Kilimanjaro for Comic Relief. Also on the trip were my bandmates Cheryl and Kimberley, plus Fearne Cotton, Alesha Dixon, Ronan Keating, and Denise Van Outen, among others.

  Initially, I’d been supposed to undertake the trek with them. In fact, I was one of the first to sign up. As the thought of it sank in, however, I started to think that I’d made a rash decision. I’d always had this underlying back and spine problem, and I was worried about how gruelling the trek was going to be. The last thing I wanted was to be moaning and complaining all the way up a mountain, getting on everyone’s nerves. Eventually, the Comic Relief team were pushing for a final answer. Although they said all the right things to encourage me, I decided not to go. I was scared that my body couldn’t take it. It’s one of my biggest regrets, I think. Apart from the whole adventure of it, it was amazing how everyone bonded on the trip. That’s something I would have loved to have been a part of and one of the reasons I’d so wanted to do the charity overseas.

  Once the second charity trip was definitely off, Mousey told me that she’d heard about this three-day meditation retreat, which sounded blissful. The experience offered reiki healers, meditation gurus, sound-baths and shaman. It was all very New Age and peaceful and also private – just what I needed. The fact that two places on the retreat came up, just as we found out I wasn’t able to go on my charity trip, was clearly a sign.

  From what we’d been told about the retreat, it involved lots of work around love, especially self-love, and I thought it would be a good thing for me. Often, the biggest problems I’ve had in life have been rooted in feelings of rejection and my abandonment issues. Maybe this was something that might help me heal in some way. The scariest prospect was the rules about what you could and couldn’t do in the week before the retreat commenced: no drinking; no red meat; no bedroom activities! I think they just wanted you to have a clear head before you started, and I actually did all right, managing all of that. Well, apart from one bedroom activity with my boyfriend on the night before it began, which I don’t think did any real harm.

  The event was held in this long, converted barn, which had kitchen facilities at one end, and several set-ups outside the barn for different healers, reiki masters, psychics and the like. Upstairs there was an office, which was where all the event’s organisers, staff and helpers based themselves.

  The initial and central part of the retreat involved a ceremony around eating the root of some white plant. I guess it was a bit like ayahuasca, which is a sacred shamanic plant medicine from the Amazon. It’s said to have intense cleansing and healing properties, as well as a slightly hallucinogenic effect. What we had was something similar, although, unlike ayahuasca, it wasn’t illegal in the UK. The idea of it is to help you find your inner spirit, your inner child, or maybe, as I did, your spirit animal. Mine was a Cheshire cat, with a scary grin, which flickered like an old movie, coming closer and closer to me with every blink.

  During the ceremony, everyone wears little white robes, and you’re all on the floor with furry rugs. It’s seen as a very sacred ceremony, and for someone of the right mindset, I’m sure it is wonderfully healing.

  On my first night there, the shaman decided that the headache I was experiencing was a hex on my brain, so he placed his hands on my head to remove it. Then it was time for the ceremony, which was to last all night. I remember wondering why there were bowls all around the room where the ceremony took place, and that question was answered during the first few hours. The thing about ingesting this plant root is, it makes you purge. It’s meant to take away any badness and negativity inside you. Your enteric nervous system is known as the ‘second brain’ or the brain in the gut, and the root helps you purge anything bad lurking in there – sadness, trauma or whatever. It’s meant to be healing. This means that once you’ve taken it, you’re actually throwing up – all night! Now, as I’ve explained, I am not good with people throwing up around me. In my younger days, I was practically phobic about it, and it’s certainly not something I want to do in front of other people. So as you can imagine, once this thing took hold, I was absolutely mortified, rolling around in the corner, doing my absolute damnedest not to be sick.

  ‘I don’t wanna be sick, I don’t wanna be sick,’ I kept saying, while the shaman kept a close eye on me. I was literally doing everything in my power not to vomit.

  Not long into the evening, the pain in my head returned – the hex. Not surprising really, as while all this was going on, people were going around the room shaking rattlesnake percussion instruments and banging blocks and bongos in your ear. I did try. I tried my best to feel the music, to let it go through me, to see visions and to heal myself. My overriding thought, however, was that I was going to kill Mousey for not telling me what I was in for with this ceremony. She knew I hated anything to do with sickness and knew damn well I wouldn’t have come if I’d known what was involved.

  While all this was going on, Mousey was in the upstairs office, where participants could talk to helpers, get a drink or go to the loo. Concerned about my general wellbeing, the shaman went up to speak to the helpers.

  ‘There’s someone downstairs who is not in a good way,’ he said diplomatically. ‘She’s not in a good way at all.’

  ‘Is it my friend?’ Mousey said, but the shaman didn’t want to say out loud.

  Meanwhile, Mousey was thinking, please, God! Please don’t let it be Sarah!

  The shaman and his wife, who was a healer, told Mousey, ‘If it does turn out to be your friend who is unwell, don’t engage or have contact with her. Don’t even look at her. She has to go through this and deal with it on her own.’

  I think by then Mousey knew
that I was the subject of the conversation. The next thing she knew, I’m being ushered upstairs into the toilets, crying and feeling hideous. In the end, I gave in and let myself be sick, and I immediately felt better. It had been the feeling that I was going to vomit and my aversion to it that had made me feel so terrible.

  By the time I came out, Mousey was there, waiting for me.

  ‘I’m going to fucking kill you for this,’ I said.

  On the second day, I felt a bit better, but I was just so drained. The bloody ‘hex’ was back again with a vengeance, and while the experience was nowhere near as bad as the previous night, I still felt like I needed help.

  ‘Go outside and find the thousand-year-old tree,’ the shaman said. ‘That will help you!’

  Mousey and I walked outside, then wandered around, searching around for the sanctuary of the thousand-year-old tree. We were both in our little white nighties – although I’d now teamed mine with black Ray-Bans in an attempt to halt my banging headache.

  ‘Is that it?’ I said, pointing into the distance.

  ‘No, that’s not it,’ Mousey said. ‘I think it’s this one.’

  When we got to the tree, we lay down beneath it, but within seconds I burst into tears. Thinking I was laughing, Mousey started giggling, loudly.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said through sobs. ‘Why are you laughing at me?’

  ‘I thought you were laughing,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m not laughing, this is hysterical crying,’ I said.

  ‘But why?’ she asked. ‘Why are you crying?’

  ‘Because this is not the right tree,’ I said.

  At that point, the shaman appeared.

  ‘What are you girls doing? That is the wrong tree. That’s not the thousand-year-old tree. It is over there.’