Talks frankly about suffering from bulimia, defends her 'bitch' image + reveals the truth behind her unplanned pregnancies
There are a few things you should know about Kym Marsh. At five foot four, she's smaller than you would expect. She's into everything from the Carpenters to Destiny's Child. Her favourite drinks are Bacardi and Coke or Bailey's with ice. And she's definitly not a bitch.
Meeting the 24-year-old from Wigan at St*rs photo shoot, that is probably the biggest surprise. After all, she was the tough cookie on Popstars - the swearing shouting one who flounced around the house in rock-star shades and stormed out of rooms slamming doors. The one who hid her kids from the judges so she could make it into Hear'Say.
But Kym's all smiles today. As she pouts, grins and screams for the camera, she glances over for reassurance, before striking another killer pose.
"I'm not a bitch!" she smiles later, as the hairstylist teases her tresses. "It upsets me when people think I'm a diva. I'm one of the most down-to-earth people you'll ever meet. I just believe in being honest. So, who told you that?" Well there's the small matter of how things appeared on the tv show. "Look, let me clear this up," she begins. "That was only one episode, and they built the whole thing around doom and gloom. It painted a really bad picture of me."
Then again most people would say she was justified in going of at Nasty Nigel when he criticised her weight, saying "christmas is over, Kym, and the goose is still fat." Kym now says she feels "nothing" about his comment, but explains, "It's a very bad thing to do to someone. I'll admit I did put on weight over christmas, but Nigel handled it very badly for someone in his position."
As we talk, the real reason for her distress becomes clear. "I has an eating disorder when I was 17," she reveals. "I became bulimic - so I'd eat, then I'd make myself sick." She fell victim to a disorder which affects thousands of girls each year in the UK. In just 8 months she lost 16kg (two-and-a-half stone) - eventually weighing in at just 41kg (six-and-a-half stone).
In her teens Kym attended a Liverpool stage school for two years, where everyone seemed thinner than her. "There was this pressure of putting on a leotard in front of other people, and the need to be thin seemed so great. So I took drastic measures to try to achieve it."
She remembers, "It made me feel quite good at first. I could eat what I wanted and be sick afterwards, and everything would be OK. But it doesn't work like that for long. It starts to rot your teeth, and you feel lathargic and drained. And the more you eat the more you make yourself sick, which defeats the object."
Kym regularly threw up after meals, while hiding it from her family. It was her promotional photos that jolted back to reality. "I'm quite a big framed-girl, with big collar bones and big shoulders, so the pictures looked awful because I had all these bones sticking out. It wasn't a nice site, and I realised that it wasn't how I was supposed to look."
She's nuetral on Geri Halliwell's dramatic weight loss, saying, "Geri's done it the right way, but if she was sticking her fingers down her throat ot taking laxatives, I'd be saying 'Don't do it'" And she doesn't support stick thin catwalk queens: "Girls think they're not. Its just pressure from the supermodels. All I'd say is look at someone like Sophie Dahl - she's beautiful. You don't need to be some waif-like person to be attractive. Anyway, bigger people have more personality."
Kym scraped into the Popstars, she was 24 when she applied - the upper age limit for applications. But ever since she was small she wanted to be famous. Brought up in Greater Manchester, she spent years desperately trying to make it as a singer.
Despite having her first record deal when she was 13 and singing backing vocals for dance bands, her hard work came to nothing. "I decided if nothing happened by the time I was 25, I'd give up. But people always said I was to good to be just sitting there."
Having her first baby, David (now 5), at 19 just made her more determined. "When you have children, you want to provide for them, it's an instinct. So I kept battling and going to auditions, but I kept getting turned down because of my children. When I finally got through Popstars, it was incredible. "I thought, 'Finally, I can build a life for us, which is amazing." Her devotion dispels tabloid rumours that she's a bad mum for David, and Emily, 3, with her parents while she commits to Hear'Say's gruelling schedule. So it's ironic when Kym admits she never really meant to have children at all. "I was very silly," she admits, taking a deep breath. "Neither of my kids were planned. When I got pregnant at 18, I had a long term boyfriend and we always used a condom, but it split. I didn't know much about the morning-after pill and I was in denail. I thought it would just go away. I was like, 'It's only once, it won't make any difference', but it did."
Kym vividly recalls the day she discovered she was pregnant. "I just sat there with my ex-boyfriend [David Cunliffe] and took the test. He was like, 'I'll stick by you. We're together and we love each other.'" Two years later, Kym and her boyfriend had another 'accident'. Although she was taking contraceptive pills, she didn't realise that the stomack bug she was suffering from made them ineffective. "I was silly again and din't think about it. But when you've got a kid already you don't worry about it so much. After all we were supposed to be getting married."
The UK has the highest teen pregnancy rates in Western Europe, and Kym's keen to pass on some advice. "I was 18 and considered young. But now girls of 14 are having babies while they're still kids themselves. So if something like that happens to you, go for the morning after pill. Don't leave it - it won't go away. And it'll be even harder to have an abortion."
Kym's come a long way in just a few months. Music industry sources reckon sales of Hear'Say's debut single, Pure And Simple, will have netted each band member a cool £33,000 in its first week of release. All five are set to be millionaires by christmas. Yet Kym is as down-to-earth as ever, apologising profusely to the male model who she now stands on for our pictures. And although she now spends her days mixing with celebrities, she couldn't resist getting autographs from Robbie and Eminem.
She does admit to hanging out in celeb bars - on a recent night out with Suzanne in London, she got "Steaming drunk" at the trendy Red Cube Bar, before falling through the front door at 4am.
But she defends this. "We'd prefer to go down the local - we're just normal girls. The thing is, we have to be careful where we go. If we want to go out for the night to relax, we've got to go to these places because they're full of celebs so we don't get bothered." To stress the point, she adds, "I do normal stuff too. Last time I was home, I went down the pub for a drink with my brothers."
Most celebs say you find out who your real friends are when you become famous, and for Hear'Say, it's been no exception, with ex-friends and lovers selling their stories to the tabloids.
"I've got so many 'cousins' now that I'd never even heard of before," Kym laughs. "It's unbelievable. People who hated me at school are now saying they were my best mate. I was walking down the road, and one of the girls who bullied me at school was standing outside this shop. She was like, 'Oh hiya, I haven't seen you for ages!' I just walked past - I wasn't going to give her the time of day."
Another person Kym refuses to talk to is her ex-boyfriend, Martin Murphy, a brewery worker from Wigan, whom she dated after David Cunliffe and remained with during the Popstars series. "We we're trying to keep the relationship going - we even had plans to move in together." But she's definite about why they split. "When I first met him I didn't really fancy him. I was with him because of his personality. We spent a lot of time together and that kept us together. But when the tv series started and we couldn't see each other, we grew apart. When we met again, we didn't get on so well. Plus I didn't find him physically atractive, which didn't help."
Once Kym made it in Hear'Say, Martin Murphy sold his story to a tabloid, which makes her very angry. "He tried to make out he was whiter-than-white. But for someone to be that sad and sell a story.... I didn't think he was like that. He's never going to speak to me again, and people at home hate him."
Now she says her only true friend outside the band is Tracey, a receptionist from back home in Wigan. "To call someone a true friend now is really difficult. But I've known Tracey for 6 years and we're really, really close. Last time I was home, we went out, and I went to see her mum and dad. She doesn't miss anything we're on - if she's out, she'll record it!"
It's clear Kym holds home close to her heart. Although the band will still be leaving their shared house for seperate London pads. She insists it's temporary. "I'm buying a place in the North. It's my home, and I go back there whenever I can, even if it's only for a night. I'd love my children to come to London, but their father doesn't want to take them out of the area, and I don't want to change their lives."