Since representing the UK in the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest, Remember Monday’s lives have changed even more than they ever thought possible.
From lighting up the stage with “What the Hell Just Happened?” came a whole new fanbase and a string of exciting performances for Lauren Byrne, Holly-Anne Hull and Charlotte Steele. Throughout this summer, the three bright and bubbly women have sung their way through festivals and danced across countless stages to crowds who, for the first time, they say, were screaming every lyric back to them. A highlight was performing at Wembley Stadium for Capital FM’s Summertime Ball, where the band came up on the stage in a toaster and their Eurovision song underscored the entire mind-blowing experience.
The British country-pop girl group have dived into their brand-new era with their single “Happier”, which celebrates the moment of excitement and relief after getting over an unsatisfying relationship and fully embracing your “gumption”, as Charlotte said. With a music video playing with themes of Desperate Housewives and Barbie, “Happier” is the perfect soundtrack for a fun and fabulous summer. The band filmed at a house in Guildford, soaking up the sun and enjoying every moment of the experience.
While they’ve been singing together ever since their days at sixth form more than a decade ago – which normally took place on a Monday – their pitch-perfect harmonies on The Voice in 2019 was what first gave them a taste of being a band full-time. When they eventually quit their jobs, Holly sat to make a bucket list for the band, where performing at Wembley was a dream which seemed so out of reach it didn’t make the list to “keep it realistic”.
Their friendship is everything. As Lauren said, they want to “empower girls and women” and create a safe space at their concerts for anyone to come alone. Saying you want to be friends with the group is “one of the biggest compliments” they could ever receive. They celebrate each other and lift each other up, while the band name immortalises those precious hours on a Monday afternoon where they could be together, let loose and enjoy the art of their music.
1883 Magazine chats with Remember Monday about the life-changing experience of Eurovision, the whirlwind of their lives since, the strength of their friendship, and more.
You guys have had a really busy few weeks, and now your music video for “Happier” is out! It looks like you had a great time filming it – what was it like?
Lauren: Yeah, our whole summer has been jam packed with such amazing fun things, and the music video is definitely one of those. The song felt so summary so we just wanted the video to give that feel good summer energy. It was such a fun day, wasn’t it, girls?
Charlotte: It was so fun. We were lucky with the weather because obviously the whole thing was so dependent on it, but there was something in the air helping us out, I think.
I heard the video was inspired by Desperate Housewives and Barbie. What was it about them that made you want to incorporate those vibes in the music video?
Holly: I just love that whole aesthetic. I love Stepford Wives and that era, the 90s classic era, I love so much. And I’m a real Pinterest girly, so I’ve spent years and years creating Pinterest boards of dream things that I want the band to do.
The thing that’s so fun about the band is we just love dressing up. We’re like dolls, and I love coming up with ideas and being like, ‘Girls, you’re gonna be wearing this like that’.
So did you have a Pinterest board for the music video? What was it like?
Holly [with Lauren showing the Pinterest board]: Oh yeah, we made a really cute board! We just really wanted to do the bright, poppy kind of colour palette of that feeling where you enter a world, exactly how when you watched the Barbie movie.
We love that moodboard so much, and obviously we’re doing it on a budget, so we’re really proud of it. It came together in literally under 12 hours. Our whole team really mucked in and we managed to get live animals on set, and it was a really, really amazing day. We feel really, really proud of it.
I think the video fits really well with what the song is about. But what inspired the song in the first place?
Lauren: We actually wrote it when we were writing songs for Eurovision, and it was just in one of our writing sessions. I think the idea is just that pure relief moment when you get to that stage in a break up where you’ve cried and you’ve screamed and you’ve eaten 12 Domino’s pizzas a week. And then and then you’re like, ‘Ohh OK, I’m done with the sadness now’. And you’re starting to realise all the reasons you’re better off.
It was just so fun to write it. We knew it wasn’t right for Eurovision, so we thought let’s just put a pin in that and then we came back and finished it, and we could factor in little jokes we’d made from the Eurovision experience. It’s about that fun feeling of realising you’re better off after you’ve been in a crappy place.
Holly: Have you guys seen the movie The Holiday? You know when Kate Winslet is in love with Jasper and it hurts, and she’s absolutely dying over this man. And then she realises she doesn’t love him anymore and doesn’t care, and she’s like –
Charlotte: “Gumption!”
Holly: Yeah. It’s that.
You guys have mentioned Eurovision a few times already – how was the experience overall?
Holly: It’s the best thing we’ve ever done in our lives. We literally adored every second of it. I feel like I’m grieving it a little bit – we literally had the best time of our lives.
It really is so much more than that one day. With Eurovision, it started in December, and it engulfed our whole life up until that final day. Everything we’d ever wanted for our band was to be able to do all these amazing things and see all these amazing places and meet all these amazing people, and it’s so cool that we have it documented.
Charlotte: It doesn’t feel real when we look back on it. Really, we were so present in everything, and we were so thankful and excited about absolutely every bit, but so much happened in such short space of time that, yeah, like Holly said, thank God it was all documented.
How do you think your audience and fanbase has changed since Eurovision?
Holly: We’ve always attracted the females because our music is, I guess, very much directed to them. But we do feel like since we’ve done this run of summer festivals, every single audience is getting younger and younger – apart from when we did come off stage at Camp Festival and a group of lads said, ‘You’re our mum’s favourite!’
We’re loving it. The little girls wearing our merch and singing our songs is devastatingly special. We don’t want to leave the stage.
Lauren: We all grew up looking up to our favourite female artists and thinking, ‘I could only dream of that being me one day’, so I always have that thought on stage watching the crowd. I remember at a festival a few weeks ago, there was this little girl in the audience, she was stood right at the barrier and she was maybe eight or nine, and she was screaming along to every single word.
Charlotte: When they get emotional as well and come up to us and meet us, sometimes they can’t talk because they’re overwhelmed. That is absolutely crazy to us, and we sit on the bus going back from a gig and say, ‘What is our life?’
I’d love to go back to the beginning of how you guys met, because I heard it was at Sixth Form. How did you decide your band name, Remember Monday?
Lauren: We met in 2011/ 2012 but Remember Mondaydidn’t properly get its name until 2018. We’d been best mates singing together for six whole years prior to that. It was just always an in-joke because we just were always able to get together on a Monday. And that started at Sixth Form but then carried on all the way through when we were at university or drama school or work or whatever we were doing. For some reason, Mondays always just seemed to be the day that we could get together.
As your career has grown, do you think Remember Monday is a reminder of that precious time at Sixth Form?
Holly: As much as we obviously are aware it’s us that was those girls, it does feel like those girls are completely different people. I guess any human being at our age probably looks back at as themselves as teenagers, as different people. It must be so crazy for our teachers – they must think, ‘How are they still going? They don’t give up, those girls.’
You guys shot to fame from The Voice. How did you decide to do that, and what was the experience like?
Lauren: It was the first year that they were doing trios or like group voice, so they were looking for trios to apply, and they approached us. We’d never really thought about doing anything like that, but they were pretty insistent and it was just such a fun opportunity for us to get to have a little taste of what it would be like – because we were all working full time separately, we weren’t doing the band full time at that point. It was just really fun.
Charlotte: It was nearly a year, so I’d say it was probably five or six months of quite an intense taster of what full-time life as the band would be like. And it honestly was amazing. We were just like, ‘Why can’t we do this every day?’
Lauren: We really loved it. And I mean, we met Jennifer Hudson and she for some reason has continued to be a massive champion for reasons we don’t quite understand.
Well, you guys are doing so amazing! Everything changed in a short time for you. Was there a time you really thought, ‘My whole life has changed’?
Charlotte: Mine is really random – it was New Year’s just gone. I knew going into this year we were doing Eurovision and we knew everything was coming up, and it turned midnight and I literally burst into tears and was like, ‘I think everything’s gonna change this year’, and I was so shocked by it. As it got through that evening, I realised I’ve never been more excited. And it is crazy. That was obviously before anything did change. It was just knowing it was coming.
Lauren: Mine is playing these festivals this summer. We’re so used to playing festivals and playing to crowds that quite literally have never heard of us before in their lives. Whereas this summer, people know the words and have taken the time to come and watch our set and have made signs specifically for us.
Holly: I made a bucket list for the band at the beginning of 2024, and it’s a realistic bucket list. It will be like a million streams on Spotify, which honestly to us did feel outrageous. But when we hit it, we were like, oh gosh, this just happened in. A week how wild.
But we didn’t put on the bucket list to play a stadium, and we played Wembley Stadium. Honestly, it was just little things like being backstage with those artists and seeing Will Smith that was just apparently normal. We came up in a toaster – what the heck were we doing? For me, that wasn’t even like my life changed. That was, ‘What am I doing?’
Lauren: It’s so funny that we unknowingly wrote the soundtrack to the rest of our year. Saying that bloody phrase every day – ‘What the hell just happened?’
I’d love to ask you guys more about your outfits – you have really colourful vibes. How do you approach the aesthetics of outfits for festivals and shows?
Lauren: I feel like we had a lot of trial and error, and over ten years of dressing poorly on my part.
Holly: I wish we could say it was really well thought out, but genuinely, it’ll be the night before a gig and we’ll ask if anyone has an item they like.
For example, last weekend, Lauren liked a pair of trousers that she had just bought. They were purple and green, and we were like, ‘Purple and green it is’. We know our individual styles now, so as long as we have a colour palette, we can sort ourselves out now, which is really nice.
Charlotte: Sometimes one of us will own way more green for instance, so then we’ll bring that to the show and we’ll be like, ‘Ok put this on, borrow that, swap this, wear this belt’. It’s very fun and very last minute.
Lauren: We’re always so stressed about it, but after we’re thinking oh, this looks kind of slay. You should see our WhatsApp group, I reckon it must be thousands and thousands of pictures of clothes.
It sounds like you’ve had a really fun and full-on summer and done some really crazy things in the last few years. What have been some of the most fun?
Holly: Our trip to Iceland was insane! The helicopter was insane. We had like three hours of sleep and went to the top of a mountain.
Lauren: For our postcard video for Eurovision, we went in a helicopter, and Charlotte’s afraid of flying.
Charlotte: That was like a, ‘Let’s get through this’ day.
Lauren: I just remembered we never posted that video of us in the helicopter wing!
Holly: Oh my gosh, let’s post it! There’s going to be a lot of stuff we haven’t posted because we were saving it because it would’ve been a spoiler at the time.
You guys have done so much. What are you hoping to do next?
Holly: There are two things I really want us to do. We want to release an album and we want a big old support slot of someone really cool.
Lauren: We just love being on tour so much.
Holly: We have a dream list of who we’d really love to support again on the bucket list, and we’re trying to be realistic, but I feel like it’s getting out of hand.
I’d love to hear some of your bucket list!
Charlotte: Go on Holly, read it out. And say the ones we ticked as well.
Holly: A million streams on Spotify. A song played on Capital Radio- it’s on the bucket list. Play Isle of Wight festival.
Lauren: And that one’s been there for years and years.
Holly: Invited to a premier – we went to the Freaky Friday premier on Thursday, that was really cool. Play a stadium. Play an arena.
Lauren: And that wasn’t on there, that was so unrealistic, we never would have put that on there – we added it after Wembley.
Holly: Yeah, so what we haven’t ticked off – we’ve got Glastonbury. A million followers on TikTok. To go on the Jimmy Fallon show – Jimmy, if you’re listening! Meet Sabrina. Just meet her [laughs].
I heard you guys are Sabrina-approved! What was it she said?
Lauren: She said, ‘Work it, smoochy’.
Holly: And then posted us on her story.
Lauren: We love her music and her humour as well. I think we’d probably be really good friends.
Holly: I love her brain as well, her whole aesthetic is incredible. I can’t wait to watch her videos and hear her new songs or see what she’s wearing – I just think she’s really clever. It’s such an amazing brand she’s built.
How would you all describe the brand you’ve built and your identity as a band?
Lauren: We’ve always really wanted to empower girls and women and hopefully our friendship does that more than anything. I think it’s our friendship is really important to us and hopefully also is relatable in some way. I want people to want to be part of our gang. Is that right, girls?
Holly: I think our unique selling point is our relationship and our friendship and how much we value that. The biggest compliment that people can ever give us is, ‘I wanna be in your band’ or ‘I wanna be one of your friends’.
Charlotte: And when people come to our shows and they say it feels like a safe place for friends to hand out and meet other people, that is the best.
Holly: We’re going on tour in October and November around the UK and Ireland. If you’re nervous to come alone, don’t be nervous. Please do come, we’re a very safe place and all of our fans are.
Lauren: Also the age restriction for a few of the venues, including London, is really low at eight and above. It’s really important to us because our fan base is getting younger and younger.
Holly: Friendship is the vibe.
Catch Remember Monday on the What the Hell Just Happened UK tour from October to November.
Interview Claudia Bradley
