How To Fail With Elizabeth Day · Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment

Atomic Kitten’s Natasha Hamilton - ‘We were young and working-class. We were dismissed.’

March 18, 2026·1 hr·4 clips

Natasha Hamilton describes the moment she told her partner Rich about a flash of self-harm ideation while cooking, shaking from head to toe, and was told at hospital she was having a mental breakdown.

Natasha Hamilton talks plainly, without polishing the hard bits. The excerpt opens on the ache of looking at her own children and wondering how adults could once be that cruel. Money stays close to the pain. After her divorce, she says she did not even have the login details for her online banking. Recovery took seven years. That one detail says a lot: heartbreak was only part of it. She also had to rebuild the everyday machinery of a life. The host keeps the conversation steady, moving from what Natasha went through to the strange turn in the band's luck after Kerry left. Hole Again had already failed once. Natasha remembers the first release reaching number 39, then dropping out of the charts the next week. Then everything sped up. Jenny Frost joined, the performances had to become live because Kerry was still on the track, and the group hoped for top ten. They were up against U2. The number one still sounds unbelievable, mostly because it came after such a mess. The gloss keeps slipping. What is left is Natasha describing pressure, public cruelty, and the long hangover of losing control over her own money. The episode also needs its warning: it includes depression and self-harm, so the warmth here does not make the material easy. The ending has a small, lovely lift. The host thanks Natasha for trusting her, then asks whether she now has access to her own bank account. Natasha says she does.

As heard by us

Natasha Hamilton turns Atomic Kitten's chart chaos, divorce, and financial recovery into a candid story of being underestimated.

Natasha Hamilton's visit to How To Fail is a clear-eyed look at pop fame from inside a young, working-class girl group that was underestimated until the chart numbers changed.

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Why you'd press play

A chart-topping comeback story with divorce, money, and one very blunt bank-account question.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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