Michelle Heaton has said that the feud between Liberty X and Hear'Say was for real, having started following the end of Popstars.
Heaton burst onto the scene when she featured on the ITV talent show in 2001 alongside Kevin Simm, Tony Lundon, Jessica Young and Kelli Young.
Having reached the final of the competition, the five singers missed out on featuring with the winning group, Hear'Say, which led to the creation of the band, Liberty X, a group which went on land ten consecutive singles in the UK Top 20 chart, before they split up in 2007.
Such singles included, Thinking It Over, Got To Have Your Love, Doin' It, Song 4 Lovers, and Just A Little among others.
However, since 2017, the tree female singers, Jessica Taylor, and Kelli Young alongside Heaton, have continued as Liberty X.
“There was a war from the get-go", Heaton said of the rivalry between the groups, while appearing on Paul Brunson's We Need To Talk podcast.
She continued: "We were constantly pitted against each other in a world we were trying to navigate".
Elsewhere, Michelle Heaton went onto claim that this hostility also came from the team surrounding Hear'Say, as well as the bandmembers themselves.
“It was evident they wanted us to fail. Not just Hear’Say as a team, but the people around them", she said. “And so that would have then stirred up the pot with the Hear’Say members in order to add fuel to the fire when they did interviews about how they were bigger and better and we were not so… and that we were running on their coattails".
Michelle Heaton claimed this rivalry felt particularly harsh, given how the two groups had initially bonded so well during the audition process for the show.
“It felt really harsh. We didn’t know how to navigate it. It felt like it wasn’t the five people that we met in the audition process", she said.
Despite this feud, Michelle Heaten admitted that she wanted to stay in touch with HearSay's Suzanne Shaw, with whom she befriended during filming.
“And alongside all of this, all I kind of wanted to do was reach out to Suzanne because that’s like one of the people that I got really close to … and be like, ‘how is it? What’s it like?’, she stated. “I really wanted to share that with her. And at no point did I see what we were doing as hanging on their coattails".
Thankfully, Heaton and Shaw have reconnected and rekindled their friendship.
Back in 2023, Michelle Heaton and her husband Hugh Hanley went back to the first restaurant where they had their first date. The couple enjoyed a lovely getaway to the south of Ireland in Kinsale and Cork. Find out more on this here.
