“Steps was never a cool band, and back in the 90s, being cool really mattered,” says Claire Richards. “If the pop charts were a school then we’d have been the kids in the corner of the canteen that nobody wanted to sit with.”

In 1997, along with Ian “H” Watkins, Faye Tozer, Lee Latchford-Evans and Lisa Scott-Lee, Richards was recruited to form a family-friendly dance pop act. Steps launched their career with the techno line dance “5, 6, 7, 8”: a daftly cheesy bop accompanied by a video that saw the quintet snapping out synchronised moves at a beach bar – all the girls in bikinis and the boys in shorts, shades and open shirts. From the off, they looked like the nation’s Redcoats. Good looking, hardworking kids next door knocking out the feel-good vibes with jazz hands. 

They appealed to tweens, some ironic students and young LGBTQ people who felt at odds with the predominantly straight indie rock scene. Richards says early fans “liked the idea of belonging to this little group of people doing our own bright sparkly thing regardless of what the cool kids thought of us.” She smiles warmly recalling the early support from queer fans and reminds me that “coming out in the 90s was much harder than it is today [Watkins only came out in 2007]. You clung to the things that made you feel happy and included…”

Producer Pete Waterman saw Steps as “Abba on speed”. In 1998, he took them to the top of the charts with the double A side single “Heartbeat/Tragedy”. In 1999, they toured America as Britney Spears’s support act in the wake of the success of “…Baby One More Time”. Steps would go on to sell over 22 million singles and 15 million albums around the world, but they left fans heartbroken after a sudden split on Boxing Day, 2001. It turned out that Richards and Watkins had quit the band to become a double act just before an arena performance in Manchester, informing their other three bandmates of their decision with resignation letters handed out around a table. When the concert was broadcast live on TV, fans noticed Tozer crying.

But Richards had been shedding tears behind the scenes for years by that point. Although she was a size 10 when she auditioned for the band she was immediately instructed to lose weight. Last year she told The Sun: “When you are young and you’re being offered that kind of opportunity – and the only stipulation is that you lose half a stone – I think any young girl would.” Today she tells me she’s “a people pleaser, I thrive on praise.” But she says shrinking herself to win that praise left her “dangerously thin”. 

After leaving the group the press focused on her figure and then her weight loss. Today, Richards’ manager has – understandably – asked me not to ask her about her weight. Her waistline shouldn’t dominate all her headlines when she’s only ever wanted to be known for her voice. 

Alas that big, belting big voice of Richards’ isolated her from the other women in Steps. When the band were reunited for Sky TV documentary Steps Reunion in 2011, Tozer and Scott-Lee described feeling sidelined when Richards – in fairness the better singer – was given more time at the mic. It made her look like the inevitable solo star, perhaps along with the charismatic Watkins, whose nickname “H” stands for hyperactive. He had been in a secret relationship with the group’s manager, Tim Byrne, so the others felt this meant he was more likely to be sent to interviews and photoshoots. When they toured with Spears, Watkins charmed his way into her inner circle and won a seat on her private jet while the rest of the band spent three months schlepping around the US on their bus. Richards, meanwhile, felt left out. She liked to curl up in her room after shows while the other girls partied. She was homesick and started to burn out.

Watching the 2011 documentary today is a reminder of how much more brutal reality TV was back then. The band members appear to have been tossed into a swanky hotel room and left to bicker it out for the cameras. In many shots Richards doesn’t speak, just absorbs the anger of her former bandmates. 

In London today to promote her new, disco themed solo tour, Richards admits that filming that documentary “wasn’t a very nice experience for me. Nobody enjoys being confronted like that, do they? I still don’t regret leaving the band in 2001. I felt trapped and I wasn’t very well. I had basically starved myself for four years. I was so unhappy. But…” She shrugs. “It was cathartic for us all to get back together.” They reunited in 2012. “If you have been living your own truth for a decade you do need to hear other people’s stories. That is what we needed to do as people and as a band.”

They built back slowly. First a tour with gloriously camp costumes (including tasselled helmets) and some new music in 2012. Then a giddy high-energy 2017 album, Tears on the Dancefloor, that they ended up releasing themselves because no label would touch them. They had the last laugh when they became the year’s second biggest-selling independent act after Stormzy and were signed by Sony to release What the Future Holds, with a title song written by pop megastar Sia and later releasing single – “Heartbreak in This City” – with RuPaul’s Drag Race judge Michelle Visage. In 2022 Steps’ third compilation album, Platinum Collection, debuted at the top of the UK chart making them the first British mixed gender group to clock up four number one albums in four different decades. “I hope it’s not because people feel sorry for us,” grins Richards. “But because we’re survivors and we work really hard.”  

Born in 1977 in Hillingdon, Richards was the youngest member of Steps, just 19 when they were formed. But she was also the only member to have been in a pop group – TSD – before. Looking back she says that the way they were formed “meant we didn’t have childhood friendships to bind us. We were all hired like members of any workplace, which meant that, like in any workplace, sometimes some of us got on and sometimes we didn’t.”

While most of her bandmates were extroverts, Richards was shy. “I grew up just wanting to be a singer, without really wanting the fame. The first band I really loved was The Carpenters. At 13 I would sit in my bedroom and sob my heart out singing along with Karen Carpenter… quite weird for a teenager in 1990.”

Her reticence meant that she panicked when the band were packed off to promote their songs on a relentless rollercoaster of TV and radio interviews. “If this were a Steps interview in 1997, I probably wouldn’t have said two words to you unless you asked me a direct question,” she says. “Even then somebody else would probably have jumped in and answered it for me. When it was the five of us it was much easier to let everybody else do the talking. Sitting in a room like this, on my own with a journalist, is something I would never ever have been able to do back then.” 

Was the band pushed too hard at first? Exploited? “I think all pop stars were exploited in the 90s,” she says. “A lot of the stuff we went through just never would have happened. Oh god, even down to the hours we worked and which countries we would go to. If we ever dared to say we didn’t want to do something we would be persuaded otherwise.” 

But Richards also believes the Steps members’ life experience gave them some advantages over younger peers. “We were relatively old compared to some of the kids in the charts,” she says. “The others were all in their twenties and we’d all had proper jobs in the real world. I had worked as a receptionist.” 

It gave Steps a sharper awareness of the financial realities, and she winces at recollections of what was happening to other artists. “They’d say: ‘Why don’t I have any money?’ and we’d say: ‘Well, it’s because you’ve got four different make-up artists.’ Every time they stepped onto a helicopter they assumed it was on somebody else’s tab. We had to say: ‘Somebody is paying for that and it’s probably you.’” By contrast, she says, “we all knew exactly what we were paying for – every car, every video, all the time”. 

Such shrewdness ensured that all five Steps alumni stayed financially secure during the decade they were apart. Richards says this is the period during which she did her “personal stuff, the growing up I’d missed”. She gives me a brisk recap of that decade: “I got married [to Steps backing dancing mark Webb in 2003], got divorced [in 2005], had a baby [with Reece Hill in 2007], got married again [to Hill in 2008] and had another baby [with Hill in 2009]. I found my grounding.” 

2011 saw Richards return to the spotlight, competing in Pop Star to Opera Star, on which she delivered an arrestingly bright performance of “The Queen of the Night” (from Mozart’s The Magic Flute) and only lost out in the final to Bucks Fizz’s Cheryl Baker. “I was such a little rabbit in the headlights on that show,” she recalls today. “But I learned so much about singing that I still use to keep my voice in good shape. I still sing ‘Queen of the Night’ to warm up before shows and everybody backstage thinks I’m a nutter!” 

By the time of Steps’ 2012 reunion, Richards believes the culture had moved on enough to enjoy the razzle-dazzle of a band who didn’t sing their own songs. “Back in the 1990s that was meant to be the ultimate proof of insincerity wasn’t it?” she sighs. Then along came shows like Glee (broadcast from 2009-2015) which celebrated people doing what Steps did: belting and hoofing out the big bright numbers without a whiff of irony. She suspects it’s no coincidence that the same period saw the rise of queer characters on TV. “People just relaxed and started to be themselves, right?” 

A Steps musical is now due to appear on the West End and Richards assures me that it is “really fun and cheesy”. Seven years in development, the show doesn’t tell the band’s melodramatic story. Instead it weaves their greatest hits into the tale of four friends all working in a seaside supermarket and deciding to embark on a summer of love. Richards notes that the show’s stars “have been realising our songs are not as easy to sing as people think. There’s an assumption that catchy music is easy to perform. But, like Abba songs – which often catch people out at karaoke – ours are challenging. Especially ‘Love’s Got a Hold on My Heart’ because it’s so high. That one always leaves me exhausted.” 

But Richards – who embarks on a solo tour, Everybody Dance, singing disco hits this autumn – tells me that she’s been enjoying live performance more than ever over the past year. Her secret? “HRT!” she enthuses. Hormone replacement therapy replaces oestrogen and progesterone to improve symptoms of the menopause. “It’s game changing. My perimenopause was giving me hot flushes, anxiety, brain fog… when I went on The Masked Singer it was all getting too much. Can you imagine standing in a huge, woolly costume on the stage in front of the nation, terrified your fear would show up in your voice? It was awful.” 

She shudders. “But then I started taking HRT and now I’m a huge advocate.” As we finish up our tea, Richards rails against “the many GPs who are still poorly informed about the menopause” but gushes over “the brilliant women like Davina McCall who have done so much to raise awareness.”

Richards tells me that one of the joys of being in her late forties has been “the kinship I’ve found with so many women going through the same things.” She points out that not so long ago female entertainers of her age would have been shuffled off stage into the wings. “Instead,” she grins, “I’m going to put on some shiny, sequin dresses, walk up to the microphone and sing songs like ‘I Will Survive’.”

Everybody Dance tours from 14 October (everybodydancelive.co.uk)