Paul Cattermole was the endearing wild card in S Club 7’s peppy pop pack | Michael Cragg

In the post-Spice Girls pure pop boom, the all-singing, all-dancing S Club 7 came to epitomise a certain turn of the millennium optimism. Their songs were peppy, sugary and loaded with gleeful generalities about reaching for the stars and forgetting about your cares. For the majority of their lineup, and for most of the pop stars at the time, landing a place in a pop act was the fulfilment of a childhood dream, or the perfect chance to escape a mundane job. S Club member Bradley McIntosh, for example, was working in a Pizza Hut when he got the call. For Paul Cattermole, the band’s most enigmatic member, who died on 6 April aged 46, there was no clamouring for an audition. He was scouted at his musical theatre school – at a time when his first rock band were playing small shows – and thrust into the world of pop.

Even in the group’s official book, 7 Heaven, released in 2001 after the band had scored seven Top 3 singles in a row and starred in three hugely successful CBBC TV shows, Cattermole’s description of being picked for the band is matter-of-fact: “I was asked to audition for the band and I got in – it’s as simple as that!”

Pieced together by Simon Fuller (the S in the name refers to him), while the svengali was still licking his wounds following his sacking by the Spice Girls, each member of the band had a role to play. While Jo O’Meara and McIntosh handled the majority of the vocals, Cattermole’s role – outside of being a roguish Smash Hits heartthrob with a goatee – was to be “enthusiastic”, as he put it in a 2019 interview with the Guardian. The restrictive nature of the pop machine would often rub up against Cattermole’s desire for something more: “Top of the Pops magazine, Smash Hits, all this sort of stuff was massive: ‘So Paul, what’s your favourite colour?’ Please! Ask me about the theory of relativity!”

Described in 7 Heaven as “a bit of thinker”, he was often the one who cared about the band’s perception. After the excellent, disco-tinged Don’t Stop Movin’ earned them a slither of credibility – helped by Cattermole, McIntosh and Jon Lee being arrested for smoking weed in central London, leading to copious “Spliff Club 7” headlines – it was Cattermole, realising the chance the band had to move beyond DayGlo kid-friendly pop, who pushed for the follow-up single to be equally as exciting. He didn’t get his way.

Speaking to me for a book about the pop of the era, former Smash Hits journalist Hannah Verdier told me Cattermole cared more than most of his peers about the industry around the band: “When they did Don’t Stop Movin’, we were at the TV show CD:UK and Paul was telling everyone it was behaving like a No 1 record. He was going into the mechanics of it.”

Perhaps it was inevitable that, in 2002, after three albums in three years, two Brit awards, the spin-off TV shows and the spin-off mini-me band S Club Juniors, Cattermole hopped off the S Club 7 conveyor belt. Keen to focus on his pre-S Club nu-metal project Skua, he told the Sun he wanted “a change musically”. Unfortunately, success was fleeting and Skua split a year later, only for another reunion in 2014 to be scuppered by the return of S Club 7 and a subsequent arena tour.

The money made from that tour, Cattermole revealed in 2018, was used to cover his spiralling debts. He also revealed he’d tried to sell both of his Brit awards on eBay. After dabbling in radio, theatre and tarot reading, Cattermole was due to reunite with S Club 7 again later this year for a sold-out arena tour marking the band’s 25th anniversary.

It sometimes seemed that Cattermole felt his life had been overly defined by S Club 7. “It was five years of my life,” he told The Guardian in 2019. “I definitely thought, when I was 20, that by the time I was 40 it would be a done thing. And it’s not … I’ve been answering S Club questions for 20 years.”

But as the band’s unknowable entity, there was something magnetic about him. Vibrant on stage but quiet off, cheeky but also deadly serious, he played every great pop band’s best role: the wild card. “It is so important to remember how great so many things about the band were,” he said in 2019, aware of the nostalgia he instilled in a generation of young pop fans now all grown up. “That time in people’s lives. That optimistic time.”