'We'd be mad not to do this'

Eurovision hopefuls Remember Monday have a chat with Kate Solomon about their entry song, avoiding nul points, getting drunk together and their multiple matching tattoos

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Arrayed on a sofa strewn with streamers, the three wide-eyed members of the UK's great Eurovision hope are sitting in increasingly uncomfortable corsets and doing what can only be described as larking about. Sandwiched between her Remember Monday bandmates, Holly-Anne Hull has barely finished saying, "We feel like we've won already!" when she lets out an indignant hoot: "Hey, that's my water!" and makes a snatch for the bottle Lauren Byrne has in her hands. A pleasant bickering follows: Charlotte Steele, it turns out, has been hoarding water bottles (two), and Holly eventually finds hers has rolled behind her on the party couch. She turns to me and says: “You see, I can’t share with Lauren because she has an incurable lip fungus.” They fall about laughing.

“That’s horrible because she’s going to put that in and I’m the only single one!” Lauren whines, and Charlotte, the peacemaker, chimes in to explain – “That’s Holly’s thing. Whenever she had to do an on-stage kiss, she’d always say right before they did it, ‘I do have an incurable lip fungus by the way.’” Such is the life of musical theatre kids, snogging on stage and making it more awkward rather than less.

But she hasn’t got an incurable lip fungus. Nor has Lauren. The band are fungus-free and ready to party. The three friends have been hustling to turn their angelic harmonies and knack for a good time into a career for more than a decade. They make no attempt to hide the fact that Remember Monday is a band that really wants to make it: Eurovision is the latest in a long string of shots at the big time. All three band members grew up doing musical theatre and Holly won Disney’s UK version of My Camp Rock in 2009, a talent contest based on the Noughties era tween phenomenon