Girls Aloud fans in stitches at how Kimberley Walsh recovered from dropping her fan in iconic performance

Girls Aloud have been rebranded 'Icons Aloud' after footage resurfaced showing Kimberley Walsh owning a performance in which she dropped her prop fan.

Between singing, dancing, keeping in time and making sure they didn't fall off the stage, the singers of Girls Aloud had a lot to think about when they appeared on GMTV for a performance back in 2005.

The group performed their track 'Long Hot Summer' to help promote their new album, Chemistry, and they were kitted out with some handheld fans to help emphasise just how hot this summer really was.

The women danced along to the track with some well-rehearsed choreography, but Walsh was forced to improvise when her fan blew out of her hand and landed on the floor of the stage.

With the cameras on her the singer didn't risk picking up her prop, and instead made the swift decision to carry on the dance without it while her bandmates all continued to fan themselves.

At one point, the person behind the camera made sure everyone at home knew exactly what was going on as they zoomed in on the Nicola Roberts' kitten heels and revealed Walsh's fan abandoned on the floor behind her.

ITV

Footage from the performance has been viewed hundreds of times after being shared on TikTok, with one viewer catching Roberts 'trying not to laugh' while others described Walsh as a 'resilient queen' who had 'improvised very well' after her performance went awry.

"Her made up choreo is better than the original," one impressed fan commented, while another added: "She carried on like a true professional."

Other TikTok users couldn't help drawing attention to the not-so-subtle camera shots during the performance, as one wrote: "The camera pan of the fan on the floor is shady but iconic."

ITV

"That [...] camera shot, they knew what they were doing," added another.

Just over 15 years after the GMTV performance, Girls Aloud member Sarah Harding died in 2021 after being diagnosed with breast cancer.

Fans were left reminiscing about her time in the band after another of the group's performances, their Tangled Up concert from 2008, aired on BBC Two last week.

The show saw Harding, Walsh and Roberts joined by Cheryl and Nadine Coyle as they performed at the O2 Arena in London and entertained fans with a number of their most popular tracks, including 'Biology', 'Love Machine', and 'Sound of the Underground'.

The band formed in 2002 through the ITV talent show Popstars: The Rivals.