In December, Beth Johnson’s world fell apart. But solace can be found in the strangest of places

Christmas Day 2024 was, in itself, a good day for Beth Johnson. It’s most magical when there are small children around to enjoy it, and Beth was celebrating with her partner, Jacob, and their little boys, Freddie and Rowan. But behind the festivities, she knew things weren’t right in the relationship – and they hadn’t been right for a long time. On Boxing Day, it all came out: Beth told Jacob that she didn’t want to be with him any more.

They’d first matched on Tinder eight years ago, when she was working as a hairdresser in New Zealand. They hit it off straight away; Beth, now 30, remembers their shared sense of fun and silliness, enjoying barbecues in that sweet southern hemisphere sunshine. But there was always a shadow with Jacob, too: for as long as she’d known him, he had struggled with his mental health. Diagnosed as bipolar, he was prescribed potent antidepressant and antipsychotic medications, which Beth fears weren’t the right fit for him. His other coping mechanisms – “he smoked a lot of weed, and drank a lot of alcohol” – only made things worse.

When, quite early in their relationship, Beth discovered she was pregnant, she told Jacob she’d be moving back home to Sheffield, to be near her parents – and that he could come too, if he wanted. He did, and they made a life together: having first Freddie then Rowan, doing up a house in Lowedges, getting a dog. Beth opened her own salon, Sage Hair Studios, in Chaucer Yard. Looking back, she sees that she was trying to craft a home where Jacob could feel settled and happy. He never really did.

On 29 December 2024, three days after Beth told Jacob it was over, she went to a friend’s house for the evening, taking the boys with her. Jacob was invited – but stayed in, feeling too down to socialise. The reality of the break-up was hitting. 

While she was at her friend’s house, Beth was seized by a sense that something wasn’t right – a gut feeling, a grim premonition. Arriving back home, the lights were on in the garage, but nowhere else in the house. Beth took the kids indoors, then, with rising dread, lifted up the garage door. Inside, she found Jacob’s body.

“According to my Fitbit, my heart rate went up from about 80 to about 150, 160,” she says. “You can literally see when I found him. You can go back and be like – that’s the exact moment.” Beth speaks about what happened with remarkable calm openness: it’s part of her way of coping with the tragedy. But as she recounts the moment she found Jacob, the shock of it seems to jitter through her again; her face clouds, the light in her eyes dimming. “That night was very, very bad.”

In the awful months that have followed, Beth’s main concern has been the boys – helping Freddie and Rowan through what had happened with their dad. “We just do one thing at a time, try to keep a routine,” Beth tells me, when we chat in the café below her salon. She’s wearing a T-shirt with colourful smiling flowers printed on it, which neatly captures her essence: someone who seems to turn towards the sun, ready with a smile as bright as her pink hair. She possesses that essential quality you want in a hairdresser: an ability to put people at ease.

“They’ll talk about him,” she says, when I ask about the boys. “When Rowan is really over-tired and about to go to bed that’s when it will all bubble up… But they’ve been so good – they’re just really resilient kids.” To get the family through such trauma, Beth did what anyone would: cancelling all appointments and hunkering down. Time to shelter from the world.

But there was one event in the diary for 2025 that Beth didn’t cancel: Clams in Their Eyes. 

There’s no way to be serious when talking about “Clams” (as it’s known). In fact, it must be the silliest event in the city’s cultural calendar, where up-for-it Sheffielders transform themselves into pop stars and perform live, in an anarchic version of the classic TV competition Stars in their Eyes.

What began as a karaoke party for 60 people at the indie venue Delicious Clam seven years ago has grown an enormous cult following. This year’s event, held at Forge nightclub last Saturday, sold 700 tickets, at £30 each. 

Beth went to Clams for the first time last year. I was there too, and couldn’t help but be won over by the ultra committed performances: a Miley Cyrus, complete with a wrecking ball taking aim at a Pete McKee mural; a topless Iggy Pop performed by someone in nipple tape; a Dido-Eminem duet featuring baby-doll props of dubious taste.

I remember running into her there – this is Sheffield; she’s also my hairdresser. But Beth is much braver than me. The very next day, still hungover, she applied to be in the 2025 show. “The madness and the chaos is a good example of our Sheffield sense of humour, isn’t it?” she says. “And it was definitely something I wanted to be involved in. I’ve always loved being a bit silly and getting dressed up.”

So it’s no surprise, when I meet up with Beth a couple of weeks beforehand, to hear that she will be performing ‘Hot to Go!’ at Clams, the high-camp synth-pop banger from Gen Z’s favourite queer popstar, Chappell Roan. It’s a perfect opportunity for a big singalong, in a big ginger wig, and a bright pink costume. “I chose the song because of the energy of it – it’s just a crowd-pleaser,” says Beth. She happily admits she’s not a professional singer, and isn’t bothered about whether she wins or not. Clams is more about giving it your all than a polished performance.

Still, the level of public exposure Clams demands isn’t what you’d expect someone coping with the loss of their partner to be in the mood for. And Beth admits she has had huge doubts about going ahead. “When everything happened in December, I was a bit like ‘fuck that, I’m not doing it’,” she recalls. 

She was on the verge of letting the organisers know that she was pulling out. But then Jacob’s brother, Alex, came over from New Zealand for the funeral, and spent ten days with Beth and the boys. At some point, Beth told him about Clams and how she’d planned to film her audition video with Jacob and the kids. The thought of now recording it without Jacob didn’t seem right. 

But Alex picked up on something. Perhaps this was exactly what Beth needed. “I think you just need to do it – go on, just make the video, see what happens,” he told her. So she did, getting through to be one of eight final contestants in the live show. Since then, somewhat unexpectedly, Clams in their Eyes became a source of strength.

Initially, it was just something to aim for, a distraction. Freddie and Rowan are Chappell Roan fans too, so Beth enjoyed practicing ‘Hot to Go!’ with them. And when she went back to work it gave her something to chat to clients about. “I don’t have to be just ‘this really shit thing happened in December’, I can be ‘guess what I’m doing in April?’ It’s a way of looking forward to something.”

But singing has also helped on a more profound level, in the aftermath of Jacob’s death – it’s offered a rare outlet for release for Beth, otherwise channeling all her energy into trying to keep it together for her kids and her business. Belting out a bit of Chappell Roan has helped her get pent-up emotions out of her body. “There’s not much time at the moment where I can sing and shout [except] when I’m on my own in the car. So I’m excited to just go “aaaaghh!!” and scream ‘Hot to Go!’ as loud as I can. I know for a fact that I’ll probably cry when I’ve finished singing it on stage.”

As to what Jacob would make of it, Beth remembers that he acted as if Clams was “totally cringe” – but she knew he was secretly keen, smiling when he heard her singing. After their much-loved pet cat died, Jacob told Beth that overhearing her singing to herself in the kitchen, as a way to get through her sadness, also helped him feel better, sitting by himself upstairs.

“He said it was really comforting to him. So I’m like: right, ok – I’ve got to keep singing, for Jacob.”

The evening is just beginning to cool, after an unusually warm spring day, and I’m outside Forge with my head up Beth’s skirt.

All the Clams contestants have had a run-through onstage, and are waiting as the crowd begins to arrive. Once the show starts, they’ll be in the audience looking like the rest of us. But beneath their clothes, each wears as much of their final ‘reveal’ costume as they can – after they’re called out of the crowd and introduced, they’ll only have a few minutes backstage to transform into their chosen star. So beneath a pink skirt, anti-fascist T-shirt and a green fluffy jacket – Beth’s regular clothes are pretty dopamine-inducing themselves – she’s secretly wearing a spangly hot-pink leotard sourced from Easy Tiger, the brand that Roan herself wears. And just as I’m interviewing her, one of the hundreds of  sequins that encrust her leotard gets snagged in the mesh of her sparkly fishnet tights.

Which is why, in between hearing how she’s feeling – “my nerves and excitement are on a par, it’s going to be amazing and also shit scary” – I get roped into helping with a delicate disentangling in the crotch region. It’s a first for me, during an interview, to be honest.

Still, if sequin-extraction is going to happen anywhere, Clams in their Eyes is a reasonable bet. For an absurd and essentially DIY event, the production values are pretty epic: our presenter, ‘Matthew Clammy’, outdoes even Beth on the sequin count, wearing a silver-spangled suit and a terrible wig; there are T-shirt and glitters cannons, professional backing dancers, whole weather fronts of dry ice, and various extended gameshow skits. Then there are the contestants… we’re treated to a falsetto-ripping Prince in a purple frock coat, a young woman doing her best tongue-extending Alice Cooper, and not one but two Bonnie Tylers, complete with a gigantic heart prop.

Beth is on third – and as soon as the audience twigs she’s going to be Chappell Roan, they roar their approval. “This is going to be huge!” hypes Matthew Clammy, as Beth disappears for her quick change. Waiting backstage are Gill and Immy, two colleagues from the salon, ready to do a super-speedy application of Roan’s famous white facepaint.

Before the show, I’d collared Gill, asking her how it had been watching her friend go through such a tough time. “Obviously it has been really really difficult, but I’m in awe of her, honestly,” she tells me, shrugging her leopard-print coat up round her shoulders. “You will not meet a better mother than Beth – you just won’t. The way that she’s carried on for the boys – and for the business and her clients… She’s been strong right the way through it. She makes it look easy, but I know it’s not.”

“Beth is so, so loved, and we’re all rooting for her,” adds Gill. “She does so much to bring joy to other people – seeing that smile back on her face is what we all want.”

Gill gets her wish: as Beth emerges onstage – burnt-orange curls piled on her head, cerise sequins catching the lights, and ‘Hot to Go!’ blasting from the speakers – the main thing she seems to be wearing is a smile. She leads the cheering crowd through the song’s YMCA-like choreography, everyone spelling out ‘H-O-T-T-O-G-O’ with their arms up over their heads as she belts out the big chorus.

She makes no mention in her video introduction, or in her chats with Matthew Clammy, of what she’s been going through for the last few months. Because tonight, Matthew, Beth gets to be someone else entirely: not a grieving mum, but a popstar, sparkling bright, to the adulation of hundreds of screaming fans.

Finding her afterwards, I ask how she feels now it’s over. Did she cry – was it emotional? “It wasn’t really… I just feel on cloud nine,” says Beth. Still wearing a massive grin.

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