
Helen Flanagan stuns in a busty pink dress as she shows off her gifted outfit - after 'broke' star admitted she's lost her £3.5m fortune
Helen Flanagan looked sensational as she took to Instagram on Saturday with a sizzling new post.
The 34-year-old 'broke' soap star, who recently admitted to losing her £3.5 million fortune, has faced a series of financial setbacks.
In a bid to be more budget-conscious, Helen turned heads as she modelled a selection of gifted items.
Delighting her followers, she wowed in a busty pink summer dress adorned with tiny strawberries.
She styled the look with brown sandals and a chic denim Kurt Geiger bag, finishing it off with dainty gold jewellery.
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Helen captioned the snap: 'Dreamiest dress for summer @molbythelabel. pink and strawberries bag @kurtgiger necklace @astridandmiyu @hertility love this Uterus charm earrings @laraheems_jewellery ( some items gifted).
The actress recently announced that she has been forced to put her 'forever home' up for sale as she can no longer afford its upkeep.
This followed her pleas to magistrates when she appeared on speeding charges earlier this year that she is a 'single mum' who struggles to scrape together cash for a £10 taxi fare.
The actress's company, HJF Darling Ltd, published last year's accounts up to August where the total came to £135,387, leaving a balance of £75,615 after tax.
Speaking candidly to The Declutter Hub podcast about her living situation in April, Helen explained: 'It actually makes me sad that I'm going to be leaving soon because I actually put so much effort into it.
'When we moved I put like a lot of my savings into doing the house up and making it look really beautiful.
'But it's a big house. It's an eight-bedroom house, which is obviously really hard to keep on top of.'
The 'newly-single' star recently confirmed her boyfriend Robbie Talbot had moved out of the home she shares with her three children, previously claimed her finances were so dire that she was struggling to afford the price of public transport.
The actress is understood to be single after breaking off her relationship with Robbie, 45, just over a year after the pair went public.
She shares three children Matilda, nine, Delilah, six, and Charlie, four, with her footballer ex Scott Sinclair.
Helen had previously hinted at wanting more children with the former non-league footballer, but is said to have had a change of heart over over recent months.
A source told The Sun: 'They want different things in life. She has just landed a new acting job and is trying to juggle work projects with the kids.
'She sat him down two weeks ago and said, ''This isn't working''... She just wants to be on her own for a while although she still has feelings for him.'
In April, Helen admitted she is no longer living with Robbie after he briefly moved into her home, sharing at the time it wasn't helpful for her children who 'miss' their dad.
The actress and her ex-fiancé Scott Sinclair, 36, separated in 2022 after 13 years together.
She told The Sun: 'I'd asked him to stay for a while, because I often get quite scared in the house on my own and feel safer with a man there.
'But Matilda is very sensitive and a proper daddy's girl, and she struggles with not seeing Scott as often as she'd like.
'I always think about how she feels when she misses her dad, and having my boyfriend there maybe doesn't help her.'
Speaking on The Mail's The Life of Bryony podcast in March, Helen praised Robbie and the positive impact he'd had on her mental and emotional wellbeing.
She said: 'He's lovely. Everybody loves him. I just met him at a bar. I literally, I just, I could not stop laughing at this guy.'
'My boyfriend's actually the funniest guy I've ever met. He's got two kids and he's, he's really beautiful with my children.'
'I think that's what made me fall more in love with him because he's so good with my mental health things and that's the main thing for me that I need.'
She added: 'I need someone that's good for me mentally and emotionally, that's my top thing and that's what I've realised.'
'No disrespect to the father of my children, I'll always have that love for him, but he didn't know how to cope with me or didn't know how to do that, and not everybody does, but because the man that I'm with now really knows how to do that, it makes me happy.'
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The Guardian
37 minutes ago
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‘Yes, there was a riot, but it was great': Cabaret Voltaire on violent gigs, nuclear noise – and returning to mark 50 years
Fifty years ago, Cabaret Voltaire shocked the people of Sheffield into revolt. A promoter screamed for the band to get off stage, while an audience baying for blood had to be held back with a clarinet being swung around for protection. All of which was taking place over the deafening recording of a looped steamhammer being used in place of a drummer, as a cacophony of strange, furious noises drove the crowd into a frenzy. 'We turned up, made a complete racket, and then got attacked,' recalls Stephen Mallinder. 'Yes, there was a bit of a riot, and I ended up in hospital, but it was great. That gig was the start of something because nothing like that had taken place in Sheffield before. It was ground zero.' Mallinder and his Cabaret Voltaire co-founder Chris Watson are sitting together again in Sheffield, looking back on that lift-off moment ahead of a handful of shows to commemorate the milestone. 'It is astonishing,' says Watson. 'Half a century. 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We just enjoyed annoying people, to be honest.' Inspired by dadaism, they would set up speakers in cafes and public toilets, or strap them to a van and drive around Sheffield blasting out their groaning, hissing and droning in an attempt to spook and confuse people. 'It did feel a bit violent and hostile at times, but more than anything we just ruined people's nights,' laughs Mallinder, with Watson recalling a memory from their very first gig: 'The organiser said to me after, 'You've completely ruined our reputation.' That was the best news we could have hoped for.' Insular and incendiary, the tight-knit trio had their own language, says Mallinder. 'We talked in a cipher only we understood – we had our own jargon and syntax.' When I interviewed Kirk years before his death, he went even further. 'We were like a terrorist cell,' he told me. 'If we hadn't ended up doing music and the arts, we might have ended up going around blowing up buildings as frustrated people wanting to express their disgust at society.' Instead they channelled that disgust into a type of sonic warfare – be it the blistering noise and head-butt attack of their landmark electro-punk track Nag Nag Nag, or the haunting yet celestial Red Mecca, an album rooted in political tensions and religious fundamentalism that throbs with a paranoid pulse. Watson left the group in 1981 to pursue a career in sound recording for TV. Mallinder and Kirk invested in technology, moving away from the industrial sci-fi clangs of their early period into grinding yet glistening electro-funk. As the second summer of love blazed in the UK in 1988, they headed to Chicago instead – to make Groovy, Laidback and Nasty with house legend Marshall Jefferson. 'We got slagged off for working with Marshall,' recalls Mallinder. 'People were going, 'England has got its own dance scene. Why aren't you working with Paul Oakenfold?' But we're not the fucking Happy Mondays. We'd already been doing that shit for years. We wanted to acknowledge our connection to where we'd come from: Black American music.' This major label era for the group produced moderate commercial success before they wound things down in the mid-1990s. But in the years since, everyone from New Order to Trent Reznor has cited the group's influence. Mallinder continued to make electronic music via groups such as Wrangler and Creep Show, the latter in collaboration with John Grant, a Cabs uber-fan. Watson says leaving the group was 'probably the most difficult decision I've ever made' but he has gone on to have an illustrious career, winning Baftas for his recording work with David Attenborough on shows such as Frozen Planet. He recalls 'the most dangerous journey I've ever made' being flown in a dinky helicopter that was akin to a 'washing machine with a rotor blade' by drunk Russian pilots in order to reach a camp on the north pole. On 2003 album Weather Report, Watson harnessed his globetrotting field recording adventures with stunning effect, turning long, hot wildlife recording sessions in Kenya surrounded by buzzing mosquitoes, or the intense booming cracks of colossal glaciers in Iceland, into a work of immersive musical beauty. When he was at the Ignalina nuclear power plant in Lithuania with Oscar-winning composer Hildur Guðnadóttir, recording sounds for the score to the 2019 TV series Chernobyl, he couldn't help but draw parallels to his Cabs days. 'It was horrific but really astonishing – such a tense, volatile, hostile environment,' he says. 'But it really got me thinking about working with those sounds again, their musicality and how it goes back to where I started.' Sign up to Sleeve Notes Get music news, bold reviews and unexpected extras. Every genre, every era, every week after newsletter promotion Mallinder views Watson's work as a Trojan horse for carrying radical sounds into ordinary households. 'The Cabs may have changed people's lives but Chris is personally responsible for how millions of people listen to the world,' he says, with clear pride. 'And one of the things that helped make that happen was the fact that he was in the Cabs, so through that lens he opened up people's ears.' Watson agrees, saying Cabaret Voltaire 'informed everything I've ever done'. Watson's field recordings will play a part in the upcoming shows: he'll rework 2013 project Inside the Circle of Fire, in which he recorded Sheffield itself, from its wildlife to its steel industry via football terraces and sewers. 'It's hopefully not the cliched industrial sounds of Sheffield,' he says, 'but my take on the signature sounds of the city.' These will be interwoven with a set Mallinder is working on with his Wrangler bandmate Ben 'Benge' Edwards as well as longtime friend and Cabs collaborator Eric Random. 'We've built 16 tracks up from scratch to play live,' says Mallinder. 'With material spanning from the first EP' – 1978's Extended Play – 'through to Groovy …' Mallinder says this process has been 'a bit traumatic – a very intense period of being immersed in my past and the memories that it brought, particularly of Richard. This isn't something you can do without emotion.' Mallinder and Kirk were not really speaking in the years leading up to his death, with Kirk operating under the Cabaret Voltaire name himself. 'Richard was withdrawn and didn't speak to many people,' says Mallinder. 'And I was one of those people. He wanted to be in his own world. It was difficult because I missed him and there was a lot of history, but I accepted it.' There will be no new music being made as Cabaret Voltaire because, they stress, tsuch a thing cannot exist without Kirk. Instead, it's a brief victory lap for the pair, a tribute to their late friend, as they sign off on a pioneering legacy with maybe one last chance for a riot. 'Richard would probably hate us doing this but it's done with massive respect,' Mallinder says. 'I'm sad he's not here but there's such love for the Cabs that I want to give people the opportunity to acknowledge what we did. You can't deny the music we made is important – and this is a way to celebrate that.' Cabaret Voltaire play a Forge Warehouse, Sheffield, 25 October, then tour the UK from 17 to 21 November. Tickets on sale 10am 6 June