This is the modest semi in Blackpool where Linda Nolan lived out her final months before her death, MailOnline can reveal.
The hugely popular entertainer, 65, had been staying here until last weekend when she became ill with double pneumonia and was transferred by ambulance to a local hospital where she then died.
Linda had lived independently several doors down in the same residential street in the northern seaside town for some years while battling breast cancer.
But as her health deteriorated, she moved into sister Anne’s house to be closer to her and to be assisted – only leaving to be given specialist care in Blackpool Victoria Hospital in the final few days before her death.
A statement posted on the Nolan Sisters’ social media account yesterday announced Linda’s death, adding that Linda, 65, ‘faced incurable cancer with courage, grace & determination, inspiring millions.’
Today we can reveal that she had been living in this £170,000 house close to the famous Bloomfield Road ground of Blackpool FC.
A neighbour told MailOnline today: ‘You won’t find a soul to say a bad word about Linda. She was an absolute angel. She may not have had a Hollywood fortune, but she was a huge star to us. Everyone around her just loved her.’
Other neighbours remembered a ‘sweet lady’ who made the town proud.
Linda Nolan moved in with her sister Coleen in the weeks before she died this week. She stayed in Coleen’s £170,000 terraced home in Blackpool. Linda owned a place a few doors along
Linda pictured in her heyday in the 1980s overcame her fair share of hardship, despite rising to fame as part of one of the 1970’s biggest girl groups
Despite being part of the hugely-successful girl group The Nolans with her sisters, financial security eluded Linda who said that she was ripped off at the height of her fame
Linda who reinvented herself and became known by the nickname ‘Naughty Nolan’ after she left the group, blamed greedy record bosses and her overbearing father for ripping her off by under-paying her and her sisters when they signed their biggest music deals
Linda and her husband Brian Hudson (pictured) suffered financial difficulties for their whole married life. They were declared bankrupt in 1995 – the same year Brian was found guilty of stealing £20 from the wallet of Frank Carson while the comic performed in stage in Blackpool
Lindar found global success as a member of The Nolans, spearheaded by parents Maureen and Tommy, who pushed their daughters to begin performing from a young age
Linda died after being admitted to hospital with double pneumonia, and prior to her death, she’d been living at a £170,000 property owned by her sister Coleen
Another said: ‘Yes, I lived next to Linda for years. I just remember a very sweet lady with a smile for everybody.
‘Then she moved a few doors down to live with her sister towards the end. It was all so sad in the end.’
Another neighbour said: ‘To me Linda represented a more innocent time when entertainment was more family friendly. Everyone loved the Nolans and sang their songs. Pop stars are just not the same now.
‘The council bathed Blackpool Tower in pink light last night which was a lovely tribute to Linda.’
Despite her salt-of-the-earth reputation in Blackpool, Linda in her younger days had portrayed herself as ‘the naughty Nolan”, supposedly the wildest member of the wholesome family group.
They had once called themselves “Blackpool’s own von Trapps” – in reference to the singing family in The Sound of Music.
The Nolans were originally from Dublin but moved to Britain in 1972 before finding fame – and even once recorded a single called Blackpool about the football club in their adoptive home.
On Christmas Day 1973 they appeared at the Cliffs Hotel, Blackpool – and were talent spotted by an agent who turned five of the girls, Anne, Denise, Maureen, Linda and Bernie, to come to London and start performing as The Nolan Sisters.
It was the catalyst for what should have been a glittering pop career that earned the sisters a fortune.
But Linda’s life was blighted by financial hardship that led to bankruptcy in 1995 – the same year that her husband Brian Hudson was so hard up he stole £20 for the wallet of Frank Carson while the comedian was on stage performing.
The source of her financial struggle, Linda claimed she felt ripped off by record bosses who paid her a paltry salary at the height of her singing fame.
When the Nolan sisters signed their first record deal, they were paid £1,000 week between them and Linda later said she that her father had ‘taken advantage of’ her in the deal.
Her sister Coleen agreed once saying: ‘We got paid a wage every week of £165 each. And I was 15, so that was quite a lot of money. We had all these people around us saying it was fine but we were ripped off. We sold 30 million records and didn’t end up with anything.
‘Eventually a lot of people said ”you need to go and find that money”, but of course you need money to go and find it. But I’m not bitter – it happened to loads of people back in the day.’
Linda was given a one-off payment when she left The Nolans acrimoniously in 1983 and didn’t speak to her sisters again for a year. But she spent the money of a five-figure tax bill.
She said: ‘A horrible situation then became even worse when dad handed me a £13,000 pay cheque as redundancy money, supposedly my share of everything we had earned. At first my sisters wouldn’t even agree that I should get a share of the royalties for the hits we’d had.
Linda in her younger days portrayed herself as ‘the naughty Nolan”, the wildest member of the wholesome family group due to her posing in risque publicity shots
When Linda left The Nolans in 1983 the split was acrimonious and she didn’t then speak to her sisters for a year afterwards. She received a payout – which went on paying a £13,000 tax bill
Linda and Brian are pictured here on their wedding day in 1981. Brian, a former footballer who played for Colchester United, was The Nolans tour manager and they were married for 26 years before he died aged 60 in 2007 from liver failure
Linda lived in Blackpool in her later years in a house just a few doors along from her sister Coleen (pictured together). Neighbours this week paid tribute to the down-to-earth star
The Nolan sisters’ parents Tommy and Maureen (pictured) pushed them to success – but their father was both violent and abusive. Linda said her father was a violent drunk with a short fuse
Linda and her siblings said that their father Tommy was frequently violent towards them. Linda said, as a result of his physical abuse, she could never remember her childhood as care-free
‘To add insult to injury, I’d just had a tax bill for almost exactly £13,000, so I didn’t have a penny to show for all that work. I realise now that maybe the band didn’t have enough money to pay me because I left just as the hit records stopped.’
Linda and her siblings have also revealed that their father Tommy was frequently violent towards them.
Linda’s sister Anne, 74, opened up to MailOnline in 2008 about the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her late father Tommy.
She bravely wrote: ‘At 11-years-old I trusted him. Maybe this was something dads did with their daughters. My overwhelming reaction was one of puzzlement. I remember thinking to myself: ‘Why is Dad doing this?’
Coleen, along with her sisters and mother, was badly beaten on a regular basis from an early age by singer Tommy.
‘If he’d been sinking the pints he had the shortest fuse in the world and could become aggressive or violent in the blink of an eye,’ she said in 2009.
In an extract from her autobiography, serialised by the Mirror, she described how she is haunted by a vivid memory of seeing her older sister Anne beaten by their drunken father.
‘He was brutal, hitting her repeatedly in the face, spitting: ‘You will cry.’ But she just sat there saying: ‘I won’t,’ while he continued to hit her in the mouth.’
In 2008, she wrote of the effect the abuse had on her life, saying: ‘My father may have invaded my body, but he also invaded my mind. I’m now in my late 50s, and yet, to this day, no recollection of my childhood can ever be carefree.
‘It has a contaminating effect that seeps into every corner of your mind, every facet of your life. It doesn’t go away, and the slate can never be wiped clean.’
Sister Coleen has said she will never forget the violence she received, and witnessed, but added: ‘At times Dad had been a monster.
‘He was a bully and a drunk. I knew he’d made mum’s life hell and sexually abused Anne. His behaviour repulsed me… But I also loved him.’
Linda, meanwhile, said of her sister’s torment: ‘Part of me cried, I’m ashamed to say, because he didn’t do it to me and I didn’t think he loved me enough.’
Denise was the first to leave the group, in 1978, but she was quickly re- placed by Coleen and the Nolans carried on almost without any disruption.
Anne also briefly left before quickly rejoining – but it was in the run up to Christmas 1979 when they were at the height of their fame that the seed was sewn which would see Linda leave the group.
The Nolan sisters were recording a Christmas song for the then popular BBC show Nationwide – a kind of precursor to The One Show – when Linda first Brian Hudson.
Money was so tight for Linda that in 2018 she confessed at one stage her sister Coleen and Coleen’s then-husband, TV star Shane Richie were forced to lend her £2,000 to get by
After she left The Nolan’s, under Brian’s guidance, Linda rebranded herself as the naughty Nolan sister which went against the group’s wholesome, family image
He was a former footballer who had played for Colchester United as well as a one-time would-be popstar himself – as singer and drummer in a band called Harmony Grass, which did not take off.
But he met Linda in his new role as manger – he had become her sister Denise’s agent after she’d left the group.
Linda quickly fell for her solo sister’s agent.
They married in August 1981 and with her lobbying he was soon tour manager for the band.
But the other Nolans were less keen on Hudson than Linda, and when they started lobbying against him she took this as her cue to leave the group herself.
Her final appearance as a Nolan sister came in 1983 before she left to go solo, not speaking to her sisters for another year.
In the meantime, under Hudson’s influence, she tried to change her image from a squeaky clean Nolan to a raunchier one.
It was at this point that she acquired the ‘Naughty Nolan’ tag.
While Linda did find a degree of success as a solo artist after she left The Nolans, it was never spectacular: she later described her income during this period as ‘feast or famine.’
In 2018, she confessed that at one stage her sister Coleen and her then-husband Shane Richie were forced to lend her £2,000 to get by.
Linda and her husband Hudson were declared bankrupt in 1995, with the star admitting they pleaded for ‘more time’ to pay off their debts, which totalled in £7,500.
It later emerged that she was paid £17,000 for an interview about the scale of her financial woes which ironically was enough to allow her bankruptcy to be annulled.
While Linda did get back on financial track thanks to a three-year stint in the West End show Blood Brothers in the early 2000s, her career was derailed again by her breast cancer diagnosis in 2006.
By this point her finances were so precarious that she was forced to return to work in the middle of her chemotherapy, as she had ‘no savings’ to support her.
Following her husband Brian’s death in 2007, she was even forced to start claiming benefits as she admitted she was ‘so depressed’ in her grief that she became unable to work at all.
But she came to rely on the steady drip of money that this gave her and didn’t declare it when she did begin to pick up pieces of work again.
This backfired dramatically: in 2014 she was investigated by Blackpool Borough Council and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) for claiming benefits to the tune of £12,000 while ‘working.’
She later said: ‘I thought I’d stuck to the rules religiously, but some of the things they thought of as ”work” just hadn’t occurred to me. I thought working meant doing a stage show, not quick television interviews.’
After coming up with a monthly repayment plan, Linda was told she still needed to go to court, but she eventually came to an agreement with the Department of Work and Pensions for the charges to be dropped.
She added: ‘Even though I was repaying the money, they’d decided I should be punished anyway. I was devastated and scared to death, fearing imprisonment.’
The same year, Linda entered the Celebrity Big Brother house, admitting at the time she ‘needed the money.’
Linda’s agent confirmed the singer’s death in a statement on Wednesday, which said she had passed away at 10.20am after being admitted to hospital with double pneumonia.
The star was first diagnosed with stage-three breast cancer in 2005 before getting the all-clear in 2006 – but in 2017 she was diagnosed with a form of incurable secondary cancer in her hip, which spread to her liver in 2020.
Three years later she shared the news that the cancer had spread to her brain, with two tumours discovered on the left side of her brain which left her struggling with her speech and balance.
And she issued an update last August that the tumours – which were thought to be stable – had grown.
In what would be her final column for the Mirror, she wrote: ‘The doctors say it’s been a bad case of flu. I’d walk a few steps and struggle to catch my breath.
The Nolan sisters found fame in the 1980s with a string of hits, making them household names
‘My legs were even more wobbly than usual and, although I try not to, I thought of how Bernie was at the end. You think, ‘Oh my God, is this it?’
‘It was only on Monday I felt well enough to venture out. It feels like a whole new world out there. There’s nothing like the sensation of starting to feel better after an illness.
‘You’ve forgotten what it feels like to feel normal (well, I say normal?).’
Linda’s sisters have a history of cancer, with herself, Coleen and Anne all receiving diagnoses as well as Bernie passing away from the disease.
While Linda had resumed her stage work following her first diagnosis, when the cancer returned in 2017 she stopped.
During her battle with the terminal disease, the star penned a column for The Daily Mirror, and in 2018 she released her autobiography From My Heart.
In July 2020, Linda and sisters Coleen, Maureen and Anne also joined forces to TV series The Nolans Go Cruising, which saw them take a journey through the Mediterranean.