Cheryl Cole: X Factor, marriage and going solo
Meet the Girls Aloud star - scrutinised for her Wag lifestyle, naked ambition and troubled family past - as she releases CD
Cheryl Cole and I step out of the glittering, gleaming, lily-smelling lobby of the London hotel, Los Angeles, into a bank of crazy flashlights. The paparazzi know she is in there. She puts on an expression I have come to know. Her mouth smiles, her eyes widen. Inside she hates it. But that doesn’t mean to say she’s not grateful.
We step into the people-carrier with blacked-out windows that will take her to the studio where she is working with Will.i.am, the R&B artist, Black Eyed Pea and producer. We enter via a back gate, we slip down a steep gulley, hidden from an army of more photographers. They start to rework a track they wrote together the day before for Cole’s solo album, Three Words. Her voice sounds strong, full of heartache, euphoria, determination, sadness, grit. This album is the end of an astonishing journey that has moved her from band member of Girls Aloud to Wag to compulsive viewing on the TV talent show The X Factor to national treasure and solo artist. She’s left a lot behind.
Today her hair is chestnut brown. This is important: when it changes to redcurrant, it makes front pages. She is wearing flared maroon velvety jeans, a frilled tight camisole, and a pink cardigan. Later on, I would see pictures of her in this ensemble taken on that day in many tabloid magazines; in one of them, my arm. Cole is open, direct, kind. She doesn’t hide what she’s feeling, and that’s one of the reasons she is beloved and in the headlines. Girls have crushes on her, boys vote her the world’s sexiest woman. Everyone’s mother wishes she was their daughter.
Cole, 26, grew up on a council estate in Heaton, Newcastle. She loves to go back there and breathe in the smell of that place. Heaton is not the poorest, craziest, most drug-addled area of Newcastle, but there is nothing there that smells of luxury. Her older brother, Andrew, 29, has appeared in court more than 50 times, mostly on charges of theft and vandalism. He is a glue-sniffer and an alcoholic. Her sister, Gillian, who is four years older, has also been cautioned, for brawling. She also has a younger brother, Garry, 22, and an older brother, Joe, 33. Cole seems separate as well as close to them. She was always ambitious, loved to sing, loved to dance, appeared in modelling competitions as soon as she could crawl — she won a “Bonnie Baby” competition held by Boots — and was a child star of several TV adverts, including two for British Gas. By the age of nine she had been sponsored by the Daily Star, running a charitable campaign, to go to summer school at the Royal Ballet.
When Cole won her place in Girls Aloud on ITV’s Popstars: the Rivals in 2002 aged 19 she knew it might be her one chance to make her life very different from those of the people she had grown up with. She lost one of her friends, John Courtney, to heroin; devil’s dust she calls it. He was a young footballer, trying out for Newcastle United. His life could have been brilliant and glamorous. It could have been the dream, but it wasn’t.
Cole knows that if things had played just a tiny bit differently, her dream could have been a bitter cocktail of disappointment and frustration. Instead, she rose above it. She turned her pain into compassion, but when she cries, as she does often on The X Factor, she appears to feel people’s pain, and we can feel hers: that’s the connection. That’s why an artist painted the Angel of the North with her face on it. She looked almost Diana-like. And at the same time, her style has mutated so much she is now revered as a fashionista. Her Vogue cover, in February this year, was a bestselling issue. Quite a trick for someone who also graces the covers of tabloids and celebrity magazines.
In the studio Cole shows me pictures on her phone of her chihuahuas — and her big toe. Revolting. The nail broke off while she was climbing Mount Kilimanjaro for Comic Relief in March. She says that climbing that mountain was horrible. Horrible scary, or horrible good? Her: “No, just horrible. Except when there was a lack of oxygen, you started to giggle about nothing. I did it because Kimberley [Walsh, her husky-voiced Girls Aloud bandmate] wanted to do it.” Will.i.am plays her song Heaven. It’s rich and clubby, lusciously funky and unmistakably has her warmth.
Back in the hotel we have lunch — salads and coconut ice cream. I had read that there was going to be an American X Factor and she was going to host it. “There’s been no talk of that.”
So the story about her voice on American TV coming with subtitles is also made up? “Yes. There was also a story about Simon giving me elocution lessons. Can you imagine Newcastle if I started coming out talking like the Queen?”
Newcastle would disown her, and that would be terrible. On the whole, she doesn’t Google herself. “I couldn’t think of anything worse. It would be enough to drive you insane because it’s not always nice, is it? Stuff is just made up. It’s not nice to be criticised by another human being, it’s not nice to read it. I used to read it, and I thought if I was reading this about someone else I wouldn’t like that person, so it was very frustrating.” Interesting: the rest of the nation has made the leap in its perception of her — from rowdy Geordie girl to national treasure — but Cole herself hasn’t. It wouldn’t be Cheryl Cole if she was smug. She believes in herself and doubts herself in equal parts. She doesn’t read the good things in case they’ll go away, but she has read plenty of the bad things. “It was all pretty much negative and soul-destroying. It was as if I was reading it about a stranger, so I just stopped.”
The girl I read about years ago is not the sensitive, empathic woman in front of me. Not even a close relation. She has found the tabloid vitriol difficult to endure. Not just because it was insulting and judgmental, but because it made her question her perception of reality and therefore her own sanity. She might have left school at 16, but she’s a girl who thinks a lot.
Many of us can remember when Cheryl Cole, then Tweedy, was defined by a snidey Lily Allen song in 2006: “I wish my life was a little less seedy/Why am I always so greedy?/Wish I looked just like Cheryl Tweedy.” And many more recall the 2003 incident in the ladies’ powder room of a nightclub where Cole got into a fight with an attendant, a black law student, and allegedly made racist remarks. She was tried, found guilty of actual bodily harm, and sentenced to 120 hours of community service and a £500 fine — but the jury ruled that the assault had not been racially motivated. She is the least likely racist, yet she felt judged. Her brother and his various misdemeanours suddenly became tabloid fodder. She feared she was going to be thrown out of the band, but the other girls stood by her; they became this incredibly tight-knit unit, going on to become Britain’s bestselling girl band. In those days, though, she could do no right.
When she married the England and Chelsea player Ashley Cole in July 2006, in white satin and a horsedrawn carriage, they were called the bad-taste Beckhams. Her Wag fashion style was criticised. She didn’t become the beloved creature she is today until there was a possibility that she wasn’t loved by Ashley.
In January 2008 a tabloid ran a story about a hairdresser called Aimee Walton alleging she had had sex with Ashley Cole. It discussed sex, vomit and his drunkenness. Then another girl surfaced, the Scottish model Brooke Healy. Cheryl’s ring came off. Once it was established that Cheryl was really a victim, people stopped victimising her. It took something bad to happen before she was seen as a human being. “Isn’t that terrible?” she says, incredulous, still smarting from all of it.
Cheryl-baiting was beginning to turn into sympathy when Sharon Osbourne quit The X Factor in June 2008 and Cole was commanded into her shadow — bringing to the small screen her own past as a reality-show contestant and a smile that tried to hide a heavy heart. She was mesmerising: empathic but feisty, unafraid to stand up for herself, unafraid to shrink Simon Cowell’s ego. Every time she put him in his place on screen we wanted her to be doing that to Ashley. Suddenly the world that was against her was behind her. After a few months she took Ashley back, and the balance of power in the relationship seemed to change. Her mother, Joan, now lives much of her time at the Coles’ home in Surrey. Her daughter is still in need of that emotional support.
She refers to the time she was not popular as “psychological bullying. To be constantly put down because you are in the public eye is a form of bullying. Regardless that I am in the limelight, I still have feelings. So I cut everything out, I don’t read any of it. It’s like a protection thing, ignorance is bliss”. A theme we will return to.
“Sharon’s shadow was really hard to fill, and at the time my only impression of judging was of being judged, so being given that name was scary. I felt uncomfortable. Then I started to realise that I could actually benefit these people because I know how they feel. I can help them.”
Last year Alexandra Burke, who she mentored — Cole was in charge of the “Girls” category for singers aged 14-24 — went on to win. “This year I think I’ll be less [emotionally] involved. This year I’ve got the boys and there was something about them being girls, young girls — I felt responsibility for them.”
It doesn’t come easily to her to have to disappoint people as a judge. Nor is it easy for her to switch roles and be the pop star again. Last year when Girls Aloud played their single The Promise on the show, she had to step out from behind the judges’ desk and go on stage with the band. She hated it: “It was the most terrifying moment of my career. For a start we couldn’t walk in those dresses, and we were dancing!”
Is it weird to be a fellow judge with Louis Walsh, who was at one time the mentor and manager of Girls Aloud? “Louis is not really the same person. I understand now how he felt back then — he’d never done much on camera before and he was thrown in at the deep end. We had a bit of a ding-dong when he was supposed to manage us. I would say that I only got to know Louis working on this show. He didn’t really know how to manage a girl band — we had to fend for ourselves. But it was good for us. It was tough, but I now look on it as a good thing.”
I´m so happy that she´s on the cover. When I saw the pics of her with red hair I thought it was mistake to dye it but as I´m watching the video I really like it on her.
