Hours after Tulisa Contostavlos was announced as the youngest-ever judge on The X Factor, she deleted her Twitter account from her phone. ‘I was getting tons of abuse. I felt like at least 50 per cent of the nation hated me.’
Part of it, she thinks, is because Twitter’s X Factor zealots just didn’t know who she was. N-Dubz, the urban pop trio she sang with until they took a break earlier this year, have had three platinum albums. But their fanbase is rooted in underground youth music, not Saturday night primetime TV.
‘If you’re not an N-Dubz fan, you’re not going to be a Tulisa fan, so I expected abuse. But I didn’t know it was going to be at that level. It was intense: “How dare you be replacing Cheryl or Dannii?” “You’re a f****** wh*re.” The main stigma was “chav”. “She’s not classy, she’s not a lady, she’s a gobby chav.”’
She pauses and laughs. Sitting in her dressing room in a pink tracksuit, sipping a cuppa (milk, three sugars), going nineteen to the dozen, ‘gobby chav’ sounds a little ironic. It’s also wrong. Tulisa, 23, is funny, thoughtful, immensely good company and strikingly beautiful – she has eyes like gemstones once the stage make-up is stripped away. She is also honest to a fault. The girl says it like she sees it – one reason, of course, why she was chosen as an X Factor judge.
‘In my interviews I told the producers I’d be honest and opinionated. I said I’m young, I’m current and The X Factor has never had that before. And it needs it. Urban pop is such a big part of the music industry right now and I don’t think there’s anyone that can specialise in that section the way I do.’