Stacey: My Story So Far

by Stacey Solomon

  After Christmas, I did a really cool shoot for Heat. It had an Alice in Wonderland theme and I was photographed in a tiny, tiny house. Zach came along, but he wasn’t supposed to be in the photos. Of course, he couldn’t resist joining me in the little house, though. ‘It’s my house,’ he kept saying, and I could understand why! In the end they included him in the photos and their cover shot featured me and Zach in the mini house.

  Later, I did another shoot, for Hello! It was the Prince’s issue – the one with the famous black and white photo of Prince William on the front. I was really privileged to be in that issue, which was the first Hello! to have a black and white cover.

  What’s funny is that the shoot showed me wearing the most amazing clothes and cool jewellery and pretending I was running around in this beautiful posh rented London pad I didn’t own and would never have been able to afford. I know! Still, it was really fun and Zach was in his element. I tried to keep him off the set, but he insisted: ‘No, I want a picture!’

  I suppose it’s not surprising that people started saying, ‘You must be rich now!’ Even random strangers in shops would make sly references to my new-found wealth. People honestly think that the minute you’re on telly, you must be a millionaire. How wrong they are! It’s not that you don’t get paid well, it’s just that, firstly, as I said before, you don’t see the money for at least three months and, secondly, the minute you get paid, 20 per cent goes to your manager and 20 per cent to your booking agent. Then there’s tax, and expenses like tour manager fees, rider and petrol fees. You’re left with quite a small percentage at the end of it. If people saw only your gross earnings, they’d say, ‘Yeah, she’s rich!’ But if they could see your net earnings, they’d say, ‘OK, she earns a decent living.’ It’s really weird. I only see a fraction of my gross earnings.

  I was determined to be cautious about money from the start. A couple of contestants left The X Factor and instantly rented smart apartments in London. How much is that going to cost a month? Thousands of pounds. And when it runs out, then what? Then there’s nothing left. It’s not even like they were putting down a deposit and paying off a mortgage. They were just giving that money away. I hate that idea; I can’t think of anything worse. I’d rather put my money somewhere, and if in five years’ time I can’t pay my mortgage, at least I’ll have a lump sum in my house.

  I haven’t had any financial advice; it’s just common sense. For the first time in my entire life I had a bit of money, and the last thing I was going to do was spend it. I was determined to save until I could put a deposit down on a property. Then, I thought, I won’t have to worry if nothing comes of my career, because I’ll have a house. I’d be settled and secure on the property ladder at twenty-one years old. How fantastic!

  That’s what I just didn’t get about the contestants who blew their money. You are so young, I thought. Go and invest in something that you will never have another chance to buy in a million years. But some people want to live for the moment, which is cool. Everyone’s different. Some people are happy to live for now and have a great time and then go back to normal. ‘I did that,’ they can say afterwards. ‘I had that lifestyle and I loved it.’

  What separates them from me is Zach. When you have a kid, you can’t be selfish. What about when he grows up? It’s fine to have had the time of your life, but what about him? I decided it would be crazy to get a nice London pad, throw all my money away on enjoying myself and then have to start again for him. This way, I thought, we would both enjoy it.

  ‘So where do you want to live?’ Aaron asked me when I brought up my dream of owning my own house for the hundredth time.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  People kept saying, ‘You’re going to move out of Dagenham, aren’t you?’ And I’d think, Hey, I quite like Dagenham. In fact, I love where I’ve grown up. I walk out the door and I say hello to everyone, because they’re like my family. If I were ever in trouble, there are a thousand people on these streets that would be there for me. Knowing that is such a nice feeling. You don’t get that realness in a lot of neighbourhoods.

  Take where my dad lives in Hornchurch, for instance. It’s a little bit posh and they all size up each other’s cars. Although my dad says hello to his neighbours every day, it’s not the same hello that I have with my neighbours. They would never say, ‘Come over and have a drink,’ like the people across the road here would say. It’s not the same. I don’t care what anyone says, I know they genuinely want me in for a drink. They’ve always just been there as friends and I love it.

  I’d been thinking about Grays, where Aaron lived, because just a couple of miles away there’s countryside and horses, which appeals to me. Still, before I could feel happy about moving there, I wanted to get to know some of the people in the area better and make friends with them. So I started going up there and hanging out in the pub where all Aaron’s friends go and where he took me out. I was a bit worried about some of the girls, because they’re mates with Aaron’s last girlfriend, who isn’t a fan of mine. But as it turned out, we clicked instantly. We quickly became close and now we’re good friends.

  As I’ve said, Aaron’s mates remind me of my old Abbs Cross schoolfriends. Me and the girls had similar memories of what we’d got up to at school and the pop groups we’d liked and the TV shows we’d watched. It felt like we’d known each other for ever because we had so much in common.

  No one was impressed that I’d been on The X Factor. It would have been different if they’d been primary school age, but a room full of twenty-one-year-olds just aren’t that interested in The X Factor. It wasn’t a big deal to them, so no one acted any differently towards me; they were all completely normal.

  I know that people from zero to a hundred love the show, but it’s different when you’re in your twenties. You don’t just walk up to someone and come over all giddy about it, especially when you’re from an area like Grays. You wouldn’t want to act that interested, because it would look silly. Even where I live, people just say, ‘Well done,’ and that’s it. They don’t rush up screeching, ‘Oh my God!’

  Someone who’s been on a talent show is viewed differently to someone who’s been successful in their own right. In many people’s eyes, even if you’ve won The X Factor, you’ve just been on a telly programme. But if S Club 7 walked in they’d be impressed, because although they may think they’re cheesy, they’d respect the fact that they’d had so many number ones. I don’t mean to be rude, but being on a talent show is less credible. It’s not cool and it didn’t make me special.

  Also, money isn’t necessarily a driving force for some of my friends, who have different dreams in life. They aspire to take care of their families and have fun. Not everyone wants to be a singer, a lawyer or a doctor. They don’t look at me and think, She’s successful. They just think, Good for you, and they are very happy for me.

  A lot of my friends are really family-oriented and have the best time being stay-at-home mums and devoting their lives to their children, which in my opinion is a full-time career in itself. They just want to get by and enjoy themselves.

  When I’m asked to a premiere, I sometimes take a friend along. For instance, I took a friend and her daughter to the premiere of Tangled. She loved it, but I know some of my friends would be like, ‘No thanks.’ Aaron isn’t interested in that kind of thing. It doesn’t appeal to everyone. In fact, the lifestyle I’ve chosen doesn’t appeal to as many people as you might think, because it’s sometimes not real, or it doesn’t seem real to an outsider looking in. There’s a lot of networking involved and industry chit-chat that doesn’t interest people outside of the business – and why should it?

  It probably seems a bit false to people who don’t want to be in the entertainment industry. I see it with Aaron. When I say, ‘Do you want to come to these TV awards?’ he’ll say, ‘Not really.’ You could ask a thousand teenagers and they’d all want to go, but when you get to a certain age and that’s not your chosen lifestyle, y
ou just want to be normal.

  Going to a premiere is different. It’s so exciting to be around people I never thought I’d get to meet. There’s often fancy food, cakes and drinks, and everything is sparkly and beautiful. You get to walk down the red carpet at the beginning and go home in a nice car at the end. It’s often more like a dream than a social event – then the minute I get home, it’s back to reality!

  I love it, but I understand why Aaron doesn’t want to come along. It’s not his dream night out, because he’s coming to work with me. It’s like me following him when he goes off to render and paint a house. At the end of the day, it is part of my job.

  A friend of mine saw me on This Morning and I was with Keith Lemon. She loves Keith Lemon – she thinks he’s hilarious – so she said, ‘I saw you with Keith Lemon. That was so funny.’

  ‘He’s lovely. We had a laugh,’ I said, and that was it. I couldn’t have gone on to say any more about it, or recount everything he said and how he said it. That would have made me cringe.

  When I meet celebrities, they’re at work, like I am, and they tend to be exactly how they are on the telly. They always will be that way unless I become really good friends with them and they start relaxing in front of me. So it’s not like I can ever say, ‘Oh, she’s a right cow,’ or, ‘He’s really horrible,’ because I never see that side of people. I’ve never met anyone who isn’t exactly how they are on the telly. They’re just how you’d expect them to be, because that’s their job. Their job is to keep up an appearance.

  The best thing about Aaron’s group of friends is that a lot of the girls have kids. Jade is the same age as me and she has a little girl called Lilly who is the same age as Zach. Lilly is now Zach’s best friend; she’s a day younger than he is and they’re really close, like a boy and girl version of each other. It’s so nice when your kid has friends to play with. You can go to the park and watch them in the playground while you sit on the grass with your mates and talk. It’s perfect!

  Some of my old schoolfriends have got kids now, too. Jade from Abbs Cross has a little girl and she’s lovely. I think it’s so nice when people leave school, fall in love with someone they went to school with and that’s it. It sounds wrong and everyone goes on about young mums, but to me it seems just like the old days when people didn’t have anything except each other. You fell in love and settled down and had kids, simple as that.

  Most of my friends who have kids are with the fathers of their children and some have been with them since they were thirteen years old. It’s really sweet and it’s all they want. Their lives focus around their kids, their partner and their home.

  They don’t want to do what I’m doing. They just don’t aspire to have a career. And although some girls want a job or a career first, or in between kids, I believe that ultimately 90 per cent of us want to have kids and a family and that’s all we’ve ever wanted.

  Chapter 12

  Peeping at the audience from behind the stage, fluttering with nerves, I stared out at the massive sea of people. So this is what 10,000 people looks like, I thought. Oh my God, it’s like a hundred times the size of the audience at The X Factor live shows! The noise was deafening. People were screaming their heads off and the atmosphere was reaching fever pitch.

  My heart started thumping. ‘Will I be any good?’ I asked myself. I was terrified and totally out of my comfort zone.

  It was time to take my position underneath the stage. We all started the show there, rising up in lifts and appearing on stage in the order we were voted out of the competition. I went to my place and waited for my cue. This is it, I thought. This is it! The sound of 10,000 people shouting and stamping their feet filled the building. Down in the depths of the auditorium, the vibrations went right through me.

  Suddenly the lights went off above me. ‘And now, what you’ve all been waiting for: your X Factor finalists!’ boomed Jeff Brazier, the show’s host.

  Oh no, I thought, my skin prickling with anticipation. Here it comes.

  There were five acts going up before me: Lucie, Lloyd, Jamie, John and Edward and Danyl. Soon it would be my turn and I couldn’t mess it up. There was so much to remember. I was completely buzzing, but I was also worried about my dance routine to the brand-new song I was performing, ‘Queen Of The Night’ by Whitney Houston. Everything about that routine was making me nervous. One: I’d had to learn the song from scratch, so it didn’t come as easily as my other songs; two: it had a faster rhythm than my other songs and I had to move and shake it and dance sexily around a pole with four dancers. I so didn’t want to be doing that.

  That morning, we’d done a dress rehearsal and sound check at ten o’clock. There was so much to remember in the ‘Queen Of The Night’ routine that I’d started to panic. Why have they done this to me? I thought. I’m never going to remember the choreography, let alone pull off the whole performance.

  At the end of the rehearsal, everything was swirling around my head: lyrics, high notes, dance moves, the lot. Luckily, I wasn’t the only one in a fluster. Everyone was thinking, How did we get here? When did it happen? When did this get so intense and scary?

  The X Factor tour is always a massive sellout and this was the biggest, maddest X Factor tour ever. Our first show was on Monday, 15 February 2010, two months after I’d left the X Factor house. After two days’ rehearsing in a little studio in London, we’d come to Liverpool seven days earlier to prepare for our first show at the Echo Arena, which is one of the biggest venues in the UK. Everyone was excited, but we all felt a bit daunted by the fact that we were at the start of a fifty-three-date tour, with only two days off over the next month and a half. What if I get a cold or a sore throat? I thought anxiously. What if I can’t go on one night?

  Tonight was the night that counted, though, and I had to give it my best. The audience was full of people who had voted for us over the ten-week TV series, so we owed them a fantastic show, especially as they’d paid a lot of money to come and see us live. We were all determined to make it a night to remember.

  I thought back to the first concert I’d ever seen, the Spice Girls at Wembley Arena. Me and my sister were obsessed with the Spice Girls as kids. We begged and begged my dad to get us tickets to go, and in the end he gave in, despite the cost. I was ten years old and it was one of the most exciting experiences of my childhood – I also got to see them when they did their comeback tour ten years later, which was wicked. Three years on, and who would have thought that I’d be singing at the same venues the Spice Girls had performed at? It was unbelievable! I had to keep reminding myself that it was real.

  From below the stage I could hear the intro starting. It began with a blast of Carmina Burana, the scary opera music they use for the X Factor judging part. One by one, each of us rose up onto the stage. It was the best feeling; I was so excited. The audience went crazy, cheering and cheering us. The noise was incredible. It just got louder and louder as I went up in the lift, and I felt more and more excited and ecstatic. I arrived on stage feeling overwhelmed. The noise of the crowd was like a massive wave of sound crashing all over the stage. It was amazing. I loved it.

  Finally Joe rose up into the spotlight, the crowd screamed even louder, the music reached a crescendo and bang! It went dark again. After a short pause, the guitar intro to our first song, ‘I Gotta Feeling’, started up. It was a group song; the boys came out from behind the doors at the back of the stage and sang the first lines, then me and Lucie came out and sang, then John and Edward jumped out and did their bit. Everyone was running on adrenaline; you could just feel it. It was so brilliant. The whole audience started singing along, dancing and going mad. It was mind-blowing, just the biggest buzz ever.

  When we left the stage at the end of the song, I thought, I want to do that again a million times over. Once you’ve been out there the first time, you realize there’s nothing better. It’s electric.

  I sang ‘The Scientist’ as a taster quite near the beginning of the show, and then near the en
d, just before Olly and Joe, I sang another three songs: ‘What A Wonderful World’, ‘Queen Of The Night’ and ‘Who Wants To Live Forever’. In the few first shows, I was out of time or out of tune a couple of times. We all were, because we were learning how to perform in a massive arena. Everything about it is different, from the way the backing music sounds to the size of the stage. Not all stages are the same. If the stage is in the middle of an auditorium, there can be a delay on the music, and it takes a little bit of time to get used to.

  I wore different costumes for each of my songs and for the group songs, so I changed into six costumes over the course of the concert. They were all outfits from the show. I didn’t really want to wear any of my show clothes – I would have preferred to wear short floaty dresses as it’s a bit more me – but you have to maintain your image from the show. I was the one who sang the ballads and the slow songs, usually wearing a long ball gown, so they wanted to stick with that look for continuity. I loved it, but I also wanted to look young and be myself.

  During The X Factor competition, I got blonder and blonder and more and more tanned, then when the show finished, I went even further. I wanted to be really blonde and really tanned. My aim was to be perfect, flawless and blonde. Later on, though, I started to feel like a tangerine. I need to get rid of the tan, I decided. But if I was going to get rid of the tan, I needed to get rid of the white hair as well, so I went back to my natural colour. Now I can imagine going blonde again, but not that blonde. Honey blonde, maybe, but I wasn’t born to be peroxide.

  On tour, we had a make-up artist called Lou, who taught me a few essential tricks. For instance: don’t put black eyeliner right inside your eye, put it just underneath; don’t use lip liner, because it’ll make you look like a transvestite; and draw your eyebrows higher. She taught me which colours looked nice on me and advised me against anything too bright. As time went on, with her guidance I started to do my make-up a bit better. I’m not anywhere near as good as Lou, but I feel I can go out looking half decent now, rather than wearing caked-on foundation and big, thick lines of black eyeliner.