Cheryl: My Story

by Cole, Cheryl

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m here, aren’t I? I did it, and we raised millions.’

  ‘Mad,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘You are completely crazy.’

  That conversation is typical of the way Simon and I spoke to each other. I always refused to play ‘Simon says’ and dance to his tune, but he refused to let me dent his ego and always made sure he got the last word in.

  I was talking to Simon because the X Factor auditions were starting again soon and, just like last year, I was now wondering whether I’d done the right thing in agreeing to do the show. As planned, the girls and I had announced at the end of the tour that we were having a break from Girls Aloud, and I was now putting together my first solo album, 3 Words. The record label wasn’t at all sure about this, because statistically it doesn’t work when one member of a girl band tries to go solo, particularly one who was not even the lead singer. Will.i.am was having none of it, though.

  ‘I think you believe in me more than I believe in myself,’ I told him.

  ‘That’s because I am right. You watch. You wait and see. You are going to be a big solo star, and you need to start believing it, because it’s happening.’

  Ashley was really supportive and encouraging too. He knew I’d always loved R&B and soul and he told me, ‘This is your chance to do the music you love. It’ll be amazing.’

  I knew it was a great opportunity, but I couldn’t shake off worries about how I would manage without having the girls around me. Team spirit spurs me on, and I’ve always found it easier to be strong for other people than for myself.

  ‘Maybe I should have turned Simon down,’ I fretted. ‘Perhaps I should just be concentrating on my album.’

  Ashley and I were taking a holiday in the South of France, between the end of the tour and the start of The X Factor. This worked out well, as June was the only month Ashley ever had time off in the football calendar.

  ‘Will you stop worrying and chill out!’ Ashley said. ‘You’ve got to do The X Factor. You’re too good at it.’

  I’d learned that with footballers, the amount of money they are paid is directly linked to their level of skill on the pitch, like a reward for their talent. As Simon had given me a big pay rise to do this series, in Ashley’s eyes that meant I was absolutely amazing at my job and therefore could not turn it down. I wasn’t convinced. I knew that in Simon’s world, money is seen as the biggest motivator, rather than reward. If Simon wants something he’ll pay a high price. He expects to be able to ‘buy’ people because he can’t understand why anybody would not be as motivated by money as he is. I had a different view to both Ashley and Simon. If something doesn’t feel right, I turn it down, and now I really wasn’t sure how I felt about The X Factor.

  ‘Look, don’t invest so much,’ Ashley said. ‘I told you this on the last series. Don’t get so emotionally involved.’

  ‘I can’t help it,’ I said, but I knew Ashley had a point, because I was already worrying about the competition before I’d even got there or met any of the contestants.

  Thankfully, we had a few distractions on the holiday and I did manage to relax. One day we met Roman Abramovich, who told me he was planning to climb Kilimanjaro and asked me all about my experience. I could see he was a big fan of Ashley’s, which made me feel very proud of my husband. It felt just like old times, actually. Ashley and I were loved up, having a laugh and soaking up the sun.

  We also met up with Ashley’s England teammate Wayne Bridge and his fiancée Vanessa Perroncel, who were on the beach with their very cute little toddler. Seeing Ashley play in the sand with him made me feel even more broody than ever. I desperately wanted to have babies with Ashley.

  ‘Can’t we just start trying now?’

  ‘No, babe. Live your dream. Make your solo record. There’s time for all that later.’

  I was dying to be a mam but I also had commitments, and I reluctantly listened to Ashley because I knew that when I had kids I wanted to be able to take time out and bring them up myself.

  When I got back to work on The X Factor I believed it was going to be my last series, because then I was going to get pregnant and start my family. That’s what I wanted, more than anything else in the world, and thinking like that helped me deal with the madness of the next few months.

  After the first auditions in Glasgow, Simon decided to change the format and bring in a live audience, which is something he hadn’t done before at the audition stage of the show. This bothered me massively, because I imagined how I would have felt if I’d had to audition for Popstars in front of members of the public, and I knew the pressure would be immense.

  I was right. I felt sick with worry when the contestants started coming out in front of the huge, noisy audience. My legs turned to jelly for them, just as if I were up there myself. Also, I hated being on show to the audience all day myself, because the auditions are long and tiring at the best of times, and you just don’t want a camera in your face for that length of time.

  I got over it after a while, and when some of the stand-out acts came on I really started to enjoy myself. I remember laughing my head off at John & Edward and thinking, ‘You two are TV gold’. I really liked Olly Murs and Stacey Solomon, and my heart melted when Joe McElderry first spoke and I found out he was from South Shields, the same neck of the woods as me. He even looked like my brother Garry, and I was willing him to be good. I’ll never forget him singing the Luther Vandross song ‘Dance With My Father’. I had goosebumps, and I was suddenly right back in the zone, emotionally immersed in the contest all over again.

  ‘Why aye!’ I said when it was my turn to vote, and I couldn’t stop smiling. ‘You just did me really proud,’ I told Joe.

  I got the boys’ category that year, which I had mixed feelings about. I was really happy because Joe was in it, but I was nervous and felt out of my comfort zone because I’d never worked with boys before. When we went to Marrakech for the judges’ houses stage, the gifts the boys bought me in the local market said it all. I got a size 20 T-shirt and a dried snake in a box. I remember laughing about it with Holly Willoughby, but deep down I was feeling very anxious about how the hell I was going to mentor boys, because I wasn’t on their wavelength at all. Your relationship with your contestants is as important backstage as it is on the live shows, and I’d never worked that closely with boys in my life.

  I also had something else to deal with while I was in Morocco: Jason Mack had done a story about me.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ I asked Sundraj when he called to alert me. I was in the most beautiful surroundings, staying in a luxurious villa, but the second I heard Jason’s name I was transported right back to our grubby little flat in Heaton.

  I felt my stomach flip over, imagining all kinds.

  ‘He’s saying you pleaded with him to stop taking drugs, and that you were so worried about him, you couldn’t eat or sleep. He also says you lost so much weight people thought you must have been on heroin …’

  ‘Heroin? Sundraj, this is really important. What exactly does he say about heroin? I want to know precisely what he’s saying.’

  Sundraj was scanning the article again now and I made him read the quotes, word for word.

  ‘When I first met Cheryl I was doing a lot of cocaine. Some days I’d blow £200 on the stuff. But she’d sit with me for hours to talk me out of getting drugs …’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I went from having everything to living on a giro … Cheryl stuck by us when I didn’t have a penny … but I started taking heroin because I wasn’t getting any further forward.’

  ‘Yes!’ I shouted triumphantly. I felt an incredible, immediate sense of relief.

  ‘Cheryl, are you alright?’ Sundraj asked.

  He was understandably confused by my reaction, and I had to explain to him that this was the first time I had ever heard Jason admit to taking heroin.

  ‘You don’t know how much this means,’ I sobbed.

  Tears were rolling down my cheeks now. I
t felt like an old wound had finally healed after all those years. I had not even realised how much it still bothered me that Jason had never made this confession before. He’d always admitted to taking cocaine, but continually denied he was on heroin. I knew he was lying, because I had seen the silver foil, the cold turkeying and the junkie friends he disappeared with for days on end. But I never once caught Jason red-handed, actually taking heroin, and he had used that against me time and time again, telling me and my friends and family that I was crazy and paranoid.

  The truth was that I was a naïve, vulnerable teenager who thought she was in love and believed she could save her boyfriend from ruining his life with the devil’s dust. I counted back through the years to when we split up in 2002 and I realised I’d carried this resentment around for seven whole years. The relief I felt now was absolutely indescribable. The fact Jason must have made money out of selling his story and had effectively betrayed me all over again hardly even bothered me. Nothing he did now could hurt me as much as his lies and mind games had hurt me in the past, and having the truth out there at last overshadowed everything.

  ***

  There were all kinds of other dramas waiting for me when we got back to London for the live shows. I had Joe, Lloyd Daniels and Rikki Loney in my final three. Lloyd was only 16 and had some private stuff going on in his life that I was finding extremely difficult to cope with. Simon knew all about it, but he can completely separate himself from his emotions when the cameras are rolling. One week he criticised Lloyd’s rendition of ‘Bleeding Love’ saying, ‘It’s like a mouse trying to climb a mountain. I’m going to put the blame for this on the girl on my right, who’s not working with you properly.’

  This was so mean of Simon to blame me, because he had actually told me to pick that song for Lloyd, and he knew I was struggling behind the scenes emotionally. I started to cry on the show, and I remember Rikki Loney making a comment about me being in more of a state than the contestants, which was actually true. All the boys would be trying to calm me down before we went on air, instead of the other way around.

  Looking back, I was investing too much emotionally all over again, and I was also doing too much generally. I’d not long taken on my contract with L’Oréal, which meant scheduling in several days to make the ‘Because I’m worth it’ TV commercial.

  ‘Wow, Beyoncé has done this!’ I thought. It gave me the same buzz I’d had when Girls Aloud had Barbie dolls made of each of us, back in 2005. That was my all-time favourite product endorsement with the girls, because Barbies are just so iconic and were something I’d grown up with. I had the same feeling about this L’Oréal campaign. It was an honour to be chosen for it, and it was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

  I really enjoyed making the advert, but it happened at the same time as I was putting the finishing touches to my album, so I was working flat out. The record label wanted me to perform my first single off the album, ‘Fight For This Love’, on The X Factor too. I could totally see the logic. Artists were desperate to get on the show and I was in a position to walk straight out of my judge’s seat and perform. I’d worked hard on the album and it would be foolish not to take the opportunity, but of course it was another pressure to worry about.

  ‘You’re nuts,’ Simon said once it had all been agreed, and for once I couldn’t argue with him.

  It was also Simon’s fiftieth birthday party around this time.

  Unfortunately Ashley couldn’t make it, as he was busy with Chelsea, so I was going on my own. I had no clue what to expect. Sir Philip Green had organised the party at Wrotham Park, where Ashley and I had our wedding, but when I turned up I didn’t recognise the place at all. There was an enormous image of Simon projected onto the front of the building, and inside the Simon theme continued, everywhere. The waiters wore Simon masks, the toilets had Simon pictures on the walls, and even the wallpaper had Simon’s face on it, complete with devil’s horns.

  ‘You’re sitting next to me,’ Simon beamed, steering me to the top table. His mother was on his other side, and Sir Philip and his wife and daughter, Kate Moss and her boyfriend Jamie, plus Naomi Campbell were also on our table. I’d met some of them before and had walked in a fashion show for Naomi once, but I didn’t know them, and I just sat there quietly, taking it all in.

  We were served soup that had Simon written in pasta in the bottom of the bowl, and a woman on the stage did a reverse strip, starting out naked and ending up fully clothed after pulling shoes out of her Afro and underwear from God knows where. It was totally surreal, and so far from my normality I felt quite unsettled. ‘I’m in deeper than I ever knew existed,’ I thought, looking around the room. This was a level of wealth and celebrity I wasn’t even aware of.

  ‘This is crazy,’ I said to Simon.

  ‘I know, tell me about it,’ he laughed.

  I sat there looking at people like Kevin Spacey, David Hasselhoff and Ozzy Osbourne, thinking to myself that they could have been in a film, because I felt so disconnected from them. It was so weird to be surrounded by so many famous faces, but I wasn’t starstruck by them at all, it was just so weird. The decadence and the craziness was simply out of this world and so I sat there, at the head of this room, just watching it all unfold and thinking how strange it all felt.

  I’d bought Simon a diamond watch from Harrods as a thank-you gift at the end of the last series of The X Factor, but for his birthday I decided to make a bit of a different statement. He laughed his head off when he saw the present. It was a grey T-shirt, a teeth-whitening kit, some fake tan, a can of hairspray and a mirror with a picture of Simon’s head stuck to it. I also gave him a signed picture of me, which was a dig at the fact he’d given me a Simon Cowell calendar the previous Christmas.

  ‘The difference is,’ I teased. ‘You were serious, and I’m having a laugh.’

  ‘You know what, I can’t always figure you out, but that’s what I love about you, Cheryl,’ he grinned.

  A couple of weeks later Simon was back in classic, arrogant mode.

  ‘You know you’ve done this to yourself, don’t you?’

  He was on the phone the night before I was performing ‘Fight For This Love’ on The X Factor.

  ‘Why are you saying this to me now? What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean you’ve only got yourself to blame. Good luck.’

  I think Simon was nervous for me, and for himself and the reputation of the show, and that was his way of dealing with it. Everybody was nervous, in fact. Ashley had started saying to me, ‘Are you sure you want to go through with this, babe?’ and my mam, Nicola and Kimberley, Sundraj and Hillary were all phoning me, wishing me luck and crossing their fingers.

  It was a big risk; I knew that. It was my first ever performance without the girls, it was my first solo single, and it was in front of millions. My acts were watching, and if I couldn’t pull it off, how could I expect them to?

  When the advert break came on, which was my cue to run from my seat at the judge’s table and get into my costume, I felt sick to my stomach with nerves. It felt like the moment when I’d watched Ashley take that penalty at the World Cup and I imagined the whole country was holding their breath at the same time as me.

  I was getting into the costume now, feeling my heart thud in my chest as I pulled on my red and black military cap and tunic and split harem pants. Even the lady who normally counts down calmly for the contestants was nervous, because I could hear her throat tightening as she rasped: ‘Ten … nine … eight …’

  All my boys were wishing me well, and as I went on stage I had this sudden panic about which of them might be going home tonight. Oh my God, I didn’t want to lose any of them! I’d have to deal with that later, because now the spotlights were on me, and I was suddenly right in the zone, singing and dancing and feeling every word of the song. I really had to deliver.

  It felt like I’d been on the stage for seconds rather than minutes when I saw that Simon and Dannii were standing up and clapping. ‘This is
going to really pain me to have to say this,’ Simon said, smiling, ‘But that was incredible! Unfortunately, you’re going to be number one next week.’

  I was euphoric. I’d not only delivered, but I’d thoroughly enjoyed myself, and I just knew this was one of those events in my life where my dad was going to tell me afterwards: ‘Cheryl, I was so proud I could pop.’

  Ashley came to the studio, which he didn’t normally do as he couldn’t stand the chaos and drama of it all. ‘You are nuts!’ he said when it was all over. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I swear I’ve been shaking the whole night,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking putting myself through that, but I’m glad I did. I’m absolutely buzzing now.’ Nicola, Kimberley and Sarah were there too, which was amazing.

  Whitney Houston had been on after me but I’d been in such a state I’d not been able to enjoy watching her. She actually fell down a step and the strap on her bra snapped, but I didn’t take all that in until I got home and watched a recording of the show that Ashley had set up.

  Watching Whitney’s performance just made the whole evening seem even more insane, because she was such a legend and yet it was only just sinking in that we’d shared the same stage.

  ‘Fight For This Love’ became the fastest-selling single of the year and went to number one in 10 countries. It felt like my life just couldn’t get any better, but I had two more amazing nights in store that really made 2009 end on a high.

  In the middle of December I hosted a one-off special on ITV called Cheryl Cole’s Night In. I got to pick the guests and what I performed, and I invited Rihanna, plus Alexandra Burke, Will.i.am, Will Young and Snow Patrol onto the show. It was an incredible opportunity to bring together everyone I loved in the music world at that point in time.

  I chose to perform my second single, ‘3 Words’, with Will.i.am, plus ‘Fight For This Love’ and ‘Parachute’, which was to be my third single from the album. As soon as I heard ‘Parachute’, I knew I wanted to dance the Argentine tango on the video, and I had a stroke of luck because Derek Hough, my favourite dancer from Dancing with the Stars, agreed to choreograph the video, and he was also going to dance with me on this show.