cheryl Cole Pop Princess talks all things controversial
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point thinking, “Please I didn’t do it, but it was somebody, help me.”
I found myself at one
Metropolis music studios in Chiswick, west London, shouldn’t feel like an unusual place to meet a pop star. But then Cheryl Cole isn’t your usual pop star. I’ve been invited here to be the first person to listen to the new, unmastered music from her forthcoming third album, A Million Lights. As is his charge, her publicist has been greasing my ears with breathless platitudes all week and, although an ardent fan of the genre that is “popular music” - unlike some, I see no ethical problem in liking bands such as Tame Impala and global pop acts like Lady Gaga - I’m dreading it. Ask any journalist who has had to sit through a “playback” in the presence of theactualartist and they’ll provide anecdote after buttockclenching anecdote about being forced to nod and foot-tap enthusiastically along to a pop star’s latest audible mediocrity like a Churchill Insurance dogs. And let’s face it: Cheryl Cole? Yes, “Fight For This Love” was as catchy as the Ebola virus in a Congolese refugee camp, a near-perfect pop equation, but that last album, Messy Little Raindrops? It was as dull as, well, a muddy puddle. At best it was one long whinge. Today, however, I steel myself to be open-minded about the new album, which had a working title of “Mechanics Of The Heart”. Oh, and to lie through my teeth. Before the music is cued on the Studio A mixing board, I prepare to pull my most rictus grin, all but ready to proclaim her new material as significant a discovery as the Sahara’s Plateau of Chasms. As I wait in the studio’s cafeteria, scanning the photographs of musical heavyweights who have recorded here - Ian Brown, Mark Ronson, Florence And The Machine - something still irks. Cheryl Cole - a pop star? Really? What, like Madonna? Well, she’s certainly put in the graft. In case you’d forgotten, ten years ago Cheryl Cole was
still Cheryl Tweedy, sprung from a Newcastle council estate. In the summer of 2002, aged 19, Cheryl Tweedy auditioned for a TV talent contest called Popstars: The Rivals - and won. Tweedy was brilliant value. Not only was she in a band, Girls Aloud, one that delivered some of the most sophisticated-sexy-bonkers pop music this county had heard in years - thanks mainly to British hitmakers Xenomania - she was as beautiful as she was combative. Tweedy was the tabloids’ golden goose. Whether you were a black washroom attendant in a London nightclub who felt VIPs should actually pay for those sweets kept in the glass bowls by the taps, Lily Allen or Charlotte Church, no one was safe from Tweedy’s big gob or brassy warmongering. The media couldn’t get enough of her, and nor, seemingly, could Tweedy get enough of the media, riding fame’s rocket - via the obligatory OK! wedding picture deal and embarrassing Camelot-sponsored National Lottery endorsement - all the way to becoming a national treasure.
suggested I seek therapy
All images taken from Cheryl Cole 2014 Calendar Available now in good stockists
So what happened? How did the idea of who Cheryl Cole is and what she represents get so scrambled? In 2004, Tweedy became Cole when she married footballer Ashley Cole, and then last summer everything that she’d worked so hard to achieve, the many parts that defined her, were gone: she was an ex-WAG, an ex-TV judge, an ex-wife, and, yes, even an ex-pop star, her own solo career having long since been drowned out by the klaxon-loud din of a tumultuous life lived out in the red-tops. Cheryl’s downward spiral - emotionally at least - was bookended by two high-profile moments: one she orchestrated, the other was thrust upon her unexpectedly. The first was in October 2010, when she appeared on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories, weeping openly over the breakdown of her marriage to Ashley Cole and about contracting malaria, and talking candidly in front of an audience of millions. She looked washed-out, fragile and utterly lost in a media glare that threatened to melt her into a moany victim. She had our sympathy, yes, but she also had our pity - there’s a difference. Then in May 2011, after having been officially announced as a judge on Simon Cowell’s American version of The X Factor, she was fired after just three weeks. Although her camp tried to shrug it off, the damage was done. Cheryl had fought for her love, her career, her profile and, seemingly, lost it all. And very publicly. Cheryl Tweedy, the fresh-faced Geordie lass with a heart of gold, a killer midriff and that potty mouth, had left the building. Betrayed by her husband, stabbed in the back by her ally and mentor Simon Cowell, she had become Cheryl Cole - beaten, finished and very bitter. A week later and we meet again to talk this all through - her past terrible year, her comeback and, yes, those lyrics. I tell Cheryl it feels like she’s been hiding away, licking her wounds in private since her world fell apart - the sacking from the American version of The X Factor and her apparent anger with Cowell, her divorce from Ashley Cole... “Well, I With this in mind, back in the studio in Chiswick I half expect Cheryl to walk in wearing a black veil, chanting canticles and announcing that she’s made a record with that speccy kid from The Choir. So you can imagine my reaction when the 28-year-old strides in on needlepoint heels, smiles sweetly and plays me a selection of songs so dirty, so sexy, so not Cheryl Cole that I soon forget about foot-tapping under duress and start wondering how I’m going to look her in the eyes. Over us, lyrics such as, “Let’s do it until we see the sun/Pound me, pound me like a drum,” play out like a summertime call for the world to copulate. Other lyrics include: “Hot sex will make you spend all your pesos,” and, “I make your jeans vibrate like a Nokia,” a Major Lazer sample about which she turns and purrs at me with a lascivious glint, “Well, everyone knows Nokia has the best vibrating system ever.” After an hour I leave feeling like I’ve spent an afternoon in a Dalston sauna: hot, sweaty and just a little bit violated. That sweet yet bitter girl-next-door with a broken heart? She just moved out. To Vegas.
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get that, yes,” she explains, perched on a sofa and waiting for her Starbucks to arrive. “Before now I didn’t have a choice of whether I could keep to myself, but I’ve taken the paparazzi to court. My privacy is very intentional.” From someone who courted the media so readily at the start of her career, now it seems Cole sees the tabloids as too intrusive - the combination of her appearances on The X Factor (for three years from 2008) with the breakdown of her marriage, turning the press from a useful tool into a rabid beast with a blood lust.
“It’s been going on a very long time. And my profile was significantly raised. First of all when I had me own personal issues,” - reader, she means “my”, of course: you can do the Newcastle accent in your head from here on in, but in my opinion it’s only bettered for sheer tastiness by the French, and maybe the Devonshire, lilts - “and secondly when I joined The X Factor. I haven’t had any normality. I’ve been famous for ten years - but not to that level. I didn’t know what I was in for when I joined The X Factor - I underestimated it. It got to a stage where I was waking up in the morning and they [the paparazzi] were outside my door, they would follow us to where I was going, through red lights... I don’t want to end up in a crash. It was seven strangers living outside my home. I was paranoid the whole time.” I tell her that her interview on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories reminded me of Princess Diana’s “Well, there were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded” interview with Martin Bashir - a calculated move by a woman cornered. “Well, that’s certainly how I felt. There was no escape. I was stuck in that glare, in that bubble. It’s not healthy for anybody. I had no life. I was kept under surveillance. It was aggressive, it was dangerous and it was inhumane. They are sick people. I found myself at one point just looking at my team thinking, ‘Please somebody, help me.’ Although I didn’t do it, it was suggested that I seek therapy for this.” I ask what her reaction was when she heard the News Of The World had shut. The grin Cheryl pulls is as wide as a canoe. “I was happy. Very happy. My Saturday nights were changed forever - I could sleep peacefully! Of course, the world needs news, but not that sort of news.” She goes on: “I wonder how Rebekah Brooks felt when followed by all those paparazzi these past few months? I’m intrigued. I’ve met her before and actually she was really nice” - there’s that smile again, with eyes that could burn through steel “to my face. How didshefeel when chased by paparazzi? Put that to her for me, won’t you?” Was Cheryl worried her phone had been hacked? “Yes, of course. I think we all were.” And had it? “Yes. Kind of.
My management, everyone around us [their phones] had been. I’ve not been directly informed that my phone has been hacked - I change my number too regularly perhaps but my management are dealing with this at Scotland Yard at the moment. It’s crazy, but I can’t really talk about it...” Cheryl doesn’t like talking about a lot of things: phone hacking, her divorce from Ashley Cole in 2010 (on which more later), or who she’s dated or who she’s dating. Trying to get her to open up about what exactly went down in the States when she was unceremoniously fired from The X Factor by Cowell last year is a task. Cheryl may come over all sweet and fragile when she needs to, but there’s fire (and a savvy marketer) behind all that purported, wideeyed naivety. “You know it’s a year ago now,” she sighs when I ask about her sacking, “and people are still asking me.” I ask her whether it’s fair to say things didn’t quite go to plan. “Well, no, they didn’t. Not for me. But let the talkers talk.” How did she feel about the way Simon Cowell treated her? She’d said herself - before things turned so sour - that they had a very “special connection”, and watching their rapport on the show they seemed to be genuinely fond of one another: “I was fond of him,” admits Cheryl. “What I will say is that business is not a nice area. And you might say that I am a business woman, but I’m not into cut-throat business moves.” Is she saying that Cowell is cut-throat when it comes to business? “I didn’t say that. And no, me leaving the show was nothing to do with my Newcastle accent; I work with Americans all the time.” Has she spoken to Cowell since? “Yes I have. He called me actually. I went to Afghanistan last August to meet the troops. One thing we did was to raise awareness of improvised explosive devices. The troops thought it would be funny to dress one of the test dummies as Simon and blow him up in front of me. It felt great, actually.
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There’s a forcefield around me. Now I’m bulletproof
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When I landed back in England there was a message from Simon: ‘Hello Cheryl. So now that you’ve blown me up in Afghanistan can we talk?’ And we did. Listen, I’m not one of those people who holds a grudge about anything and I know Metropolis music studios in Chiswick, west London, shouldn’t feel like an unusual place to meet a pop star. But then Cheryl Cole isn’t your usual pop star. I’ve been invited here to be the first person to listen to the new, unmastered still Cheryl Tweedy, sprung from a Newcastle council estate. In the summer of 2002, aged 19, Cheryl Tweedy auditioned for a TV talent contest called Popstars: The Rivals - and won. Tweedy was brilliant value. Not only was she in a band, Girls Aloud, one that delivered some of the most sophisticated-sexy-bonkers pop music this county had heard in years - thanks mainly to British hitmakers Xenomania - she was as beautiful as she was combative. Tweedy was the tabloids’ golden goose. Whether you were a black washroom attendant in a London nightclub who felt VIPs should actually pay for those sweets kept in the glass bowls by the taps, Lily Allen or Charlotte Church, no one was safe from Tweedy’s big gob or brassy warmongering. The media couldn’t get enough of her, and nor, seemingly, could Tweedy get enough of the media, riding fame’s rocket - via the obligatory OK! wedding picture deal and embarrassing Camelot-sponsored National Lottery endorsement - all the way to becoming a national treasure. exactly what went down.” I ask whether, after being fired by him from America’s X Factor, Cowell had tried to lure Cheryl back to the UK version - the job that Tulisa Contostavlos eventually secured. “That’s a big question,” she smiles, evasively. “I’ve changed my number. I wouldn’t know.” Simon Cowell must know, though. So I phone him up to get his side of the story. If Cheryl won’t talk, maybe the mogul known for his straight-up, no-nonsense honesty - will. And, all credit to Cowell, he does just that: “Well look, if I could reverse time it wouldn’t have happened,” he explains when I ask if he has regrets about booting Cheryl off the American version of his show. “It was one of those things; it was an inthe-moment decision where you have to put your producer’s hat on, and I made the decision that [Cheryl] should go back to the UK. I just thought she was more comfortable on the UK show than the American show really and since we hadn’t started the UK show [at that point], I thought we would renegotiate a new deal with her - which I was in the process of doing.” So what went wrong? “I think whoever was advising her talked her out of it. And I think it was a big mistake. OK, I can say in hindsight now that I probably didn’t give her enough time. Everyone says I sacked her, but I like to say I was... moving her! I was still going to pay her for what she did - which was a lot of money; I had negotiated a very, very good deal for her to come back [to the UK X Factor].” So if it wasn’t money, was it simply Geordie pride? “I think she was talked out of it, to be honest with you.” Rumour has it that the person who talked Cheryl out of going back to the UK was her new manager since 2011, the Black Eyed Peas rapper Will.i.am. “When you’ve got someone negative in your ear, you know, who is putting a negative slant as opposed to a positive slant, then you might get swayed,” says Cowell. “I think if it was left down to her she would have done it.” I ask whether he thinks Cheryl felt betrayed. After all, he was the one to convince her to try to break America. “Totally, yes she was hurt. And we still have that connection. And that’s why we fell out so badly, because when you’re really, really close and you trust someone and you feel that person you trust has let you down - and she did feel that I had let her down - it hurts. And it hurt me that she was upset and I didn’t want that to happen. But that’s one of the pitfalls you have to take on when you produce these shows. It all ended pretty badly to be honest with you.” So would Cowell work with Cheryl again? “I think it’s more of a question of whether she would work with me again! I would in a heartbeat. And I think, you know, the chemistry, and our relationship, it would be so fractured now that I would love it! It would make for incredible TV. I always said to her that the door is permanently open, but it is entirely up to her what she wants to do. To be honest with you, even though we went through that pretty horrible period, I could look Cheryl in the eye and say, what I did do for her in those two years really propelled her into a different league.” There is a strong rumour, I tell Cowell, that Cheryl is to appear on new BBC talent show The Voice, in May - a rumour fortified by the fact that Will.i.am is one of the judges. Would he take it as a slap in the face if Cheryl went on The Voice? “I honestly couldn’t care less,” he roars. “Why would that bother me? I mean, given the choice, would I do The Voice, or Britain’s Got Talent?” Both shows have been at war in the ratings. “You know, I would go with the show with the bigger audience. But if she wants to go with the show with the smaller audience then that’s up to her.” That, ladies and gentleman, is what gold-standard, Phantom-chauffeured success sounds like in 2012: unapologetically unflappable.
“ Sahara’s Plateau of Chasms.
music from her forthcoming third album, A Million Lights. As is his charge, her publicist has been greasing my ears with breathless platitudes all week and, although an ardent fan of the genre that is “popular music” - unlike some, I see no ethical problem in liking bands such as Tame Impala and global pop acts like Lady Gaga - I’m dreading it. Ask any journalist who has had to sit through a “playback” in the presence of theactualartist and they’ll provide anecdote after buttockclenching anecdote about being forced to nod and foot-tap enthusiastically along to a pop star’s latest audible mediocrity like a Churchill Insurance dogs. And let’s face it: Cheryl Cole? Yes, “Fight For This Love” was as catchy as the Ebola virus in a Congolese refugee camp, a near-perfect pop equation, but that last album, Messy Little it was one long whinge. Today, however, I steel myself to
Raindrops? It was as dull as, well, a muddy puddle. At best be open-minded about the new album, which had a work-
ing title of “Mechanics Of The Heart”. Oh, and to lie through my teeth. Before the music is cued on the Studio A mixing board, I prepare to pull my most rictus grin, all but ready to proclaim her new material as significant a discovery as the
As I wait in the studio’s cafeteria, scanning the photo-
graphs of musical heavyweights who have recorded here - Ian Brown, Mark Ronson, Florence And The Machine - something still irks. Cheryl Cole - a pop star? Really?
I would work with Cheryl again. Our relationship would be so fractured. It would make for incredible TV Simon Cowell
What, like Madonna? Well, she’s certainly put in the graft. In case you’d forgotten, ten years ago Cheryl Cole was
“ So are you single? “Yes.” woman and I like sex!” “But no more footballers?” I quip. I think she might punch me. OK, how about Prince Harry? and respect him for that.”
So are you single? “Yes.” Her dainty nose screws up knowing - within seconds she’s already gone back on her promise. How is being single, I ask? “Let’s not go there.” I try to lighten the mood by suggesting a few potential suitors. As Cheryl tells me herself when I ask about her new, bold record, “I’m a
“Yes!” she beams, relieved to be off the subject of her exhusband. “I love Prince Harry. Good looking and a bit of a rebel. Me and his dad are as thick as thieves and I knew Harry before I knew his dad so we’ve met a few times. I think he’s amazing. And I think you can relate to him because he’s made mistakes. He’s cool. Although, I think I would be Cougar Ville in that relationship.” Erm, “Cougar Ville”? “Yeah, Cougar Ville, you know. He’s 23 and I’m 28 now, 29 in June. I would be the cougar for sure.” I go on to ask her about her relationship with Derek Hough, the cherubic dancer who seemed to be Cheryl’s shoulder to cry on after her marriage broke down in 2010. They went on holiday together to Tanzania; she contracted malaria and “very nearly died”. Not the best beginnings to a relationship? “Derek will be a friend forever. He was there when I was dying, for God’s sake. I trust him wholeheartedly - as a friend. I’ve heard newspapers offered Derek an amount of money that could buy you a home to basically tell lies about him and me. I know people who would take the money and do that - he never did. I will always love him
I wonder if all the media attention puts men off Cheryl. “I haven’t had to deal with dating rumours for years because I was married; I didn’t have to deal with any of that crap. I actually wasn’t linked to that many people even before I met Ashley, so it’s weird now, to be honest. Every week I’m seeing someone else; I’m a busy girl. I haven’t thought about how it affects the guys, but it doesn’t affect me any more. It goes through me. There’s a force field around me. I’m bulletproof.” Bulletproof she may be, but that won’t stop others trying to make a name for themselves by embroiling her in tabloid feuds. Those who do it know that if they can get Cheryl’s name into a story then they’re guaranteed column inches. Take MC Harvey, who earlier this year purported to have had a relationship with Cheryl while she was still married to Ashley. He even told Now magazine that he had the e-mails to prove it from Cheryl and, oddly, from Cheryl’s mother. At the time of going to print, Cheryl’s lawyers were taking Harvey to court - with a response due from his legal team by 4 April. More than likely they will settle. But today Cheryl seems genuinely exasperated: “Oh God, that whole Harvey thing. I would really like to have that full conversation with you - it’s mind-blowing. I’ve met him once. One time. In 2002. With his wife.” I tell her that, to me, it sounds like someone who once used to be famous trying to generate press for themselves: “I can’t say much. But my feelings are exactly the same as yours.”