Unbreakable: My New Autobiography (25 page)

My advice to her would be to stay away from alcohol for a while and perhaps go through some therapy to deal with any issues, then keep a very low profile until it all blows over. I would say, use that time to rethink your life and where you want to be for the next few years, because she has got a lot going for her. She just needs to take stock and look at who she’s hanging around with, what their influence is on her. She’s only young; she can come back from it.

Myself and the other judges were all staying at the Grosvenor Hilton in the city and, of course, quite a crowd of fans and assorted media had gathered outside the entrance. As I stepped out of the car, a number of autograph books were pushed in my direction and I started signing them as the fans and journalists shouted questions at me. It was utter chaos.

‘Sharon! How does it feel to be back on
X Factor
?’

‘I love it.’

‘Sharon, what do you think of Glasgow?’

‘I love it.’

‘Sharon, what do you think of Tulisa…’

I couldn’t hear the rest of the sentence above the mayhem, so just stuck with the same shtick.

‘I love it.’

As soon as the words left my mouth, I realised that answering a question you can’t hear is a very stupid thing to do. I should have known that, given my years of experience of having remarks thrown at me on red carpets around the world. But it was too late.

It turned out that they’d asked me what I thought of Tulisa being in trouble. Shit. And, of course, the next day they ran a story about her with my quote tagged on the end as if I was gloating about a young girl having a bad time, which I would never do. So that pissed me off no end. What a great start.

Once inside the hotel, I established that all the other judges had arrived and insisted we all meet in the bar for ‘one drink’, just to hang out a bit before we started filming the very next morning. Well, one drink led to another. Then another. There was no food, not even a slice of cake, so the booze went straight to our heads. We finally got to bed at 4 a.m., and had to be up three and a half hours later!

Louis and I are old friends, and I know Nicole Scherzinger from way back too. I first met her in LA, when she was still in the Pussycat Dolls, and thought she was just the most
magnificent
young woman. She is one of those women you look at and go, wow. But not only does she have a face and figure that are jaw-dropping, she is beautiful on the inside too and
such
a grafter. My God, she has worked her butt off for every last thing she has in life and she never takes her success for granted. I adore her.

When I did what turned out to be my last
X Factor
in 2007, she had come out to Los Angeles to help me choose my finalists at the judges’ house, and I see her around and about occasionally over there too. We have a great relationship, and it’s only got better since working on this year’s series together.

The only judge I didn’t know was Gary Barlow, though I respected him enormously as an artist. There wasn’t a Take That tour I hadn’t seen, so I hoped that when we finally met we would gel – and we did.

We all clicked immediately, no doubt assisted by the alcohol we consumed that first night, but from then on we just hit a rhythm and it worked. The four of us complement each other well – two artists and two managers looking at things from a different perspective – and we’re careful to give each other the space and time to say our piece without talking across each other. And as many of the camera and sound guys were the same ones who had done the 2007 series, it was like putting on a comfy pair of old slippers. It was friendly but, best of all, it was fun.

‘I was nice and professional before you joined,’ Gary told me after a few days. ‘Now you’ve turned me into a naughty boy.’

It was true. The four of us were back in the hotel bar in Glasgow, all wearing our dressing gowns, a rule I had insisted upon for comfort, and one that stuck for the duration of filming the audition stages.

Gary’s eyes had popped out of his head when I first suggested it, but soon he didn’t give a shit. We must have looked a right sight to other guests staying in the hotels on our itinerary across the country, but at the end of each day’s filming, we all felt very wired and the surge of adrenalin wasn’t something we could just switch off. We needed to unwind, to sit and just be silly for a bit, and the bar was the best place to do that. Also, it felt liberating for us to have conversations together that weren’t being bloody filmed.

I corrupted Gary during filming, too. After a few polite responses to contestants on the first day on set, it didn’t take me long to hit my stride on the insults, particularly when it was one of those ear-wiltingly bad singers who has auditioned before and just wants to be on TV for a painful few seconds. We could all spot them a mile off, but unlike the others, I couldn’t be arsed to be polite about it.

‘Fuck off, you’re wasting our time,’ I told one man who looked like he’d come straight from the pub and didn’t even know the proper words to the song he was supposedly trying to impress us with.

I could see that Gary was rather unsettled by my bluntness, but after a succession of piss-poor acts he finally snapped and started talking my language.

‘Nah, fuck off, you’re rubbish.’

Bad auditions like these were fun in small doses, but if you got a run of them it could be very wearing. Then, every so often, an act would wander in that reminded me why I loved doing the show.

In 2007, when I last did the show, a fourteen-year-old girl called Stephanie Woods auditioned and got through to my judges’ house stage in Hollywood, the one where Nicole was helping me. But we didn’t put her through to the live finals because she was just so young, and I felt it was too soon for that kind of pressure. She was a genuinely nice girl, but she wasn’t as street-smart as the others and I thought, I can’t do this to you. It’s too much. Afterwards, I wrote her a note telling her that she was a star and shouldn’t give up on her dream.

Fast-forward six years, and she turned up with my note in her hand. It was such an incredible moment for me, really humbling. She’s twenty now, and working in a normal job, not singing, but she auditioned again and this time got through to the next stage, so we’ll see what happens.

The first major difference I noticed between the first four series of
The X Factor
and the current one is how the absence of Simon made it much harder work. When he was on board, he would flatly refuse to start filming before noon, so it meant the rest of us got a lie-in too. Invariably he would turn up a couple of hours late anyway, so it meant we wouldn’t get going until 2 p.m. or 3 p.m., but I didn’t care because me and Louis would sit around chatting with the production crew, gossiping about what was in the papers and catching up on everyone’s lives. It was a job, yes, but it also felt like a little family. Prior to the arrival of Dannii Minogue, I had always actively looked forward to going. It had never felt like work.

This time, however, it did. The judges all got along swimmingly, so that wasn’t the issue. It was the interminably long hours, and that there was seemingly no escape from the cameras. The only place we weren’t filmed was the toilet, and even then, within two minutes someone would be banging on the door saying I was needed on set. It felt a bit like being on
Big Brother
.

For the audition shows, my alarm would go off at 7.30 a.m. and I would hop in the bath to try and wake myself up. As I rise early each day for
The Talk
, it wasn’t the getting up as such that fazed me, it was the jet lag, because I would have just flown in from LA, which is eight hours behind the UK. So my body thought it was getting up at 11.30 p.m.

Meanwhile, my wardrobe supremo Maggie would have quietly let herself into the suite, and be steaming about three outfits for me to choose from for that day’s filming. Then there would be a request from someone in production for me to wear something with a ‘splash of colour’, and I would completely ignore them and wear what I liked, which was usually black or cream.

After my bath, I would emerge from my bedroom to find Maggie steaming away, my make-up artist Trisha ready to beautify me and my assistant Claire ready and waiting with my pot of tea, a few slices of lemon and either a bowl of bran or a couple of poached eggs.

Just like every other woman on television, I like to have my own people around me. All the people who work with me have done so for years. I consider them to be extended family. Trisha knows that when you get to my age, good make-up is all in the blending. If my regular hairdresser Lino isn’t around, she does my hair too. Then it’s on with that day’s chosen outfit and into the car to head to the filming location for 10 a.m. sharp.

In Manchester, we filmed at Old Trafford, a stunningly high-end stadium with fantastic facilities where we could each have had a private room to sit in during downtime. Except that there was very little downtime any more, because just about everything was filmed and we were constantly followed by the cameras.

During the occasional five-minute breaks, the other three judges and I would be taken to a communal room where the make-up artists and production crew sit, and we would be filmed the entire time, even while I was slurping a quick bowl of soup.

When Simon was in situ, he was also acting as producer, which he does superbly. He has a fantastic eye, a natural instinct for knowing what makes great television. Yes,
The X Factor
is a talent show, but it’s also a TV show and he would be editing in his head as we went along. Both Louis and I learnt so much from him in the first four series because he would regularly tick us off, explaining that if we had taken this or that road with that contestant, this or that would have happened and then there would have been a great scenario at the end of it, but we didn’t…

But the new philosophy seems to be film absolutely
everything
and let’s see how it pans out. I know that TV shows have to evolve to stay on top, and that they are trying to make the viewer feel more involved by filming everything backstage too, but it’s much more draining for the judges because from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m., when filming wrapped, we would rarely get a break from the exposing eye of the camera lens.

Most nights, after a couple of wind-down drinks with the others in the bar, I would get back to my room, exhausted, then start making telephone calls, first to the kids to make sure they were OK, then to Julie in LA to go through any Black Sabbath business or other work matters. So to say I felt shattered the next day would be a masterly understatement, but it would be the same relentless schedule again until that phase of filming finished and I would hop back on a plane to LA.

I wasn’t complaining; they were paying me well and I wanted to do it. But there were plenty of times when I was reminded that I’m not getting any younger. I was also missing my family terribly, and when Jack or Lisa put Pearl on Facetime to me, I would have a little sob afterwards.

So now it’s the first live audition show of the tenth anniversary season and Louis, Gary, Nicole and I are standing at the back of Wembley Arena, tucked out of sight of the crowd. It’s a vast space, but the collective heat of the assembled bodies on this hot July day is overpowering, though thankfully it does nothing to diminish the buzz of excitement.

The usual handful of production staff with clipboards and earpieces hovers around. One of them, a young girl, smiles warily at me, presumably because my reputation for speaking my mind precedes me. I smile back and give her a little wink, just to reassure her that I don’t bite.

Simon’s long-standing warm-up man, Ian Royce, is going through his routine, making them howl with laughter and whipping them up into the high-octane frenzy you need to create an atmosphere on TV – otherwise the filter of the camera lens kills it stone dead.

I close my eyes for a couple of seconds, trying to control the butterflies in my stomach. Perhaps sensing my unease, Louis throws an arm around my shoulder and gives it a little squeeze.

‘You OK?’

I simply nod and smile, focusing in on the fact that Roycie is in the throes of finishing his routine.

I want to do this. I need to do it, for closure. To put things right.

Apart from the long hours, the audition stages of the past few weeks have been water off a duck’s back, particularly as we returned to the old format of doing them in a small room with just the four of us and the contestant present. But you’re operating in a vacuum because the shows don’t get aired until several months later, so you have no idea how you’re coming across or being received.

Today is different. We are at Wembley Arena and, for the first time since rejoining, I will walk out in front of a live studio audience. My insides are on fucking spin cycle.

A live studio audience is that deeply scary unknown factor, the reaction of which you can never take for granted. They will either love you, in which case they’ll raise the rafters, or they’ll hate you and boo with all the gusto of a pantomime audience when the wicked witch appears on stage. And there isn’t a damn thing I can do to predict or change which of those two reactions it’s going to be.

I’d like to be able to say that I couldn’t give a damn whether they liked me or not, but it’s not true. I do. And even if ninety-eight per cent of that audience is cheering, I will only hear the two per cent who are expressing their dislike of me.

‘Ladies and gentlemen, let’s hear it for the
X Factor
judges!’ booms Roycie. It’s time.

As the four of us walk down the central aisle through the 4,000-strong crowd, they go absolutely wild, cheering, whistling, clapping and even stamping their feet. I feel the vibrations through the floor as I walk towards the raised judges’ table in front of the stage.

This is the part I love. The moment when the performance begins and I surf the wave of audience reaction, feeling like the Queen of the World lifted up with their applause. It’s a mini version of what rock stars feel when they walk out on stage and thousands of people simultaneously roar their approval. The adrenalin surge it gives you is the most amazing feeling and is, therefore, addictive.