Cheryl: My Story (11 page)

‘Who wants me to make some chicken and rice?’ one of the other contestants in the house asked one night. This was Javine Hylton, and she loved to cook.

‘Yes please!’ the rest of us chorused. I didn’t have a clue how to cook anything fancy like that and nor did Nicola or our roommate Aimee, so we were always grateful for Javine’s chicken and rice. It was really good, and I ate so much of it I noticeably started to put on weight for the first time in years.

We had several weeks in the house together before the live shows started, during which time we were encouraged to have singing lessons.

‘Use your chest voice, Cheryl,’ the teacher said to me one day.

‘What’s me “chest voice”?’ I replied. I’d never had a singing lesson in my life and I didn’t know what she was on about.

‘Well, how do you breathe when you are singing?’

‘I just do, with me lungs.’

Nicola and I retreated to our room afterwards and collapsed in a fit of giggles. Nicola painted my nails and I taught her how to put on eyeliner. Day by day our bedroom got messier and messier, until eventually you could barely see the carpet for all the clothes and shoes, hairbrushes and towels strewn all over the floor.

One morning a really awful pair of trainers arrived at the house. I don’t know where they came from or who they were for, as I don’t remember us having stylists or anything like that in those days, but I was full of mischief and I saw the opportunity for a joke.

I took the trainers to each girl’s room in turn and told them very seriously, ‘These have been sent for you. Davina McCall says you have to try them on now and then wear them for your first performance.’

Their faces fell but they dutifully tried on the trainers, not wanting to go against the wishes of Davina, who was the host of the show. When they eventually found out it was a wind up each girl had a fit and then cracked up laughing. That’s what it was like all the time in the house. It was full of fun, like being on a daft girls’ holiday.

I phoned my mam most days and she would always tell me if there had been a mention of anything to do with
Popstars
in the papers. There were bits of tittle-tattle all the time, with stories of the girls sneaking out of the house to party with the boys and silly things like that. I never took much notice because I wasn’t involved, but one day my mam phoned me up to warn me there was going to be a story all about me, and it didn’t sound good.

‘Cheryl, I think someone’s done one of them kiss-and-tells on ya.’

My mind went into overdrive. Only the day before I’d spoken to my dad, and he’d told me, ‘I’m so proud of you I could pop.’ Now my mind was going crazy. I was wondering what had been written about me, and what my family was about to read. Mam didn’t know what was in the story yet, explaining that she’d just taken a phone call at home from a reporter trying to get her to make a comment, and she thought she’d better let me know.

I panicked and worried about every single boy I’d ever kissed, until I actually got to read the article the next day.

I was totally stunned to discover it was a completely fabricated kiss-and-tell from a guy who used to come in Nupi’s café, who I didn’t even remember talking to.

This was my first experience of being the focus of a made-up tabloid story and I just couldn’t believe a newspaper could print such rubbish and get away with it, but they did. It was so weird and frustrating to find myself in that situation. I felt incredibly uncomfortable; the feeling was like nothing I’d ever experienced in my life before. I had to phone my dad and tell him the guy had made it all up, and warn him not to read the paper, which was just horrible, especially so soon after he had told me how proud he was of me.

Not surprisingly, my heart stopped when my mam phoned me again a few weeks later to tell me there was going to be another story on me in the papers.

‘Oh my God, what next?’ I asked. I was still rattled by the last one, and I wasn’t sure I could take another.

The live shows were in full swing now and even though I wasn’t afraid of being kicked off, I was suffering badly with anxiety each time I had to step up to the mic. My nerves used to completely consume my body, in fact. Even if I sang perfectly it felt to me like they were trying to take the breath out of my body on every note.

‘Just tell me, mother. Nothing can be as bad as the last story.’

‘It’s not like that, Cheryl,’ my mam said. ‘Some of your friends have hung a banner over the Tyne Bridge. It’s huge and it says “Vote For Cheryl Tweedy”. They had to get special permission from the council.’

I burst out laughing, as much with relief as pleasure. That was pretty special. Geordies are so proud of their own, and it gave me a real boost.

I was doing really well in the competition and getting voted through each time. I can’t remember any of the comments now, but I know the girls competed against each other every fortnight, alternating weekly with the boys. Each time I’d think, ‘Am I really still here?’ Being on the television didn’t faze me, but the whole idea that I was being judged was horrible, because I wasn’t used to being in that position when I was singing.

I found it very hard when some of the friends I’d made started to be voted off, and it was absolutely terrible when my roommate Aimee went. I genuinely wished I could go in her place, because I was older and felt I could cope with the rejection better.

My mam and sister came to the final show and were cheering like mad in the audience, but practically the only thing I can remember in amongst all the tension and excitement is Davina standing up to announce which five of us, out of the six remaining girls, had made it into the band.

‘The first member of the band is …’ I could almost hear my heart beating.

‘Cheryl!’

I jumped out of my seat, looking more like a Newcastle fan when the team had just scored than a pop singer, and the memory of it still makes me cringe.

Davina had to make me sit down and I perched on a stool in disbelief, shaking and trembling as first Nicola, then Kimberley and finally Nadine and Sarah took their seats next to me. Javine was the sixth girl who hadn’t made it, and I was absolutely gutted for her.

The rest of us just started screaming at each other, and we kept on screaming for what felt like the whole night. I remember going up to the bar and being pulled from pillar to post by so many people wanting to congratulate us. Then it was straight to a London hotel, because we still had the competition with the boys to go through, and the record label wanted us to start work the very next morning. I lay in bed staring at the ceiling for literally the whole night. I couldn’t sleep a wink. I had adrenalin pumping through my veins so fast I thought I was going to go bang. I was absolutely
euphoric
. My life was changed. I felt it, very strongly, as I lay there in the dark. My life was going to be different now. I was a member of Girls Aloud, as the band had been named. And I just knew that we were going to absolutely smash the boys when it came to the battle for the Christmas number one, which was our next challenge.

Looking back, I was completely naïve about the world I had entered. I desperately wanted to be on the
Smash Hits Poll Winners’ Party
show on TV because I’d always watched it as a kid, and in my head I would be able to do that now. Going on that show, and on
Top of the Pops
, was the be-all and end-all for me.

It never occurred to me that there was a lot more to the music industry than making records and singing on a stage. I should have known better, especially after the whole kiss-and-tell hoo-hah, but it still took me totally by surprise the first time Girls Aloud were criticised in the press.

The headline was incredibly rude. ‘Porkstars: The Rivals’ it said, or something like that. It was true that we’d gained a few pounds between us. Javine’s chicken and rice had seen to it that
my
weight had gone up to more than nine stone, which was the heaviest I’d ever been. At just five-foot three the extra weight did make me look on the chubby side, but I was still shocked that the whole band was under scrutiny for something that seemed so un-newsworthy and had nothing whatsoever to do with our music.

I’d never looked at food as a problem, ever. Food was never an issue in my life, and growing up I never knew anybody who was on a diet. You just ate what was put out for you, and that’s what I’d done in the
Popstars
house. Now, it seemed, I was paying a price.

To make matters worse, as the boys-versus-girls chart battle got under way, we were working every hour God sent in the recording studio, as well as making our first video, promoting Girls Aloud on radio and TV shows and generally doing our best to put the boy band, One True Voice, down at every opportunity.

For two weeks we just got in a car with our newly appointed tour manager, a lovely guy called John McMahon, and went all over the country, appearing on
GMTV
and
CD:UK
and giving interviews to radio stations and magazines. We ate McDonald’s for breakfast, dinner and tea some days, or we’d fill up on pizzas and rubbish we picked up at service stations. We never ate one bit of green for a whole fortnight, and at the end of it we got a phone call from Louis Walsh, who had been appointed manager of Girls Aloud.

‘Lose weight,’ he told us bluntly, and we were all so shocked we actually listened. That was the only good bit of advice Louis ever provided actually, and it gave us a big reality check. It made us realise that we weren’t just being picked on by the press with their ‘Porkstars’ headline because they didn’t have another angle for a story. We really were eating an unhealthy amount of junk food, and it had to stop. We had new jobs, and looking our best was part of the job description.

Looking back, it says a hell of a lot about the music industry that this is my abiding memory of those first two weeks. Here I was, doing what I’d dreamed of for years, yet only a tiny percentage of our energy was going into the actual singing and we were all starting to moan every day, about the early starts and long hours and the bad press we got.

‘Good moaning,’ became our make-up guy’s regular early-morning joke when we got up and prepared for promos, as we all complained so much at having to get up at the crack of dawn. The battle with the boys got quite nasty, too. It was a
real
competition, and the media had the boys down to win. Everyone was saying that our single, ‘The Sound of the Underground’, was too ‘out there’, and that girls bought more records than boys and would back the boy band, and so One True Voice would beat us on sales.

‘Do you wanna bet? Don’t underestimate girl power,’ I said time and time again.

I was back home in Newcastle, visiting my family, when I finally got the call I’d been dreaming of, telling me that Girls Aloud had annihilated the boys, and we actually had the Christmas number one. What’s more, we were the first girl band
ever
to debut at number one.

It was simply amazing news, and I will never, ever forget my dad standing up in the local pub, where we had a party, and saying: ‘I have to eat the biggest piece of humble pie ever, because Cheryl told me as a child she was gonna have a number one and be on
Top of the Pops
, and I told her to take her head out of the clouds.’

I imagined 2003 was going to be the best year of my life so far. The girls and I had all started to bond really well as a group, and we were all really excited about recording our first album together.

I was living the dream, and nothing was going to burst my bubble.

5
‘You’re arresting
me
?’

‘I’m really sorry to be the one to tell you this, Cheryl, but John has died in a car accident.’

It was Sundraj Sreenivasan on the phone, head of publicity for Polydor, Girls Aloud’s record label. I could scarcely believe it, but he was talking about John McMahon, the guy who’d driven us all over the country when we were frantically promoting ourselves as a newly formed band. All of us girls had spent more time with John in the past month than with anybody else but each other. He was 43 and had children, and we all thought he was such a great person. He’d been so much more than a tour manager; he’d been like a dad to us really, looking after us and making sure we had everything we needed. It just didn’t seem real at all.

‘What happened?’ I cried, unable to stop the tears rolling down my cheeks.

John had been drinking, and he’d crashed into a telephone pole near his home in Stafford on Christmas Day. He was actually in the car we’d toured in, which had Girls Aloud painted on the side, and he had died at the scene. All of us girls went to his funeral just after the New Year, which made us bond even more, but in a way none of us could ever have anticipated.

The record was still number one, but the moment had passed, and we all just huddled together saying to one another, ‘Are you alright?’ We were lost for words, and none of us could believe our eyes when photographers turned up at the funeral and took pictures of us crying.

‘That’s disgusting,’ I said to Nicola. ‘His family has got to grieve in peace.’

‘I know, it’s sick,’ Nicola replied, and she sobbed her little heart out.