Susan Boyle (3 page)

Her performance wasn’t helped by the fact that she had developed a slight cough, and it was actually her second, utterly flawless take that ultimately made it to the screen. The audience didn’t care, though: Susan got a standing ovation before she had so much as sung a note and a rapturous reception afterwards. It was ‘bloody great’ to be back, she said, adding, ‘I feel great being back here, I feel at home and I loved performing. The public should watch out for the album.’

Presiding over it all, of course, was the ubiquitous Simon Cowell. Cowell has become, beyond a shadow of a doubt, the most influential person in British showbiz circles - and increasingly in American ones, too - and this was his moment. ‘I feel so proud of you, and it’s lovely to have you here,’ he told Susan, but it was so much more than that. Without meaning to sound coy or cast aspersions, Simon was the fairy godmother here: it was he who had taken a shy little Scottish lady and transformed her into something quite different: a woman who was inspiring the world. In Susan he had picked the right person, for she had the talent to carry it off, but it was still Cowell who had facilitated her success and been the brains behind the most astonishing début the world had ever seen. This was Susan’s
and
Simon’s moment. Between the two of them, they were changing the face of musical history and redefining the limits of what could be achieved by whom. Shy little Susan had taken on the world, and with a little help from her friend Cowell, she had won.

Saturday, 11 April 2009. Britain was grouping around the nation’s television sets, hunkering down to watch one of the most popular shows on TV,
Britain’s Got Talent
. It was the first episode of the new series and no one had a clue what they were about to see that night.

In the theatre in Glasgow where the show was recorded, the three judges - Simon Cowell, Piers Morgan and the actress Amanda Holden - were seated at their desk. Behind them the audience roared with anticipation as each new act came on, with those roars frequently turning to derision as one act after another floundered, failing to live up to its promise. The mood soon turned to frank incredulity when a small, plump lady with unkempt grey hair, exuberant eyebrows and wearing an ill-fitting cream dress marched on to the stage, showing no discernable sign of being able to do anything very much. The cameras panned across the audience’s faces: eyebrows were raised and bemused expressions seemed to be the order of the day. Who on earth was this? And how did she think she was going to justify being here tonight?

Simon, with his customary dispassionate sneer, took up pen and paper. ‘Right,’ he began, ‘what’s your name, darlin’?’

‘My name is Susan Boyle,’ replied the figure on the stage. She had a strong Scottish accent and there was a little nervous intake of breath, but otherwise she was calm.

‘OK, er, Susan, where are you from?’

‘I’m from Blackburn, near Bathgate, West Lothian.’

‘It’s a big town?’

‘It’s a sort of collection of, er, it’s a collection,’ Susan’s hand circled desperately in the air, ‘villages.’ Her nerves were palpable now, but still under control. ‘I had to think there!’

‘And, how old are you, Susan?’

‘I am forty-seven.’ This provoked hoots and catcalls from the crowd, to which Susan responded with the hip wiggle that has become her trademark. ‘And that’s just one side of me,’ she continued, wiggling more than ever. Piers wrinkled his nose in disbelief. ‘What is this?’ his expression seemed to say. Meanwhile, the camera panned to Ant and Dec, who were in hysterics backstage. ‘I love it!’ cried Ant, doing some wiggling himself.

Simon, by now wearing the expression of a weary schoolteacher faced with a couple of misbehaving nine-year-old boys, went on. ‘Wow,’ he said rather disapprovingly. ‘OK, what’s the dream?’

‘I’m trying to be a professional singer,’ replied Susan. That got a laugh from the audience, though not a sympathetic one, and more expressions of stunned disbelief flashed across the screen.

‘And why hasn’t it worked out so far, Susan?’

‘I’ve never been given the chance before, but here’s hoping it’ll change,’ said Susan with an expansive wave to the audience. Fat chance, they might have replied.

‘OK, and who would you like to be as successful as?’

‘Elaine Paige,’ said Susan, prompting more calls from the audience who were definitely not on her side at this point.

‘What are you going to sing tonight?’ interjected Piers.

‘I’m going to sing “I Dreamed A Dream” from
Les Miserables
,’ said Susan to more hooting from the stalls. Amanda Holden looked suitably unimpressed.

‘OK? It’s on,’ said Piers.

Susan turned to Ant and Dec on the side of the stage and gave them a thumbs-up. The music began to swell in the background and Susan brought the microphone to her mouth. She smiled - she, if no one else, knew what the audience was about to hear - then opened her mouth and out it came: ‘I dreamed a dream in time gone by . . .’

The reaction was immediate: the audience exploded into cheers, and it was real cheering this time. Meanwhile the camera panned across the faces of the three judges, all of whom were registering amazement, shock and disbelief. On she went, causing the audience to get increasingly worked up.

‘You didn’t expect that now, did you? Did you? No,’ Ant asked the camera as he and Dec looked stunned by what was happening on stage.

By this time Piers was clapping, Simon was beaming and the audience was getting to its feet to give Susan the first of several ovations she would receive over the course of her performance.

It was getting better and better out on stage. Susan’s voice was soaring and she changed key without faltering, hitting the high notes and drawing out the full beauty of the song. Amanda was also on her feet applauding and Ant and Dec were chortling like naughty schoolboys. ‘Look at that!’ cried Ant. Look indeed.

Susan was beaming, totally in command of the stage and utterly different from the shy little woman who had walked out there. This was the voice of an astounding singer, and she finished to more rapturous applause and another standing ovation. As the music came to an end, Susan blew a kiss to the audience and began to walk from the stage.

This was not according to plan, and there was some pantomime action in the background as Ant and Dec motioned at her to go back. It was then that the full force of what had happened began to make itself felt.

 

‘All right,’ said Simon. ‘Thank you very much, Susan. Piers?’

‘Without a doubt that was the biggest surprise I have had in three years of this show,’ Piers began. ‘When you stood there with that cheeky grin and said, “I want to be like Elaine Paige,” everyone was laughing at you. No one is laughing now. That was stunning. An incredible performance.’ On stage, Susan was beaming. She was beginning to realize what had begun and blew out another kiss to the audience, who were eating out of her hand and roaring with delight.

‘Amazing,’ Piers continued. ‘I’m reeling in shock. I don’t know about you two.’

‘I am so thrilled, because I know that everybody was against you,’ said Amanda bluntly. ‘I honestly think that we were all being very cynical and I think that’s the biggest wake-up call ever, and I just want to say that it was a complete privilege listening to that. It was inspirational.’ The audience burst out into yet another round of applause.

‘Thank you very much,’ Susan replied.

Simon couldn’t help playing the joker. ‘I knew the minute you walked out on that stage that we were going to hear something extraordinary, and I was right,’ he said, to laughter from the audience and an admonishment of, ‘Oh, Simon!’ from Susan herself.

‘What a lot of tosh!’ cried Dec.

‘Susan,’ Simon continued, ‘you are a little tiger, aren’t you?’

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Susan.

‘You are. OK, moment of truth. Yes or no?’

‘The biggest yes I have ever given anybody,’ said Piers as Susan began to laugh in amazed delight.

‘Amanda?’

‘Yes, definitely.’ Susan was beginning to look a little stunned now.

‘Susan Boyle,’ said Simon, ‘you can go back to the village with your head held high, with three yeses.’

Susan couldn’t contain herself. She shook her fists in the air, did a little victory dance on the spot and finally left the stage, blowing one last kiss to an audience which was on its feet again. It had not only been one of the most extraordinary moments on a televised talent show, but one of the most extraordinary moments ever on a television screen.

Susan had had a little chat with Ant and Dec prior to going on stage, so the viewer at home was quite as bemused as everyone in the studio by what they were seeing. Chatting to the two of them, Susan confessed she was nearly forty-eight, that she had a cat called Pebbles and had never been married or kissed, a comment she would come to regret in the fullness of time given the amount of media attention it garnered. She came across as an awkward little thing, confessing to nerves, but wanting to get out there and give it her all. And then, of course, she did just that.

‘I’m going to make that audience rock,’ she told Ant and Dec, who looked as if they wouldn’t count on it, but were far too polite to say so.

The reaction in the next day’s papers was similarly astonished. That such a stunning voice could come from someone who wasn’t groomed to within an inch of her life was greeted with sheer disbelief: ‘She has a soaring, beautiful voice that could grace a heavenly choir - but self-taught singer Susan Boyle has the hair-do from hell,’ proclaimed Mark Jefferies in the
Mirror
. ‘And the scruffy 47-year-old stunned judges on
Britain’s Got Talent
when she opened her mouth and produced “the biggest surprise ever” on the show.’

He called it a ‘stunning performance’ and he was not alone. The
Daily Telegraph
called her a ‘singing marvel’, the
Daily Star
reported how the audience was ‘stunned’ by her ‘amazing’ voice, and the
Sunday Express
commented on her ‘electrifying performance’. More amazingly still, the sort of people who wouldn’t normally have noticed a lady of a certain age giving it her all in a moment that would change her life joined in. The Hollywood star Demi Moore tweeted that it was one of the most moving things she had ever seen and Oprah Winfrey wanted her on the show. A clip of the audition found its way on to YouTube, where it promptly became - and still is - the hottest thing online. At the time of writing, it had received over 35 million hits on that channel and well over three times that worldwide.

The interest in Susan was immediate and intense, provoked by the contrast in her appearance and her voice. On the one hand she was being compared to Paul Potts, another ungainly looking singer who had won
Britain’s Got Talent
two years earlier thanks to his remarkable voice, but the reaction Susan provoked was quite unique. It was inconceivable. Nothing like that had ever happened before.

But though the world of television was reeling, it was nothing compared to what Susan was feeling. Being thrust into the public eye like this would have given even the most savvy media manipulator pause for thought. But Susan wasn’t savvy: what you saw was exactly what you got, and so, having no concept of how huge the interest in her was, or how everything she said and did would be magnified by the unforgiving glare of the newspapers (with the possible exception of the
Financial Times
), Susan made various remarks and jokes that got blown up out of all proportion. At this early stage she had minimum guidance on how to deal with the press, for the simple reason that no one had anticipated the level of interest she received.

An early case in point was an off-the-cuff remark Susan made about Piers Morgan, for whom she undoubtedly developed a tendresse, but not quite to the extent that it was written up in some quarters. She had already confessed live on air that she had ‘never been kissed’, although even that was not quite the truth, and now, rather unwisely, she spoke of her admiration for Piers.

‘Up until now I have never met the right man, but maybe that will change now I have met Piers,’ she declared to the bevy of reporters who had gathered outside her modest home in Blackburn, anxiously digging up every bit of information about this extraordinary woman who had so enthralled the nation. ‘He’s a very handsome man. It’s quite hard to choose between Piers and Simon because they’re both lovely, but I think it would definitely be Piers.’

It was pretty harmless stuff, but a gift to the writers of the huge amounts of copy that would come to be written about SuBo, as she came to be nicknamed.

However, there was also a more serious side to what Susan had to tell the reporters who trailed her. It wasn’t just that she was casual about her appearance and a bit of a country bumpkin, she’d had genuine medical difficulties that had caused her problems all her life. Without a hint of self-pity Susan declared, ‘I am a slow learner. All my life people have told me what I can’t do rather than what I can do, so it’s nice to show the country that I can sing. I find it so much easier than talking to people. I sing from the heart and can communicate how I feel so much easier.’

That wasn’t the end of it, either. While Susan wasn’t a creature to be pitied, her life had clearly been harsh, not least because she lived alone. ‘I lived with my mum up until she died two years ago from old age,’ she went on. ‘Now I only have my cat Pebbles for company, but when I sing I know my mum is still listening.’

As all this and more came out, the atmosphere surrounding Susan shifted. When she’d first walked out on to that Glasgow stage there had been an unmistakable sense of mockery in the air; a feeling that an ungroomed woman from the sticks who compared herself to Elaine Paige was setting herself up for a fall. But as Susan’s vulnerabilities became clear, there was a pervading sense of shame about people’s initial reactions. Susan had clearly been bullied all her life in one form or another, and now here she was, having the guts to stand up in front of 3,000 people in an auditorium, 11 million on television and, courtesy of YouTube, 33 million worldwide and show what she could do. Why shouldn’t this woman be given a chance? Why shouldn’t she be allowed to achieve her full potential? And above all, what right had others to mock? She was only human. Didn’t she have feelings, too?