Tulisa - The Biography (10 page)

This controversy played out just months after Dappy had again embarrassed Tulisa’s band when it first emerged that he had a conviction for assault after spitting in a girl’s face. After a night drinking with a female fan he returned with her to her home in Chelmsford, Essex. There, he got into a row with two women, who called the police and Dappy was eventually to plead guilty to two counts of assault and received four weeks in jail, suspended for 12 months, and 100 hours’ community service, to run concurrently, plus £50 compensation and £300 costs. At first the conviction was kept quiet. It was an embarrassing day for Tulisa when news of the incident reached the media. His subsequent behaviour following the Chris Moyles Show incident only made the discomfort more profound.

****

In June 2010, Tulisa was brought to the attention of a host of new people when she was featured on the Channel 4 series
Being
…
N-Dubz
. It was knowingly and huskily narrated by
Loose Women
favourite Lynda Bellingham. In the opening episode she introduced the band as ‘a dynamite trio’. Tulisa and her band-mates wore ‘head cams’, which meant that the viewers could see life through their eyes. Dappy explained that while it took him and Fazer just five minutes to get ready in the morning, Tulisa took over two hours to handle ‘the feminine side of things’. Meanwhile, the lady herself was shown being pampered at a flash hairdressing salon. She reflected that the ‘stuff’ she had to ‘put up with’ from her male band-mates is ‘un-be
liev
able’. The show portrayed a deliberate contrast between her and the men of N-Dubz: while they take the tube to the studio, she is shown rolling-up in a flash, convertible car. ‘Oh you donut – you diva,’ shouts a mock-disgusted Dappy. She turned up two hours late to the Soccer Six celebrity football charity tournament, underscoring the ‘diva’ image the show was keen to promote.

When a pitch scrap broke out between Dappy, Fazer and rival rapper Lethal Bizzle, a breathless Tulisa was quick to weigh in. Addressing Lethal Bizzle’s allegation that
N-Dubz
had stolen a song of his, she said: ‘Let me pay a grand out of my pocket for a lie-detector test, bruv,’ she said. ‘But he don’t wanna do it, why? Because he knows I’m telling the truth. Big-up N-Dubz!’ Back in the football action she was the hero for her side when she scored the penalty that won her team the tournament. She celebrated with glee, parading the trophy, while an onlooking Dappy observed: ‘Tulisa didn’t do that bad after all!’ While the insights into the band’s day-to-day life were entertaining, in truth it was Dappy who stole the show throughout the series. He has a way with random wisecracks that play well in this format, though he – and the band and show in general – were not to everyone’s taste. TV reviewer Keith Watson wrote in
Metro
: ‘If you’d dropped in unannounced on
Being… N-Dubz
, you’d have sworn it was some kind of lame, MTV-style spoof …
Being… N-Dubz
was way funnier than any spoof because it was real. Well, as real as any show could hope to be that features cartoon characters called Dappy, Tulisa and Fazer.’

The
Scotsman
’s un-bylined review began by describing the band as an ‘uncompromisingly stupid pop trio’. The reviewer was particularly harsh on Dappy, asking ‘Seriously, what’s wrong with him? Why doesn’t he calm down? Half an hour of his incessant yammering, posturing and childish horseplay was enough to force me to abandon my liberal values and demand the return of national service.’

Tulisa soon took-part in a more sober and well received television project. In the summer of 2010, Tulisa laid bare the truth of her mother’s mental health issues in a BBC documentary called
Tulisa – My Mum And Me
. In it, she openly and movingly discussed her own experiences as the child of a mentally ill woman. She then takes to the road, interviewing other youngsters who have gone through similar experiences. ‘I’m Tulisa, I’m probably best known to you for being the girl in N-Dubz, but there’s a big part of my private life that I’ve always kept quiet about,’ she said in the introduction. It was about to be thrust into the public eye, during the moving scenes that followed. She
reread
old diaries of hers, including one from when she was 12 years old, in which she had declared that, for all her problems, she loved her mother ‘with all my heart’. In another diary she had smeared her own blood onto the page to demonstrate that she had self-harmed. She then looked over old photographs, including some taken at Disneyland. Then Tulisa does a ‘piece to camera’ alone, recalling the full horrors she went through as a child, including the police arriving to section her mother, who was ‘literally restrained and dragged away’. She explains how she was haunted by a ‘vivid image’ of her mother ‘screaming in an ambulance’. She revisits the hospital her mother had been taken to, and recalled how her mother seemed so ‘defeated’. Tulisa had wanted to ask her mother what was going on, but she realised that her mother – not her – was almost the child in this situation.

Tulisa then visits other children who have faced comparable horrors. This starts with a girl called Mia from Windsor, whose mother Tanya suffered from bipolar disorder. The rapport between Tulisa and 16-year-old Mia was palpable. Despite coming from a different background, Tulisa related to the challenges. She also visited 15-year-old Hannah from Dover, who had suffered as a result of the clinical depression of her mother Julie. The anger that Hannah admitted she had felt was something Tulisa very much understood. Like the younger Tulisa, Hannah said she had turned to cannabis to deal with the pain. She left Dover concerned for Hannah and Julie, who had seemed far less tranquil than the Windsorian family she visited. She then spoke with people closer to home. First, her best friend from school Mercedes, and then the N-Dubz DJ Mazer, who told her how he remembered her behaviour when she was 13. ‘You were a bit crazy, T, to tell the truth,’ he said. He also speculated that without the direction music gave her, he thought she would be ‘Probably in a council flat with twins, signing on’. He added: ‘It would not have been a good look, man.’

Later in the programme, introducing young carers to a network of support groups, Tulisa took Hannah to a specialist youth group. In doing so, she followed the narrative of many N-Dubz songs: be unflinchingly honest about a dark situation and then search out the positive light you can bring to it. ‘Small improvements can make a huge difference when you’re struggling as a young carer,’ said Tulisa. She also revisited Mia in Windsor, who had just sat her GCSE exams. As Tulisa reminded the viewers, she personally had never sat her GCSEs, leaving school at 15.

An issue that increasingly troubled Tulisa during the making of the programme was one that had haunted her for some time. She was scared that her mother’s health issues had begun in her late teens but had only really started to show themselves in her early twenties. ‘I’ve always suspected that mental illness runs in families and that my chances of getting ill are greater than other people’s because of what Mum has.’ So she visited Cardiff University, where a huge study into such theories was being undertaken. To what extent, she wanted to know as she donned her lab coat, did genes play in an individual’s susceptibility to mental illness?Having heard an explanation from Professor Nick Craddock, she cut straight to the point. ‘So… is mental illness hereditary?’ she asked.

‘Well, yes,’ he replied, adding that there is a tendency for it to run in families.

She then went further, wondering whether she was susceptible to getting mentally ill. So she underwent a psychiatric interview by Professor Craddock. She explained to him about her panic attacks, self-harming and suicide attempts.

‘It’s clear that you … have had depression, and that means you’re susceptible in the future to have more depressions,’ he told her. So far, so obvious. He added: ‘What I would say is that in anyone who’s had panics or been low it’s really important to look after your health – both your physical health and obviously your mental health.’ He advised her to avoid triggers that might risk further mental issues. He told her to avoid drugs, excessive drinking or irregular sleep patterns.

None of this seemed to be rocket science, yet Tulisa admitted that what he had told her had ‘really freaked me out’. In fairness, she reflected that she now realised she had a susceptibility to mental illness and a lifestyle that put her at risk. She added that it was a ‘dramatic jump’ to move from considering herself as having a one in a hundred chance to a one in ten chance of becoming mentally ill. It had been a harsh realisation for Tulisa. She said: ‘The risk of me ever suffering from mental illness, that is quite a lot for me to take on board. I’m not sure if I’m pushing myself to the limit at times.’

However, she explained, that at the end of a live show she felt that the crash of adrenaline after she came off stage was akin to a ‘comedown’. She added: ‘I do get this feeling of emptiness….Sometimes I end up feeling quite lonely.’ The show left Tulisa setting up her first house. She said that she had realised that she had ‘shut off’ feelings about the troubles of her past. ‘I guess it’s just been a journey for me to move on and accept the situation and deal with it,’ she said. As Ann arrived to see her daughter’s first house, Tulisa was proud to show her – and the viewers – the spare room she had set up especially for her mum to sleep in. ‘Oh, Tula,’ said Ann, with moving pride. She concluded the programme predicting that she would always be a carer for her mum. ‘Being a young carer never stops,’ she said.

The press reaction to Tulisa’s documentary was very positive. Scribes who might not normally have much positive to say about her often expressed admiration at this other side of her. ‘As with many BBC3 documentaries about “issues”, it’s been made with a young audience in mind, but Tulisa is an honest and compassionate host,’ wrote the
Guardian’
s Julia Raeside. The
Independent’
s Simmy Richman said Tulisa’s ‘warmth, honesty and approachability meant [she] came across as a sort of urban Princess Di, reaching out to people society might otherwise sweep under its carpet.’ However, as she had suspected would happen, there was indeed scepticism over her decision to go public about her mother’s issues. Some claimed that it was an exploitative publicity stunt. One online viewer quipped that she had made the programme purely as ‘a bid to generate some good karma for when she meets the man upstairs’. James Steiner’s review on the On The Box television website went further, saying: ‘It is a shame that Tulisa could not tame the media-hungry-whore that dwells inside every celebrity as she resorts to several shameless plugs of her band.’ This is a nonsensical sentiment, as her fame was a key part of the appeal of the programme to the channel and its viewers. Back in the mainstream, the
Radio Times
called her programme: ‘A brave, eye-opening, and…potentially
life-changing
film’. The
Times
felt that Tulisa’s programme had single-handedly given the channel a fresh lease of life. ‘What a service the once derided BBC Three does for its target audience (and me) by using celebrity to open eyes to the awful variety of teenage experience.’

As the media began to discuss her mother’s experiences and the issue in general, Tulisa was at pains to leave the matter on a positive and loving note. ‘Mental healthcare in this country is much better now, although we still have a long way to go,’ she said. ‘Too often people like me are just left to get on with it. But there are support groups for young carers now, which is a huge step forward because one of the worst things about dealing with my mum was how helpless and alone I felt at such a vulnerable age.’ Mindful that her documentary and the motivations behind it might be misinterpreted, she wanted people to know that she and her mother have a relationship that is normal and loving in the important ways. ‘No matter what has happened, I love my mum,’ she said. ‘She is happy for my success and I feel that for the first time in years I can have a more relaxed relationship with her.’

She added that her mother has improved since the darker days of old. ‘I’m not sure if it was a combination of better understanding of mental illness, better community care or that my mum just struck lucky with the doctors, but finally they realised that her medication wasn’t working,’ said Tulisa, explaining how things began to turn around. As a result, her issues were examined in a new light. ‘They completely re-evaluated her case and she was diagnosed as having both bipolar and schizophrenia,’ she said. ‘Now she takes drugs to combat both. She’s good at taking them and for the most part she has been stable. There are times when she’ll say mad things. I’m in the middle of decorating the house and I had a bottle of white spirit in one of the rooms. When she saw I’d left a lighter nearby she started freaking out because she was convinced something dreadful would happen. But I can tell her to calm down and we can laugh about it now, whereas before it would have led to an argument. There are times when I get frustrated by her behaviour but at least now I have the space and freedom to escape from it. I believe a lot of it comes down to how strong you are mentally. I have been through a lot for someone my age but it has made me strong and determined and I have to pray that is enough for me not to suffer the way my mum has.’ The final word from Tulisa on the matter: ‘They say blood is thicker than water and it’s true.’ Amen.

At the end of November 2010, N-Dubz released their third studio album. Titled
Love.Live.Life
, it was to be their most successful release to date. The lead single for the album had been released in May – it was not just arguably the band’s finest hour but also surely Tulisa’s finest vocal performance. ‘We Dance On’ begins with the emotional strings of Pachelbel’s ‘Canon in D Major’, a beginning reminiscent of ‘Dry Your Eyes’ by The Streets. It is only when Dappy’s chant heralds the house backing track that the N-Dubz stamp is put upon it. Tulisa then launches straight into the vocals. The vocals warn that tough and challenging times are ahead, but Tulisa promises that she will be OK and promises to break any obstacles placed in front of her.