Cheryl Cole: Her Story - the Unauthorized Biography (9 page)

Not to be outdone, Pete then accused the girls of not actually singing on the record and told Neil Fox on his Capital breakfast
radio show, ‘It’s a smashing pop record but unfortunately they are not on it. I’ve had that record since September. The version I’ve got is no different. It’s just got four other singers on it. Just listen to the choruses – they are session singers.’ First Louis threatened to take legal action if Waterman continued to spout such rubbish, then Cheryl let loose at the producer in the
Sun:
‘How did he think he was going to get away with that when people heard us sing on TV for ten weeks?’

Hurt by the personal comments made by One True Voice, she added: ‘They’ve called us tarts and said we can’t sing or dance. It’s taken it beyond a joke but we’re not going to sink that low. I don’t know why they have taken it to this extent. They’re insulting all the people who voted for us to be in the band so they’re not doing themselves any favours.’

And the battle didn’t just stay between the bands. The
Sun
then seemed to support Pete Waterman by stating that ‘Sound Of The Underground’ had actually previously been recorded by another girlband called Orchid and that the original band could still be heard on the record. The record label responded, pointing out that they had never hidden the fact that the girls could be heard singing backing vocals – and their names, Eve Bicker, Giselle Somerville and Louise Griffiths, were credited. Girls Aloud themselves added: ‘Everyone uses backing vocals; Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston use them and they just make the song sound better. We’re not denying it and we never did.’

The bitterness between the two bands became so ferocious that they couldn’t actually bring themselves to say anything nice to each other when they came face to face on TV shows or at functions. All this saddened Jamie Shaw of One True Voice,
who blames the feud on over-zealous PR: ‘As soon as the rivalry started there was a dramatic change in the girls’ attitudes but I know for a fact that their management and PR offices had a lot to do with it. It was from that point that we started to lose contact with each other. Which was very sad for me as I still fancied Cheryl.’

On 22 December, the results were through. The two bands returned to the
Popstars: The Rivals
studios to discover where on the charts their songs had entered. The midweek results were expected to be repeated, with the girls beating the boys, and Cheryl and the rest of the band were confident. Standing on stage looking a lot slicker and more styled than even a week before, the girls relished the fact they were to be told that they were number one at Christmas and that they would beat their rivals on live TV. But it wasn’t yet confirmed, so Davina crossed to DJ Neil Fox, who was presenting the
Network Chart Show
and asked him to put the country out of its misery.

As expected, the girls had triumphed, having shifted 213,000 copies compared to the boys’ 147,000. The girls exploded with joy, as they were showered in ticker tape, while the boys had to half-heartedly comfort each other. But the girls had little sympathy for their cocky rivals. ‘The boys had been bigged up so much and then they didn’t actually get it,’ Nicola was reported as saying in the
Observer.

So there it was: the girls had won and the boys had lost. And not only had they scooped the fifty-first Christmas number one, but the group were also the first band to score a festive chart-topper with their debut hit, and the first girlband to debut at number one. Who needed Christmas presents when the girls could boast fabulous facts like that?

Before Cheryl could head home for some well-deserved festive time off, she had one last issue to address – Jamie Shaw’s continued infatuation with her. Even though the two bands had fallen out during the ferocious chart battle in the run up to the Christmas number one announcement, Jamie still had a crush on gorgeous Cheryl.

The night before the final Christmas show, Jamie, no longer able to keep the extent of his true feelings to himself, sent Cheryl a text telling her that he wanted to go out with her. He felt that if he didn’t tell Cheryl about the way he felt there and then, he would never know what she might have said. But he would have to wait until the next day to find out what she felt.

‘She came up to me at the show and told me that it wasn’t going to work out,’ Jamie recalled. ‘It made me feel shit, to be honest, as my feelings for her were electric. I did cry a little, knowing I didn’t have a chance in hell with her. She said to me that I wasn’t her type on the outside but that I was on the inside. I felt bad but I didn’t feel awkward afterwards. We both cherished the friendship that we had for the time it lasted.’

Although the pair pledged to remain friends, Jamie and Cheryl lost touch soon after that Christmas. ‘We texted each other for a couple of years, but we just weren’t able to see each other much,’ he explained.

And so with that episode sorted out, Cheryl was able to say goodbye to her new bandmates for a short while so she could head home to spend Christmas with her family. But Cheryl’s yuletide joy was about to come to a tragic end …

When Cheryl arrived back in Heaton, she received a hero’s welcome. Well-wishers flocked to her mum’s house as if it were Graceland, all keen to let Cheryl know that they had helped her land a place in the band. The local newspaper, the
Evening Chronicle
, which had been so supportive to her over the years, was there to welcome back their triumphant daughter.

While Cheryl was extremely grateful for the attention and excited by her newfound fame, she wanted more than anything to spend some quiet time with her family. Having worked so hard down in London and spent so much time away from home over the past few months, Cheryl wanted just to be Cheryl Tweedy from Heaton again.

Once the euphoria surrounding her return had died down, Cheryl was able to enjoy her three-day break at home, catching up with her brothers and sister and on the local gossip. But as soon as she’d lost herself in the magic of Christmas, she was brought back down to earth with a bump when she received a
call from her record company rep passing on the devastating news that the band’s tour manager, John McMahon, who had driven them around the country for promotional appearances and interviews for the past few months, had been killed in a terrible car accident on Christmas Day. The forty-three-year-old, who had previously worked with the likes of Belinda Carlisle, Mis-Teeq, Craig David, Boyzone and Westlife, had been thrown through a side window of his Chrysler people carrier when it careered off the road and ploughed into a hedge and hit a telegraph pole. He had been pronounced dead on the scene near Cresswell in Northumberland.

The girls, who in the short time they had known him had looked up to John as a rock in the craziness of their new lives, were distraught by the terrible news. A heartbroken Kimberley said in a statement to the press: ‘John has been with us every hour of the day since we were picked to be in the band. We feel devastated because John was a constant support to us everywhere we went. He was the one who would round us up while we were promoting the single. We really liked John. He was a father figure to us.’ Cheryl added: ‘We were supposed to be celebrating Christmas but we are very upset and shocked. Our thoughts are with his family.’

Cheryl and the girls started their new year by scrapping all their promotional plans to pay their last respects to the man they had grown to love, attending John’s funeral at St Austin’s church in Stafford. Dressed in black, the girls let the tears flow freely as friends and family spoke emotionally of their loss during the forty-five-minute service. After Louis Walsh’s girlband Bellefire had performed an emotional song, John’s coffin was carried out to the strains of Tina Turner’s ‘Simply
The Best’. The girls, so moved by the loss of their friend, would later pay tribute to him in the sleevenotes of their first album.

Sadly for Cheryl, trouble seemed to follow her around during the month of January 2003. Just days after John’s funeral, her future in the band hung in the balance after she got into a brawl with a toilet attendant during a night out at the Drink club in Guildford. The evening had started off pleasantly enough when the band had gone for a quiet dinner after a gruelling twelve-hour stint at a local recording studio. Cheryl and Nicola, up for a night on the tiles, decided to join some other pals at Bar Zuca, where they spent much of the evening drinking. After enjoying several drinks there, the tipsy group moved next door to the Drink nightclub for a bop on the dancefloor.

And they weren’t disappointed. The place was in full swing, with music pumping, revellers dancing and drinks flowing freely. After their stressful few weeks and their very recent loss, Cheryl and Nicola were determined to relax and have a good time. And for the most part all seemed to be going well. When they weren’t on the dancefloor or quaffing champagne in the VIP lounge, they spoke happily to onlookers who recognized them from
Popstars: The Rivals.
In fact, they appeared to enjoy the attention they were attracting, no doubt because they’d only been proper popstars a matter of weeks and the novelty of signing autographs and having total strangers approach them was still fun.

But when Cheryl and Nicola ducked to the loo, problems ensued. According to thirty-nine-year-old toilet attendant Sophie Amogbokpa, trouble started when Cheryl started grabbing lollipops and a bottle of perfume from her display table. When Sophie asked Cheryl what she was doing, she
allegedly replied, ‘My father owns this place. I can do what I like,’ and made for the door. The attendant grabbed an angry Cheryl by the arm and pulled her back and made her drop the goods into the sink.

At this point, Nicola apparently dashed off into the club to find a security guard to calm things down. Meanwhile, the attendant alleged that, as she began to replace the items Cheryl had taken, the singer began shouting racist comments at her and then, just as Nicola returned with the security guard, Cheryl allegedly launched herself at the attendant and punched her in the face.

Phil White, the club’s head of security, also told the
Mirror
a couple of days after the incident that he had to pick Cheryl up and carry her to the other side of the toilet to calm her down, but she kept flailing and shouting out racist comments at Sophie. Phil said he then escorted her to the VIP lounge where she was ordered to apologize to Ms Amogbokpa. But Cheryl apparently continued to rant about the attendant and kept on slapping her fist into her hand threateningly. Police were called and Cheryl was taken to Guildford Police Station, where she spent the night in a cell.

The experience wasn’t pleasant. ‘It was scary there,’ she said on
The Frank Skinner Show
in November 2003. ‘It was cold, it smelt funny, like that bleach smell from school. I just sat on the bed and sobbed. And pressed the buzzer around twenty-five times. I was able to make one call and I called my mam straight away!’ Meanwhile, Nicola had returned to the hotel where the girls were staying to break the news to them that Cheryl had been carted off by the police. ‘We were like, “No way!”’ Kimberley recalled on
The Frank Skinner Show.
‘We couldn’t get our heads round it. Then we went downstairs and the police were there to take Nicola’s statement.’

Back at the cell, Cheryl felt scared. She’d never been in trouble with the law before and she felt so alone. All she wanted was her mum to come and hold her in her arms. As she sat there, gradually sobering up, she began to wake up to the enormity of what had happened. Getting into a brawl – for whatever reason – was stupid in the position she was in now, and she was scared that her new record bosses would come down hard on her. She’d only been a popstar a month or so and now it looked as if she could be on the verge of losing her job already. She couldn’t believe what was happening.

At eleven the next morning, Cheryl made a statement to the police claiming she’d acted in self-defence and had never referred to the toilet attendant as ‘a black b****’ and then headed to ITV studios to appear on
Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway.
There was talk of pulling out of Ant & Dec’s show as Cheryl was sporting a juicy shiner, but thanks to the expert skills of make-up artist Christopher Ardoff, Cheryl managed to go on stage without anyone guessing she’d been involved in a scuffle.

Speaking to the
News of the World
two days after the incident, Cheryl told a very different story to the one Ms Amogbokpa had recounted. ‘We saw these lollies, took one each and went to do our make-up. The attendant started shouting, “Oi, you’re supposed to leave money.” I said, “We’ll pay when we leave.” She then called me a bitch so I told her to get lost. She punched me in the face and then I hit her back and called her a “****ing b****”. When I got to the police station a doctor was called to examine me because I had a swollen cheek and some scratches, but I got the all-clear.’

Cheryl also hit back at the claims that she had racially abused the toilet attendant. ‘I am not a racist. Javine from
Popstars
, who is black, is one of my best friends.’ She also revealed that when police had read her Ms Amogbokpa’s original statement, there had been no reference to any racist slur. ‘I only acted in self-defence because I was hit first. I admit I may have called her a b**** in the heat of the moment, but I never made any racist comments to her. I am distraught that people are accusing me of racism. It couldn’t be further from the truth.’

Concerned mum Joan was quick to defend her daughter and to quash the suggestion that she was racist in any way. ‘Cheryl is a quiet, sensitive girl who has never been in any trouble,’ she told the
Sun.
‘I can’t imagine she’d start the fight. She is obviously devastated at newspaper reports of what she is supposed to have said to this woman.’ Joan also pointed out that Cheryl had long enjoyed the music of black artists and had dated Haydon Eshun from boyband Ultimate Kaos during her Metroland days.

‘She grew up loving music made by coloured artists,’ Joan said. ‘Cheryl has been speaking to Javine and she has given her full support. Cheryl has had boyfriends from the ethnic community and has friends who are black. To call her racist is really out of order. All I know is she has been left very upset. She feels her name has been dragged through the mud.’