COVER STAR
myself again. The consequences if I didn’t were just too frightening.’ The grit to fight back was there, though; it always has been. Her background is well-known: single mum, four siblings, a heroin-addict ex and barely a qualification to her name when she left school at 16. I’ve seen the steely inner core that this forged first-hand. I remember watching Cheryl at the Brit Awards in 2010 as she rehearsed for her first live solo performance. That same day, details of her husband’s latest liaison were splashed over every red top. She walked into her dressing room with dignity, then emerged an hour later to perform. She didn’t miss a step or a note – the perfection was as robotic as it was mesmerising. I saw the same determination when Cheryl was 19, back in 2002, having won reality TV show Popstars: The Rivals. Louis Walsh, who put together the group – Nicola, Kimberley, Nadine, Sarah and Cheryl – watched them top the charts with debut single Sound Of The Underground, then stopped taking their calls when the show ended. Cheryl’s response? To phone venues, pushing them to book Girls Aloud. They paid for their own travel, bought their own outfits, did their own make-up. They went on to become the UK’s biggest-selling girl group of the 21st century. Cheryl – now worth an estimated £16m (incidentally, millions more than any other Girls Aloud member) – was never and will never be, a pushover. So why then, at least where Ashley was concerned, did Cheryl silently allow herself to be painted as the victim? Well, she says, mud-slinging isn’t her style: ‘I don’t want to be one of those ex-couples who hate each other. Let it rest and just move on. That’s something that I Iearned from my mum.’ Not only did she refuse to talk about the emotional fallout from the split in the press, she refused to talk about it at all. ‘Even with my closest friends, I was a closed book. They never dared say anything as they knew how fragile I was. Plus, nobody really knew what to say.’ Instead, she hid out in Thailand with bandmates Nicola and Kimberley, ‘smoking cigarettes in silence, looking out to sea’, then holed up in LA for an extended period. Not that it helped. ‘Everywhere you go, your brain goes with you. That becomes the thing you can’t stand.’ It was shortly after this, on a break to Tanzania in July 2010, that she contracted malaria. In typical Cheryl style, she tried to work through what she thought was a bad bout of flu. When she had to be rushed from a photo shoot to A&E, she realised it was far more serious. ‘My mum was told I had 24 hours to live.’ Instead of giving
‘Everywhere you go, your brain goes with you. That becomes the thing you can’t stand’
herself time to recover, though, she took barely a fortnight off. ‘And I was in hospital most of that time.’ Having won over her home turf in three seasons of damp-eyed sincerity on The X Factor – has there ever been a bigger sucker for a back story? – she agreed to be a judge on The X Factor USA. Simon Cowell promised it would kick-start her career over there, but it proved to be just another kick in the guts. Within a matter of weeks, her American dream was over. Cowell didn’t even bother to sack her face to face. The text she sent Simon on receiving the news read: ‘F*ck you. F*ck Fox. F*ck the orange and purple outfit. F*ck big hair. F*ck the UK X Factor. F*ck you all. I hate you.’ By now, every man she put her trust in, from Walsh to Cole to Cowell, had somehow betrayed her. She gives me a wry smile, and leans back in her chair: ‘I can talk about this because I’m OK about it now. But I went through hell and it literally drove me mad. I became so desensitised, you could say terrible things to me and I wouldn’t even think about it. I’d read awful stuff about myself and not blink. I shut down because I didn’t know what else to do.’
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umours about why she was dismissed from Cowell’s judging coterie – and replaced with Nicole Scherzinger – circulated, but neither party ever spoke about it publicly. What Cheryl will admit is that it was for the best. ‘Now, I can say that Simon was right to get rid of me. I wasn’t well in the head when that was going on, so it wasn’t going to work. But he wasn’t right not to tell me to my face.’ Overwhelmed by illness, unhappiness and rejection, and after back-to-back tours – first solo, then with Girls Aloud – she ground to a halt. ‘I got calls about going into a studio, but I just couldn’t. I was worried if I threw myself back into another album, I wouldn’t cope. I called everyone and said I had to stop. I stood up for myself. I hadn’t stopped working for 10 years. I was turning 30 and I needed to deal with everything I’d been avoiding.’ She didn’t do therapy, eschewed rehab (‘I’ve seen people drink and do drugs, and that was never going to be me’). Instead, she sat down and wrote her bucket list (‘My f *ck-it list, actually,’ she laughs). Right at the top was ‘dolphins’, and the first trip she booked was to Hawaii to swim with them. ‘It was a beautiful day and we were just off an island. There was a family of them swimming – leaping, brushing past me, showing off. I cried because I was so happy. Actually, it wasn’t exactly the happiness: I was crying because I was feeling emotion, any emotion, after stopping myself feeling for so long.’ And the tattoo (Cheryl’s tattoo artist tweeted an image of her bottom last year, covered in giant inked roses from her lower back to the tops of her thighs), was that on the f *ck-it list too? ‘It’s my roses, my life: some are in bud, some are in bloom. That’s how I felt about myself, coming into flower.’ It might not have been ›