Cheryl Cole: Her Story - the Unauthorized Biography (16 page)

Cheryl went on to reveal that she wanted to have a big fairytale wedding, complete with horse and carriage, but hadn’t decided yet whether or not her bandmates would be bridesmaids – ‘I’ll have lots, but there is a lot of family.’ She also spoke about how happy she was with Ashley and admitted that she was thrilled to have her dream job and her dream man, and that eventually she’d like to introduce at least five children into their lives.

Cheryl’s joy was slightly clouded due to a spat with Charlotte Church, who, Cheryl said on Radio 1, was ‘using our [Girls Aloud’s] sound’ for her move into pop with the single ‘Crazy Chick’, sparking an argument that would last for months. The
Mirror
reported that the Welsh wonder hit back and challenged Cheryl to a sing-off at the
Glamour
magazine awards, saying, ‘As soon as you can sing “Ave Maria”, then you can have a go!’ Charlotte added: ‘I used to love Girls Aloud but not any more after that. Girls Aloud wouldn’t be able to sing “Crazy Chick” if they tried. They just don’t have the range.’

The argument continued when Cheryl criticized Charlotte’s Walkers Crisps television advert, saying it was appropriate
that she was seen to be stuffing her face with crisps. She also commented in the
Sun
that she thought Charlotte’s hunky rugby-player boyfriend, Gavin Henson, was a ‘posing idiot who looks like a girl’. This was like a red rag to a bull for Charlotte, who hit back: ‘I thought it was funny to start with, but now it’s just pathetic and I’m going to knock her out if I ever see her.’

Thankfully, a truce was finally called and Cheryl said in
The Times
that the whole argument had just been a misunderstanding. ‘Someone asked me if I was devastated we hadn’t recorded “Crazy Chick”. I just felt like it was an insult because we had good records. I said, “We’re moving on now, so if Charlotte wants to do that sound she can.” … We’ve yet to kiss and make up, but I’m open to the idea.’

Schoolgirl spats weren’t all that occupied Cheryl’s mind. She and Ashley were rattled when they discovered that a gang was plotting to steal her £50,000 engagement ring. Cheryl was terrified because she couldn’t be sure what lengths the gang would go to in order to get their hands on her treasured ring. There were so many stories about people who had been held hostage, or worse, just so a gang could get their hands on some expensive jewellery. ‘The whole thing has been pretty scary,’ she said at the time. ‘I don’t really know what is going on and neither does Ashley. It’s scary. I am not wearing my ring.’ But once the gang had been thwarted, Cheryl declared that if anyone had tried to mug her she would have hit them in the face with her shoes, adding, ‘They’re scum, picking on a young girl.’

Back at work, Cheryl and the girls were gutted when their next single ‘Long Hot Summer’ entered the chart at number seven – comparatively low for them – selling just 18,541 copies.
Had the bubble burst? Or was the song not up to scratch? Eighties popstar Phil Oakey from the Human League decided it was his turn to take a pop at the girls, dismissing them as ‘a bunch of page-three girls who release songs, not for musical reasons but as souvenirs’. However, the girls didn’t really think anything of his comments, as they didn’t actually know who Phil Oakey was.

As a result of her relationship with Ashley, Cheryl had now been awarded the label of ‘WAG’. And now that she was set to become a footballer’s wife, no one was surprised when she announced that Victoria Beckham had taken her under her wing and had promised to take her shopping. The pair had met at a recent England match and Cheryl later admitted that on that day she had learned a harsh lesson if she wanted to be accepted by the other wives and girlfriends of footballers.

‘It was so embarrassing. All the girls were really glammed up, then I walked in with chipped nail varnish and wearing a jumper,’ Fametastic.com reported Cheryl as saying. ‘I think I looked terrible. But Victoria was down to earth and welcoming. She’s going to take me shopping in Madrid. I’d love her to style me because she always looks fantastic. I don’t know how she does it with three sons. I look up to her.’

Cheryl had always been an enthusiastic supporter of Victoria. When the Rebecca Loos scandal broke back in 2004, she was right there fighting in Victoria’s corner in
Top of the Pops
magazine. ‘Why doesn’t she [Loos] just shut her mouth. She’s a scheming bitch – she knew what she was doing and I hope she’s proud of herself.’

Of course, because Cheryl and Ashley came from the same professions as Posh and Becks as a singer and a footballer,
they had to deal with the press referring to them as the ‘new Beckhams’, a tag both she and Ashley hated. ‘We get fed up with that,’ Ashley said in his autobiography. ‘It’s such rubbish and we don’t really know what it means. It’s something made up by lazy journalists who want an easy ride.’

He also went on to explain that he and Cheryl looked at the Beckhams as a model couple living in this media madness. ‘They’ve proved a lot of people wrong about the strength of their marriage…But seeing what has been thrown at them serves as a warning to the likes of me and Cheryl. David is right when he keeps saying that as long as he has his wife and his boys around him, nothing can touch them. It’s how Cheryl makes me feel.’

As time went on, more and more people began referring to Cheryl as a WAG, and she wasn’t happy about it. As far as she was concerned, a typical WAG was a girl who had no job, no money and merely lived off her football boyfriend’s fortune.

‘The label really makes me angry,’ she said in
AXM
magazine. ‘When people say footballer’s wife they think of someone who just goes out shopping with her husband’s money. Well, I’ve got my own career and my own money. It would upset me if anyone thought I was the sort of person who lives off my husband. It goes against everything I was brought up to believe in. It would really make me sick to be kept by somebody!’

Meanwhile, as the girls started work on their third album,
Chemistry
, Cheryl began to think about how her big day would shape up. She checked her diary to see when it would be best to get hitched. It wasn’t a hard choice as the following year’s diary was already pretty full. There was a three-week window in July 2006 that looked promising, coming after the girls had
completed their
Chemistry
tour and Ashley had finished up at the World Cup in Germany.

After a brief conflab with Ashley, the couple decided that they would tie the knot on 15 July 2006 at Highclere Castle in Berkshire, a gorgeous stately home that really conjured up that fairytale feel that Cheryl was looking for. They viewed the building and Cheryl fell in love with it as she strolled through the corridors that boasted so much history, and decided to book it there and then.

Finally it looked as if everything was coming together. Already they had a date set and a venue, and with wedding planners Banana Split on board nothing could go wrong. But then they were dealt a blow. It was 10 September 2005 and Ashley was lying on his bed flicking through the TV channels when he came across a report on the wedding of Katie Price and Peter Andre, which was taking place that day. As the report cut to an aerial view of the couple’s top-secret venue, it suddenly dawned on him that they were getting married at the very same location he and Cheryl had chosen. Ashley recalled in his autobiography how he grabbed his phone and called Cheryl’s number – he knew she was not going to be happy.

‘You’re not going to believe this,’ he said when she answered, ‘but Peter and Jordan are getting married at Highclere today.’

Cheryl’s reaction was as he’d expected: ‘Right, Ashley, we’re changing venues!’

It wasn’t that she didn’t like Katie and Peter: on the contrary. Sarah Harding was good friends with the couple and they seemed lovely. What worried Cheryl most was that she wanted her day to be special and unique and not compared to anyone else’s. If she and Ashley got married at Highclere, people would
forever remember that it was the place where Jordan and Peter got married first – and that would never do.

Luckily, the folks at Banana Split were able to come up with an equally stunning option – Wrotham Park, a large and beautiful mansion in Hertfordshire set in acres of greenery. It was gorgeous – so much so in fact that it had been used many times as a location in films such as
Peter’s Friends
and
Gosford Park.
What more could a bride and groom ask for?

As autumn drew to a close, the girls decided that they wanted to branch out from singing, and in early November they unveiled their very own range of Barbie dolls. Looking just as polished and perfectly formed as the real girls, their plastic likenesses were perfect keepsakes for devoted fans. Each was individually dressed by the girls. Cheryl chose a crop-top, jeans and a white jacket and was pleased with the result, joking that she thought her doll was too good-looking to be her. Cheryl’s doll sold out at toy stores all across the North East, leaving thousands of little girls disappointed on Christmas Day.

Following the comparatively disappointing performance of ‘Long Hot Summer’ in the charts, the girls’ next single, ‘Biology’, released in February 2006, put them back on the map and entered the charts at number four. It was their tenth consecutive top-ten hit, matching the Spice Girls’ record. The album
Chemistry
followed swiftly and once again proved to be a critical success. The girls were particularly pleased because on this album they had given their all and they seemed to be growing each time they released a new album.

Cheryl gushed: ‘A lot of pop acts make a big splash with their first album and then fade away. We’ve done things the other way round. Our albums have got better and better. If we
weren’t here, people would be crying out for a group like us.’ What pleased the girls most was that the critics saw that instead of playing it safe as so many bands before them had done, Girls Aloud were trying to push the boundaries of pop.

The Times
was particularly impressed by the new record, saying: ‘It’s as though Brian Higgins and his team have set out to flout the rules of pop. If it didn’t have
FHM
cover stars singing on it, the wah wah nausea of “Swinging London Town” would sit happily between Mirwais and Vitalic.’

The album entered the chart at number eleven, their lowest chart entry, but sold a whopping 81,962 copies in its first week, which would have been enough to have landed them a number one earlier in the year. But the girls weren’t fazed. It was close to Christmas and at that time of year, the charts were always filled with greatest hits and compilation albums, so they raised a glass of mulled wine to the phenomenal sales instead.

The girls ended their year by releasing another single, a cover of Dee C. Lee’s ‘See The Day’. It was a brave move by the record label, as it came just a handful of weeks after ‘Biology’. But their label bosses had a canny plan. They wanted to show the diversity of the
Chemistry
album – the wild and crazy pop anthems and the softer, more soulful sound of the band’s voices.

And the trick seemed to work as the single entered at number nine – impressive for a Christmas chart full of novelty records – and kept sales of the album buoyant. However, overall, the album wouldn’t shift as many copies as the previous one. ‘The
Chemistry
album was a great collection of pop songs, no mistake, but this time round something was missing,’ a former teen magazine journalist said. ‘
What Will the Neighbours Say?
had “Wake Me Up”, “The Show”, “Love Machine”, as well as a
whole host of great album tracks like “Grafitti My Soul”. On
Chemistry
we had to make do with “Biology”, which is up there with the best of their tracks, and that’s about it. There were one too many ballads cluttering up the album and that’s not who Girls Aloud are!’

Was the critical tide finally starting to turn against Girls Aloud? They were about to find out…

Cheryl started her 2006 in a dilemma. The wedding was just around the corner and she knew she had to decide who her bridesmaids would be. She wanted to ask her bandmates for sure, as they had been on this journey with her for so long. But if she did that and excluded any family members, she knew there’d be all hell to pay.

‘I’ve got family who will never talk to me again if they’re not bridesmaids and my bandmates would probably not forgive me either if they don’t get to follow me up the aisle,’ she admitted to the
Mirror.
‘But I can’t have ten bridesmaids, and I don’t want to let anyone down. It’s doing my head in, to be honest.’

She didn’t let her problem spoil the build-up to the big day, however. ‘I’m so excited about getting married,’ she said. ‘I want a huge meringue wedding dress. It’s a tough choice between a fairytale one or a sleek one. I always thought I’d go for something more demure, but this is my big day so I’m going to go for it.’

But choosing a wedding dress was the last of Cheryl’s worries when, a few days in to the new year, and during a brief shopping trip to New York with her mum Joan, she received a devastating phone call. Her PR had received a message from the
News of the World
informing him that they were planning to run a story about Ashley having spent the night with a mystery woman on New Year’s Eve.

Needless to say, Cheryl felt winded. She trusted Ashley implicitly and knew that the story had to be rubbish, but phoned him to find out where the story was coming from. He reassured her that the story was just lies. Yes, he’d been out with some mates on New Year’s Eve, and yes, some girls had latched on to their group, but he had gone home alone. He’d even spoken to Cheryl while he was in a cab heading to a Chinese restaurant, where he ended up enjoying a quick bite to eat on his own. Cheryl was well aware that girls often sold stories about sleeping with celebrities they had in fact never met. She was sure that that was what had happened here and told Ashley that she believed him.

However, Ashley was keen to prove to everyone that he hadn’t been unfaithful. To prove his innocence, he instructed his lawyer to speak to the restaurant he’d eaten in and to track down the taxi driver who had taken him there. And he did just that. The restaurant offered up CCTV footage that showed that Ashley had indeed eaten alone and the cab driver vouched that he had picked up Ashley and dropped him off at a certain time – the same time that the girl had alleged Ashley was sleeping with her. Ashley revealed in his autobiography that he was relieved he had cleared his name and was touched that Cheryl had believed in him regardless.