Cheryl Cole: Her Story - the Unauthorized Biography (4 page)

Back in September 2000, however, a seventeen-year-old Cheryl met another boyfriend who would make a deep impact on her life. Strolling through the Byker region of Newcastle one afternoon after a shift at JJ’s, she caught the eye of a furniture salesman called Jason Mack. ‘From the moment I saw Cheryl I wanted her,’ the shaven-headed shop assistant told the
News of the World.
‘She had the most perfect face, great legs and a fantastic backside.’

It wasn’t long before they were dating seriously, but things weren’t exactly easy-going. Cheryl’s mum wasn’t happy about her daughter spending too much time with Jason alone at his flat, and eventually suggested that he come and stay with them – a clever way to keep a keen eye on the pair of them. But as Joan would discover, she wasn’t able to keep an eye on them all the time.

Whenever Joan went on her Saturday morning run to Morrisons, Jason claimed in the
News of the World
that he and Cheryl were able to indulge in bouts of passion. But when they weren’t holed up in her room at home, they’d be out and about. Cheryl would treat Jason to expensive designer clothes, such as
Lacoste, Rockport and Henri Lloyd with money she had saved up from her wages from the café. In return he got himself a tattoo of a she-devil with the word ‘Chez’ etched underneath it.

But wise Joan had been right to keep an eye on Jason, as she would later find out that he had an ongoing problem with drugs and alcohol. In his
News of the World
interview, Jason revealed that when he first met Cheryl, he was ‘doing a lot of cocaine’ and on some days would ‘blow £200 on the stuff’. He also admitted that as soon as he got up in the morning he’d be swigging from bottles of Bud until he ‘crashed out at God knows when’.

Although Cheryl herself never indulged in such practices, Jason claimed that she was so besotted with him she couldn’t turn her back on him and bravely tried to help him kick his nasty habit. It was tough, but she proved to be a patient and thoughtful counsellor who helped Jason through the worst of his problem. ‘She’d sit with me for hours to talk me out of going out and getting drugs,’ he confided. ‘In a couple of weeks I turned my back on cocaine.’

Drugs were something that would play a major part in Cheryl’s life over the next few years: their impact on her family and friends would have a lasting effect, ensuring that she’d never consider dabbling in any herself.

Living on a council estate in Heaton was hard for many of the youngsters. There was little money and even less for them to do.

‘When I was growing up I did not have a clue about anything,’ Cheryl said in
The New Statesman.
‘All I knew was going to school and going back to the council house, not always being able to have dinner, not knowing why we were skint, just assuming that’s the way things had to be.’

And the solution for some of these directionless young people? To escape their monotonous lives by losing themselves in drugs. But Cheryl was different. Even though she’d quit school at sixteen, against her father’s wishes, and was finding it hard to make ends meet with her café job, she was determined to make something of herself. Cheryl knew that she had something special and that she had a future in showbiz, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to waste what talent she had, or any opportunities that came her way, by getting caught up in the world of drugs.

‘Heroin was there for the taking,’ she told
The Times
in 2007. ‘I could easily have taken that route if I’d wanted to. But I always maintained my ambition and I’m proud of myself. That nightmare devastated family and friends, but I’m grateful. If I hadn’t been exposed to that at such a young age, who knows what might have happened?’

But in 2005, Cheryl did experience what could have happened if she’d made the wrong decisions, when a school friend called John Courtney was found dead from a heroin overdose. The twenty-one-year-old had become friends with Cheryl during their time at Walker’s School, and they had grown very close. Like Cheryl, John had dreams and potential. A gifted footballer, his sports teachers and the local football manager reckoned he had a bright future in the sport and dubbed him ‘another Shearer’.

After leaving school, however, the good-natured boy’s life was turned on its head when he became hooked on heroin and fell into a life of crime, which resulted in a jail spell. According to John’s mum, Angie Courtney, Cheryl was a light in her son’s life.

‘She was always a lovely girl and a good friend of John’s while they were teenagers,’ she told local newspaper the
Evening Chronicle.
‘When John died, we got hundreds of flowers and more than three hundred cards, but hers were among the first to arrive. She sent them as soon as she heard. While John was alive, she came to our house and wrote him a note, telling him to get off the drugs and he kept it on his wall to remind him that he had to keep battling it.’

Sadly, Cheryl’s attempts to help John shake off his habit failed, and on 2 April 2005, just three weeks after being released from prison, John’s body was found curled up on a carpet in his uncle’s house, a needle lying next to him. In order to raise awareness of the growing drug epidemic in Newcastle, his parents gave the
Evening Chronicle
permission to print a picture of his corpse. The paper launched its ‘War On Drugs’ campaign, which Cheryl backed wholeheartedly, pledging, ‘I’m in total support of John Courtney’s family in raising awareness about the devastating effects of heroin addiction.’

In 2007, Cheryl, sickened by the media’s positive portrayal of notorious rock junkie Pete Doherty, would use her friend’s untimely death as a warning to her fans in an interview with Piers Morgan in
GQ.
‘His mother crumbled to a five-and-a-half stone wreck by the end, because he’d even steal Christmas presents from his family to feed his habit. And then to see pictures of Doherty glamorizing it, and with Kate Moss on his arm, too. It makes me sick. Heroin is devil’s dust, it ruins lives and families, and everything it touches. I’ve seen what drugs do to people.’

She went on to tell Piers that it broke her heart to see her friends and family go through the horror of drugs and
admitted, ‘It put me off for life … Smackheads tell so many lies. You convince yourself they’re going to change, you’re blinded by love. Yet the man you love is spaced out in bed all day. It’s so destructive for everyone around them. I don’t feel sorry for addicts, they know what they’re doing. Kids may have been offered a spliff twenty years ago, now it’s smack that can kill them. Leopards don’t change their spots.’

Speaking to
OK!
magazine, tough-talking Cheryl offered no sympathy to Pete Doherty. ‘I couldn’t give a shit about him and I don’t care if I never see a picture of him again … He’s had umpteen chances to get off it in rehab but it’s clear that he doesn’t want to … It’s not living, it’s existing … It’s devastating and I hope kids realize that it’s not the right life to lead.’

While her honesty shocked the media, John’s mum was only too proud that Cheryl had spoken out and was backing her campaign to stamp out drugs.

‘To hear her speak out about drugs like that was fantastic for us and I just wish more celebrities would do it because they’re role models to people,’ she told the
Chronicle.
‘This just shows how down to earth she is and how she’ll never forget her roots. She’s done well for herself and lives down in London but made sure she got in touch when he died. As she said, heroin is the devil’s dust, and that’s why we decided we had to do something. We said from the start that if we could save one life by starting the campaign it’d be worth it.’

As Cheryl reached her late teens, romance was beginning to play a larger part in her life, but, ever ambitious, she remained focused on becoming a star. At sixteen she decided the best way she could concentrate on kicking off her career was to leave school and forget about further education; a decision that her father Garry wasn’t all that happy about. ‘I told her that I thought she should go to college so she had something to fall back on,’ he remembered on the E4 documentary series
Girls Aloud: Off the Record
in 2006. ‘But she said I would be eating humble pie when she got on
Top of the Pops
and I have to admit I’m eating a big slice of humble pie now.’

Cheryl was determined to prove to her father that she’d made the right decision. She knew that she had what it took to make something of herself; she just needed a lucky break. Fortunately, things seemed to go well for her as she was swiftly signed to a management company at Metroland in Newcastle (attached to the Metro Centre), the largest indoor funfair
complex in Europe. While it might not sound like the most prestigious of venues, the Metroland was the perfect place for breaking in new talent, with up to 20 million visitors a year. The complex was also the place where local kids could get to see their favourite music acts on stage, as well as offering up-and-coming local talent the chance to perform in front of an audience. Having been signed up by the company’s management team, Cheryl was now on the way to fulfilling her dream of singing.

Over the next few months, the plucky songstress gigged at the complex on a regular basis, running through a couple of new songs a night. Singing to as many as a hundred people at a time, she took her job very seriously and planned her stage routines meticulously. In the daytime, she’d spend hours rehearsing at the Newcastle Dance Centre so that her moves were tight and slick. The centre’s principal, Michael Conway, who had first taught Cheryl when she was ten, knew that she had what it took to take her talent to the next level. And as the man who had previously taught such superstars as Ant & Dec and Donna Air, he clearly knew talent when he saw it. ‘Cheryl always wanted to be a star,’ he told the
Mirror.
‘She had charisma and lots of talent but she also worked very hard to learn her routines.’

Michelle Heaton, who found fame in the original
Popstars
TV show and was one-fifth of the band Liberty X, remembers meeting Cheryl several times on the Metroland circuit. ‘I first met Cheryl when I was about eighteen and in a band called Inside Vision,’ Michelle recalls. ‘We’d both been signed up by the same management company at Metroland so we used to cross paths whenever we were gigging at the same time. She was
very cute, and of course gorgeous, and you could see the boys in the crowd going wild for her whenever she performed. She sang all the latest R&B and hip-hop tunes that were popular at the time. She loved R&B and she’d wear dungarees and trainers and look very much the fly girl.

‘Needless to say, with her gorgeous face and big smile, she went down a storm at shows and when she supported boy band Ultimate Kaos, she managed to outshine them and appeared so confident and professional that it looked like she’d been on the circuit for years. She definitely had something special, so I was not that surprised when she did so well on
Popstars.
’

Another famous face who remembers Cheryl from her early days was
Big Brother
star Michelle Bass, who, having grown up in Newcastle, would often go to the Metro Centre, where she saw Cheryl sing on a number of occasions.

‘I never knew her on a personal level, but I used to see her performing at the Metro Centre all the time,’ Michelle recalled. ‘She used to wear tracksuits and have her hair in a pony tail with a big fringe. Some people said she looked like a chav, or a charver as they call them up that way, but I think she looked good. The song she used to sing quite a lot was a track called “I’m Gonna Get You” and her performance would normally consist of her doing the splits. In great big sweatpants!’

After a period of gigging locally, Cheryl took the plunge and moved briefly to London where she was signed up by management company Brilliant, which was run by Nicki Chapman, a judge on the original
Popstars
who would later become a leading figure at Simon Fuller’s 19 Management. Here, she spent her time traipsing around the city auditioning or playing showcases. It was tough for Cheryl, as this time she was in
the big smoke all by herself, while Joan remained at home constantly worrying about her – even though Cheryl was all grown up now and had more confidence than she had when she was training at the Royal Ballet.

And Joan’s concern wasn’t completely unfounded. It was hard for Cheryl to make her mark in London. Although with Brilliant’s backing she managed to land a few gigs as a session singer and very nearly a record deal, solo success still seemed out of reach.

So, reluctantly, Cheryl had to return home to Newcastle. She worked in bars to make ends meet, which left her feeling forlorn. Was she ever going to achieve her goal of fame? Or had she experienced the best of her opportunities already, destined to remain in Newcastle serving customers drinks and flashing them a flirty smile?

It was while she was working at Tyneside’s floating nightclub Tuxedo Princess that Cheryl met a customer called Richard Sweeney. ‘He was totally smitten by her,’ a friend of Richard’s remembered in the
Mirror.
‘The minute they started dating, they were inseparable, and Richard thought perhaps he had finally found his Miss Right.’ But little did he know that waiting just around the corner was something that would not only end his relationship with Cheryl but would also change Cheryl’s life forever.

When Cheryl heard the news in early 2002 that a new series of
Popstars
was to hit TV screens, she knew her time had come. Two years previously she had sat at home with her mother Joan, feeling frustrated that she was being forced to watch Noel Sullivan, Myleene Klass, Kym Marsh, Danny Foster and Suzanne Shaw form the reality band Hear’Say. It also hit her hard that
Michelle Heaton, whom she knew from her Metroland days, and the other wannabes who failed to get into Hear’Say went on to form their own band, Liberty X, which would go on to dominate the charts with their cooler R&B sounds. Fame and success seemed so close to Cheryl and yet so very far.

As she read the front-page stories about both bands, Cheryl was devastated that she hadn’t been part of the process, that she hadn’t had the chance to shine and show the world what she could offer. Every time she heard Hear’Say’s ‘Pure And Simple’ on the radio or read about how the record had broken first-day sales, her heart ached, wishing that it were her up there performing and being photographed. It didn’t even bother her when Hear’Say’s star took a sudden tumble, and the records stopped selling by the bucketload: she still felt that she wanted what they had.