Cheryl Cole: Her Story - the Unauthorized Biography (6 page)

‘The parties were wild,’ contestant and eventual member of One True Voice Jamie Shaw recalls. ‘There weren’t any drugs
involved but plenty of booze. And everyone was sexually frustrated so there was lots of snogging going on behind closed doors.’ The young pop wannabes partied hard, sometimes drinking straight through to the morning. However, as a result of their wild late-night revelry, many would wake up the next morning with sore heads and croaky voices; the guilty were always detected by the judges who could spot a hangover a mile off.

But this final night was a massive blow-out. Without a care in the world, the rowdy gang, relieved that they no longer had to prove themselves to the judges, hijacked the hotel bar and in a few hours practically drank its contents. Cheryl was just so pleased that she could finally relax and not have to worry about learning dance moves or hitting the right notes until she found out whether she had made it through to the next stage.

As the evening progressed and the booze continued to flow, Cheryl caught the eye of fellow contestant Jacob Thompson. A handsome carpet-fitter from Leicester, Jacob was a popular competitor who, with his boyband looks and confident vocals, many felt had what it took to make it all the way to the final stages of the competition. No one was surprised then when the judges decided he would be one of the final fifteen. However, his journey getting to this stage almost came to an abrupt halt when he arrived at the first auditions in Manchester. When he swaggered in to meet the judges, all three were impressed by his looks, with Geri in particular captivated by his handsome boyband features and his astonishing green eyes. However, one thing bugged her – his George Michael-style beard. ‘Lose the beard and come back and see us,’ she advised encouragingly.

Desperate to impress, the gorgeous Jacob went away and
did just that, returning shortly afterwards clean-shaven and slick, and looking even more irresistible than before. And it was these dashing looks that caught Cheryl’s eye on the first day of auditions. Better still, when they spoke, they discovered that they had a lot in common and conversation came reassuringly easily. Frustratingly their schedule over the week had put paid to their getting to know each other as well as they’d hoped, so the pair certainly made sure that this last night in London was not a wasted opportunity. After talking for a while, it was clear that they both wanted to be more than just friends.

But while Cheryl was lost in Jacob’s attentions, little did she know that her joy was causing heartache for another of her fellow
Popstars
wannabes. Sixteen-year-old Jamie Shaw, who would eventually land a place in the final
Popstars
boyband One True Voice, had fallen head over heels in love with the Geordie beauty.

‘When I saw Cheryl for the first time at boot camp I was immediately smitten,’ he remembers. ‘Out of all the girls, she really stood out in the crowd with her cute dimples and quirky attitude. I thought she was just beautiful. At the start she seemed quite shy but as she progressed through the competition she came out of her shell. But I think that was because the judges were blown away with her looks and her performances and gave her a lot of positive feedback and compliments. I think she felt her confidence grow.’

Jamie’s crush became very difficult for him to deal with as the week progressed. He knew that he didn’t stand a chance with her, especially now knowing that Cheryl and Jacob were an item. ‘He was so manly and handsome, the competition was a little tough for me,’ he confessed. ‘But he was a really nice guy
and Cheryl seemed absolutely besotted by him. I have to admit I was so jealous. But I was just happy to be her friend. She was so kind and so caring. Sometimes we’d sit in her room and talk about all sorts; about our families, our lives. She told me personal things about her family that I will never tell because I still respect the fact that she confided in me and she listened to me.’

The next day, after the party, and oblivious to the fact that she had left a broken-hearted young man behind her, Cheryl headed back home where she would have to endure the long wait to find out if she would be chosen for the final ten girls. After a week of such emotional highs and lows, life back home was something of an anti-climax. Much as she loved to be back with her family, she found it incredibly frustrating. She knew now more than ever that she wanted to make it into the band. Her week in London had been so amazing, and she had experienced a taste of what life might be like for her if she made the final cut. She had sung her heart out, danced her feet off and tried to soak up as much advice as she could from her mentors.

Cheryl had also found love – or what she thought might be the early stages of love. And while she waited for the day when the judges would put the wannabes out of their misery, at least she had Jacob. Luckily they were able to keep in touch with one other by phone and arranged to meet again whatever the outcome of the competition.

Then, a few days after the auditions, the moment she and all the other hopefuls had been waiting for arrived – when the three judges jetted around the country to inform them all which of the fifteen boys and fifteen girls would make the final twenty.
When Geri arrived at her door in Newcastle, Cheryl was a bag of nerves. What news had the former Spice Girl brought? Had Cheryl impressed the judges enough with her abilities? Or had Geri decided to pick her doppelgänger Emma Beard for the final ten, thus making her own place in the band redundant? Cheryl led the global superstar into her family’s sitting room to discover her fate.

As they sat facing each other on the couch while the camera crew set up, Cheryl tried desperately to read any clues in Geri’s face. But Geri gave nothing away: even when the cameras started rolling she looked stern and emotionless. ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’ she teased. ‘The comments are that we thought you held back. We could tell that you did not give your all. As a performer you’re beautiful, you absolutely blew us away. You’re absolutely stunning looking and there are a lot of people that loved you.’

Cheryl wasn’t sure where Geri was going with this. She’d said some negative things and some positive things. Did this mean she was in or out? She had seen in the previous series of
Popstars
that at this stage of the game the judges played with contestants, convincing them that the journey was over only then to reveal they had made it through. Could this be what Geri was doing?

Geri continued: ‘Do you feel positive about your week?’ Cheryl replied, ‘I’d like to, but not at the minute.’ Her heart sank. This wasn’t going as well as she’d hoped. Was she about to stumble at this last hurdle and miss out on this chance of a lifetime? Only Geri had the answer. ‘Okay,’ began Geri, ‘that was the bad news … because you’re in.’ The words that tripped off Geri’s tongue echoed in Cheryl’s ears. ‘You’re in! You’re in!’

Cheryl couldn’t believe it. She had done it: she had got through to the final ten. She squealed and threw her arms around Geri and squeezed her as tightly as she could. But then her joy and elation turned to mock anger and the feisty girl jokingly told Geri off for her wicked ruse. ‘You shouldn’t do that,’ she joshed. ‘That was really horrible. You shouldn’t be allowed to do things like that to people.’

Sadly, in another part of the country Louis was in Leicester telling Cheryl’s beloved Jacob that his journey was now over, explaining that his voice wasn’t quite ready to go any further. Gorgeous Jacob was devastated, not only because he had crashed out of the competition at such a late stage, but perhaps also because deep down he realized that this blossoming romance wouldn’t last if Cheryl continued in the competition.

Meanwhile in Wales, Jamie Shaw was delighted to discover that he had made it into the final ten boys. This meant he was in line to become a TV star and potentially one-fifth of a brand new boyband that would win the hearts of thousands of girls – and perhaps even the heart of Cheryl.

Cheryl heaved her bags through the door of the plush £6 million mansion in Oxshott, Surrey, where the girls were to reside for the course of the competition. It was like nothing she had ever seen before. Beautifully furnished, it had all the mod cons you’d see in a superstar’s house: hi-tech sound systems, plasma TVs and a kitchen full of handy gadgets.

The rooms were huge, the garden expansive, and at the back of the mansion there was a tennis court. If the girls fancied a relaxing break, they had the choice of slipping into the jacuzzi, the sauna or the steam room. But the most exciting feature of the house was the massive indoor swimming pool, which the girls immediately fell in love with. The closest most of them had come to living in a house with a pool was when their parents had filled an inflatable paddling pool with water when they were kids. This was a whole new world to them – most of them had grown up in a working-class environment – but this was a world, they realized, that they could quite possibly be living in if they made it through to the band.

All the girls knew that they now needed to outshine each other during the live shows if they were to make the band. Having reached this stage, Cheryl felt very confident in her ability and believed she had a good chance. She knew her success depended not only on her own performance, however, but also on those of the other girls, whom she considered just as strong and confident as herself.

And indeed they were a formidable collection of singers. There was Sarah Harding, the self-confessed ‘loon’ from Stockport; Lynsey Brown from Salford, who had already become close chums with Sarah; doll-like blonde Aimee Kearsley, who at just sixteen was shy and gentle; Chloe Staines, a redhead from Chelmsford; Nadine Coyle, Louis’s old Irish
Popstars
winner; London-born Javine Hylton, who the judges thought was the UK’s answer to Whitney Houston; smiley Kimberley Walsh, who’d been hastily brought in to replace a pregnant entrant called Hazel Kanaswarn (who had turned out to be too old to take part in the show); and savvy Nicola Ward from Croydon.

The final girl was Emma Beard, from Northampton, the sweet young singer who Geri had said looked so like Cheryl that she thought only one of them would be able to make it through to the band. Although she remembered from the auditions that Emma was one of the nicest of the girls, Cheryl couldn’t help but worry that her position was vulnerable and that she and Emma would be in direct competition.

It was soon clear that it wasn’t just Cheryl who was affected by the stress of the competition: she and eight of the girls were rocked by the news that Nicola Ward had decided to walk out on the show just days before the live shows kicked off. While host Davina McCall would announce on the girls’ first live show
that Nicola had quit for personal reasons – she had previously admitted that she had been missing her fiancé – Nicola later revealed that she wasn’t happy with the contract the girls had been asked to sign.

‘They are trying to make us sign our life away,’ she was reported as saying in the
Mirror.
‘The contract is outrageous. If we win, we have to sign up to an agreement which means they own us. They can use our faces on mugs, band duvets and God knows what. And we’ll only get £1,500 a week for touring while they’re raking it in. They’ll be making profits from ticket sales, T-shirts, TV interviews and paying us a pittance.’

She also said the recent demise of Hear’Say was warning enough of the pitfalls a band created through a reality show could face. Instead, she said she was keen to concentrate on her own solo career, a career that would, sadly for one so ambitious and talented, never materialize.

Even though Cheryl understood Nicola’s reasons for quitting, she was willing to take a gamble. If the band became big, then one day perhaps she and the girls could take control of their destiny and renegotiate their contract as the Spice Girls had done before them. For now, Cheryl was quite happy to ‘sign away her life’, as Nicola had put it, if it meant that her dreams would finally come true.

While the house was sad to see Nicola go, her sudden departure meant there was a gap that needed to be filled. And the lucky girl to be given a second shot at stardom was flame-haired Nicola Roberts from Runcorn. Although she had made the final fifteen, Louis had initially described her during the audition stages as ‘nice, but not great’. However, the judges reckoned that she had a certain something that set her apart
from most of the wannabes – and that she could be the Ginger Spice of the band.

Instead of receiving the news via one of the judges, producers of the show had a much more devious way of informing her about her good news. She was invited to appear on the ITV2 extra show, hosted by Dane Bowers, to ‘talk about her experience on the series’. Midway through the conversation on live TV, however, the former Another Level hunk broke the news that she was now in the running to land a place in the band. Nicola couldn’t believe the news and was in a ‘total state of shock’ that, after her initial disappointment, she had been given a second chance!

So, with days to go before the live shows kicked off, a jubilant Nicola moved into the house and was immediately befriended by Cheryl. The pair of them were very similar, sharing the same sense of humour and a very ballsy forthright nature. In the house, they shared a bedroom with Aimee, and all three would chat about all sorts of things, such as boys and what they planned to do if they didn’t end up in the band. It was this close friendship that would give them the strength over the subsequent weeks to survive the tough live stages of the show.

Although nerves were beginning to affect the girls, Cheryl was able to distract herself from the upcoming live shows by losing herself in Jacob, who despite his disappointment was making the extra effort to travel all the way down from Leicester to see her. Behind the producers’ backs, Cheryl would slip out of the mansion at night and go to meet her beau at a secret location where they could enjoy an evening together.

Even though he knew that Cheryl only had eyes for Jacob,
Jamie Shaw, who lived nearby with the rest of the male finalists, still couldn’t stop thinking about her. He’d even confessed to her that he liked her more than as a friend. Cheryl’s reaction was sweet and she told him she felt flattered but said that at sixteen he was too young for a woman of nineteen like her. He may have received the brush-off from Cheryl, but it still didn’t stop him from harbouring desires for her. ‘I knew she was out of my league,’ he remembers. ‘But I thought it was worth a try. She was just the most beautiful girl I had ever met.’