Tulisa - The Biography

 

B
ack when she was a streetwise north London teenager, Tulisa would get stopped by the police as she walked down the road: they assumed she was up to no good. Nowadays, people stop her in the street to ask for a photograph or an autograph, and to tell her how much they love her. Such has been the spectacular turnaround for a young woman whose past includes self-harm, suicide attempts, drug use and the emotional suffocation that her mother’s mental illness caused in the family home.

Forget the colourful sob stories so beloved of
X Factor
contestants: the show’s new judge has been to hell and back, and lived to tell the tale.
The X Factor
positions itself as the saviour of those who find fame through it, but Tulisa found her salvation through music many years before she sat down at that famous table alongside Gary Barlow, Kelly Rowland and Louis Walsh. 

Tulisa is a much discussed but little understood young woman. She has been described as the ‘mother hen’ of her band, N-Dubz, but also accused of being ‘definitely trouble’. Elsewhere she has been dubbed ‘the most famous chav in the UK’, ‘chav-tastic’, ‘rough round the edges’ and ‘a bit of a loose cannon’. People see different qualities in Tulisa: someone nicknamed her the ‘pauper’s Beyoncé’, yet she has also been compared to movie character Jerry Maguire and wartime UK prime minister Winston Churchill. It is a kooky cocktail of comparisons. All these descriptions have at least an element of truth, but none quite do justice to her complicated and fascinating character. Perhaps the least accurate description of her came from a teacher who said in a class that she ‘doesn’t even come into the equation – she’s not going to do anything with her life’. Tulisa has proven that teacher wrong now, but at the time she believed what the teacher had said. She thought she would never amount to anything.

Yet, in keeping with the well-trodden narrative path of the kid written off at school who rises to great success, she has amounted to so much. N-Dubz has won three MOBO awards, released three sensational albums whose combined sales go into the millions and sold out huge arenas. She has also acted in a popular television drama and several films. She is most famous for her place on that 21
^st
-century broadcasting juggernaut,
The X Factor
. The dental veneers she had fitted to her teeth ahead of her first appearance are symbolic: the rough diamond became a polished jewel as she sauntered into the mainstream. We now have the new Tulisa who, while not disowning her past, is eyeing a new, sophisticated and mature future. ‘I like to see myself as sophisticated chav in an expensive tracksuit,’ she has said, trying to bring the various strands of her image together into a coherent whole. ‘A polite chav, if you like.’

The turnaround began with N-Dubz, which quickly gave her a direction and something to believe in and live for. Writing music became her form of therapy and
self-expression
as she faced the challenges and pressures her mother’s mental illness created. She says that without the band she would have committed suicide. Then N-Dubz brought her riches and a profile that ultimately allowed her to soar to new heights. Although she is fiercely ambitious and undeniably hardworking, she remains suspicious and dismissive of the show-business treadmill and those who jostle for a place on it. ‘I find the whole industry quite shallow, poncy, needy,’ she said. ‘They are the words I’d use for it. It aggravates me. I don’t like it. I spend as much time away from it as I can.’ She also roundly dismissed the
X Factor
circus, a circus of which she has now become a star attraction.

She joined the circus ostensibly to replace Cheryl Cole, who had departed for a crack at America that proved as
ill-fated
as it had always seemed ill-judged. Simon Cowell wanted new-girl Tulisa to be ‘trouble’, nicknaming her thus. Given her chaotic background, she seemed a gamble on Cowell’s part. Would she end-up being too much trouble and risk unbalancing his prize show as it entered a new and uncertain era? In the end she was, if anything, a little too mellow. Despite thumping the table angrily on a few occasions, becoming the subject of an investigation by a broadcasting regulator and then getting embroiled in a hellishly ongoing row about a contestant’s alleged bullying, Tulisa slotted into the mainstream with surprising ease.

She has squeezed so much into the first 24 years of her life that one wonders what the future holds. In the immediate future, she has a raft of new projects lined-up including a solo album. Her place as an
X Factor
judge seems a sure-fire bet for a few years. She has worked so hard for her fame that she is not about to surrender her place in the spotlight easily. Yet the glamorous lifestyle of her early twenties could scarcely be more different to that of a few years earlier, when she regularly self-harmed, considered suicide and struggled to cope with vicious school bullies and the challenges of her mother’s illness. ‘Obviously, my past has affected me,’ she said in 2011. ‘I can’t pinpoint how exactly.’ What a past it is. Let’s go back to the beginning.

M
uch has been said of the dramatic transformation Tulisa made to her appearance and image when she signed up to join the
X Factor
judges’ panel in 2011 – but that was not the first time she had radically reinvented herself, as all pop artists must do if they hope their fame will endure. The feisty, urban-imaged Tulisa of N-Dubz is significantly different to the Tulisa of her early years a school. In fact, Tula Paulinea Contostavlos was a shy, geeky pupil at the La Sainte Union school, which she attended until she was 12. There, she often stood alone in the playground. She was nearly always too timid to speak during class.

‘I’d always be the odd little one out,’ she later recalled. She did try to fall in with the in-crowd but kept getting it wrong. As a consequence of this she rarely stayed friends with people for long and tended to drift quietly from group to group. Despite her shy behaviour she was as bright as button and a conscientious student. Her homework was always delivered on time and usually received top marks from her admiring teachers.

X Factor
viewers will remember well how she thumped the judges’ table as she defiantly explained with a roar how she ‘worked my way up from Camden – that’s why I’m here today!’ She has indeed worked hard – but not entirely as an outsider. Her family actually has an entertainment industry heritage going back generations. Indeed, her mother, Ann Byrne, was a pop star who herself came to prominence through a television reality show. Ann had grown-up in Dublin’s southern suburb of Churchtown. She moved to England when she was 15, and was soon keenly chasing musical fame. For Ann, she was to achieve it on
Rising Stars
, which was the BBC’s rival to ITV’s
New
Faces
, which is itself an antecedent of
The
X Factor
.

In fact, the musical heritage in Tulisa’s family goes back further than her mother. Tulisa’s maternal grandfather Tommy Byrne was a singer in Ireland who found fame as a teenage soprano. He won the Feis Ceoil – an Irish musical competition – three times in a row and went on to sing alongside the likes of Val Doonican and the Four Ramblers. Privately, he also sang the Irish folk tune ‘Molly Malone’ to Tulisa when she was very young. ‘That’s where I get my music from,’ she said. Also, Tulisa’s uncles Michael and Brian Byrne formed a band called The Spicelanders which performed at folk clubs, festivals and contests around Ireland. They then joined forces with the hugely talented Donal Lunny and soon merged their two groups – Lunny’s had been called The Emmet Folk – to create a new act called Emmet Spiceland. They enjoyed hits in Ireland including ‘Báidín Fheidhlimi’, ‘Down By The Sally Gardens’ and ‘Mary From Dungloe’. Brian then moved into musical theatre and made appearances in West End musicals. He went on to marry a dancer from the film
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
called Mavis Ascot. She later choreographed the original
Riverdance
with Michael Flatley and Jean Butler.

By choosing a musical career herself, Tulisa was following in the footsteps of generations of family and has the industry in her blood. So, how just how musical were Tulisa’s ancestors? One of her aunties, Ann’s sister Moira, paints a picture of a clan in which the very musical,
show-business
behaviour continued inside the home. ‘Everyone in our family was always singing – it was our way of life. As kids we were forever putting on shows for our parents,’ she told the
Daily Mail
. Indeed, during Brian’s West End stint, the four girls used to perform in the foyer prior to the show. It was there that they were first spotted by an industry figure, a meeting that was to launch their careers. It was the radio presenter Monty Modlin who saw them singing and invited him on to his show. Before long the sisters were performing live in halls around the country, and were also invited on to television shows, including
Rising Stars
. Sometimes they were the warm-up acts for household names such as Jimmy Tarbuck, Les Dennis, Cannon and Ball and Russ Abbot. Mr Dennis was one of those who picked Ann out of the pack. He loved it when she sang ‘The Trolley Song’, by Judy Garland. During the between-song banter that was all part of the girls’ act, Ann stood out as a true wit and mimic. ‘She would have us howling with her impressions of Marilyn Monroe,’ said Moira.

What fun they had during these musical evenings – but pain was just around the corner for Ann. At the age of 18, her band Jeep began to take off, with hits such as ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’. They would sometimes don US military clothing to perform on a real-life army jeep. It was also around then some of those close to her became troubled by noticeable changes in her behaviour. The first signs of her mental-health issues were appearing, though not in a form that anyone could have properly understood at the time. Her sister Moira said that it was only when Ann entered her twenties that she noticed the issue developing. It was during a trip to Monte Carlo that she particularly began to notice them. ‘She went very quiet, very motionless, very thin – but racy. Her body was racing but she was very blank. We knew she was having problems but we didn’t have a diagnosis…It was very upsetting to see it and very scary to see it.’ Just a week later, the band split up.

In the wake of Jeep’s break-up, it was expected that, of all its members, Ann was the most likely to continue building a successful career in music. However, the expected solo success was not to transpire. Instead, there was pain and disappointment in store for Ann as her mental health issues took hold on her life. In 1988, she married Steve ‘Plato’ Contostavlos, another musician. He was a ‘session’ musician – a freelance performer available for short-term hire by acts needing such talent. Among those he had played for were the English rock band Mungo Jerry, most famous for their 1970s hit ‘In The Summertime’. He also sometimes worked as a barber, in Edgware, north London. This uncertain professional life meant that his income was similarly erratic. However, Plato came from comfortable stock. His father, Spiros, was a diplomat who had worked at the United Nations alongside Kofi Annan and the family owned a
five-bedroom
house in West Hampstead, as well as a holiday villa in Greece.