Tulisa - The Biography (2 page)

Their marriage prompted Ann and Plato to form their own musical outfit for a while, playing alongside Plato’s brother Byron. ‘They wanted to be rock stars,’ explained N-Dubz member Fazer in the band’s book
Against All
Odds
. Instead, they were to become parents, as our heroine officially enters the story. Within months of Ann marrying Plato, she gave birth to a beautiful baby daughter on 13 July 1988. They named her Tula Paulinea, though she was soon referred to as ‘Tulisa’ as she grew up as an only child. In Ancient Greek her name means ‘the lady herself says’, a balance between good and evil. In the ‘naughty but nice’ image she has developed since maturing from N-Dubz into her
X Factor
role, she partially lives this out.

How much has she fulfilled other potential destinies? There is a growing belief that people’s birth order position – whether they are a first, middle, last or only child – has a considerable influence on their character. Tulisa is an only child, and has said that this meant she was a loner. Historically, there was some stigma about only children, who were a rarity. However, changes in social attitudes – particularly the empowerment of mothers to decide for themselves how many children they wish to have – have seen an increase in the number of families with just one child and therefore also in the acceptance of such children. Only children often have high levels of self-confidence and strong communication skills, due partly to the fact that as they grew up they heard and participated in more adult conversations than they would have done with more children in the household. Tulisa was Plato and Ann’s only child together.

She has never stated her opinion on the birth order theories but Tulisa has indicated that she does believe in astrology. She had a tattoo on her body that represented her star sign, Cancer. Characteristics and traits commonly associated with Cancerians by those who believe in astrology have been seen in Tulisa. For instance, her nurturing side which has been seen multiple times, most strikingly in the almost maternal role she has taken with her own mother and also in the way she so effortlessly took to the mentor role in
The X Factor
. However, the
often-nostalgic
Cancerians are sometimes plagued by fears that bad experiences they have had in the past will repeat in their future. Tulisa is known to be haunted by fears that the hell she went through due to her mother’s mental health issues will reappear in her life. She particularly fears that she will succumb to the same illnesses, and has investigated the chances of this happening, as we shall see.

Long before that fear gripped her, Tulisa grew up aware of and often submerged in the musical and theatrical atmosphere of the elder members of her family. As we have seen, her grandfather sang Irish folk songs to her. She also often heard the sound of 1940s American music and it was this that began to inform both her interest in becoming a vocalist and, ultimately, her vocal style. ‘I don’t really listen to it any more but I’m sure that some of my vocal sound probably comes from training my voice from young to 40s music so it has that powerful vibe to it,’ she later said. Many of Britain’s recently successful female singers grew up listening to the music that influenced their sound. Adele, for instance, heard the sounds of Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Louis Armstrong and Bob Dylan as a child. As for the late, great Amy Winehouse, both sides of her family are steeped in music for generations, so the sounds of jazz and blues were the soundtrack to her formative years as well. The soundtrack of one’s youth clearly has an effect. As Tulisa said in one of the first interviews N-Dubz ever gave: ‘I didn’t get no [vocal] training, I must have grown up listening to music.’

Music brought Tulisa moments of happiness that she needed as her mother’s mental health issues increasingly became part of her life. She will always remember the terrifying day when she was just five years of age and she watched her mother taken away to a hospital to be sectioned. Now, she understands what happened and also the seriousness of someone being placed under psychiatric care, but at the time she only knew something very upsetting had happened. ‘My parents were arguing and I remember the police and ambulance lights flashing outside as my mum was taken away to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, North London,’ she told the
Daily Mail
, looking back. ‘I knew something was wrong because everyone around me was upset but I didn’t understand what was actually going on.’

The trauma continued when Tulisa next saw her mother, and realised afresh that there was something seriously wrong with her. However, within weeks of that visit it seemed that everything was rosy again. ‘I visited her in hospital and she seemed distant, not like my mum at all,’ said Tulisa. ‘But she came back home after a few weeks and life seemed to get back to normal.’ It did not seem that way for long. Soon, Ann’s mental health issues began to cause problems for the family again. It was claimed that, for instance, Plato once found Ann trying to feed young Tulisa raw eggs. Tulisa was reportedly sitting at the table saying, ‘Please, Mummy, don’t. They’re raw.’ The danger of this moment is clear, but it would soon be upstaged by ever more terrifying turns of events. Tulisa, as an only child, began to feel ‘suffocated’ in the family home due to the issues and would go on to behave troublingly, even resorting to self-harm.

The problems underlying this were both serious and deep-rooted. Ann had been suffering from a schizoaffective disorder since before Tulisa’s birth. Its symptoms are a cruel combination of those of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder: hallucinations, delusions and wild mood swings from the pits of despair to manic elation. In Ann’s case, she would have what Tulisa has described as ‘episodes’. They would, she wrote, ‘bubble up during the year and she’d have to go into hospital for one to four months’. The episodes included her hearing voices, severe mood swings, periods of intense paranoia and potent emotions. Naturally, Ann’s condition was an enormous strain on Tulisa throughout her childhood; at times it made life almost unbearable for her. She tried to be as loving and supportive as she could, but as she wrote it was extremely ‘hard watching her suffer’. Even while discussing this most upsetting of issues, she is keen to emphasise that her mother is ‘a beautiful, kind person’ and her ‘idol’. Ann’s older sister – and former Jeep co-member – Louise sometimes stepped in to help, inviting Tulisa to go and stay with her when the going got tough. One such intervention was key, as we shall see.

Significantly, given the road Tulisa would later take, Ann’s behaviour was a factor in turning her daughter into more of a street girl. She recalled how the ‘whole…worry’ of her mother’s mood swings meant she would often avoid being in the house altogether. ‘I never wanted to go home and be around that,’ she wrote. This was not just for her own sake but also for her mother’s. ‘It made me sad, so I would stay out and try not to worry her with my problems.’ Even when trained experts attempted to help, Tulisa felt that their interventions were unsuccessful. ‘The doctors didn’t seem to be able to stabilise my mother’s moods and I felt myself being dragged further and further down by the environment I was forced to live in,’ she said in 2010. ‘Music and my dream of becoming a success was all that kept me going through those very dark times.’

Her father, too, suffered greatly, so it was not a huge surprise when Plato eventually lost patience with the situation and left the family home. However, it made for some difficult times between father and daughter. He had met a new woman, called Mel. Plato and Mel had first met in the late 1990s. Plato wooed her using an unconventional gambit: ‘If you agreed to date me, and we dated for a year, would you marry me?’ When he told Tulisa that he was leaving Ann, it was the hardest conversation they had ever had. His daughter, who had already been through so much, was distraught. ‘I could see how sad she looked but I had just had enough,’ he said. ‘I just needed my own space.’ For Ann, and therefore for Tulisa, this parting had severe consequences. ‘My dad left home and it triggered one of her episodes,’ said Tulisa of her mother’s response. ‘One minute she’d look all mournful as if someone had died, the next she’d be angry and aggressive, smashing cupboards and shouting. I wasn’t allowed to turn on the TV because she thought it might harm us – the same with the hot water.’

Life was becoming genuinely intolerable for Tulisa. She was not even 10 years of age and yet was having to face the most difficult of experiences. To watch, at the age of nine, one’s parents split was enough in itself. However, she had also seen her mother sectioned to psychiatric care and had witnessed at first hand the erratic behaviour that had led to that move. ‘It was impossible to have a conversation with my mum because she’d drift off into her own little world, but at the same time she didn’t want me to go out and leave her so I couldn’t even escape to a friend’s house. I was like a prisoner in the flat with her. Inevitably, she went into hospital again and I stayed with my mum’s older sister, Louise. She had children of her own and it was felt she was more able to look after a young girl.’ Tulisa spoke to
The
Sunday Times
about what life was like for her in the aftermath of her parents’ divorce. ‘Me and my mum spent a year in a one-bed council flat,’ she said. ‘There was no shower – we’d have to run across the hall, so it was far from glamorous. Don’t get me wrong, my dad did his utmost to support me. He worked, but he was never rich. Most days, I would live off £3.’

Around the same time, Tulisa changed her appearance, as she began to become aware of the attraction of boys. ‘I grew out my horrible fringe and got my ears pierced, pulled my hair back off my face, put on a shorter skirt and undid my top button – and that was it: I found I got a lot more male attention,’ she said. Not that her rebellious ways could conceal the sweet, frightened girl underneath it all. Nor could it entirely destroy her already notable spirit. Take, for instance, the impression young Tulisa first made on her stepmother, Mel. ‘She was a lovely little girl,’ Mel told the
Daily Mail
. ‘I remember her telling jokes, mimicking members of her family. She was a happy-go-lucky character.’ Tulisa remains a fine mimic to this day. ‘There didn’t seem to be any ill-feeling about me being in her father’s life,’ said Mel. ‘They were very close and she appeared happy to be around him, happy to be in his presence. You could see there was definitely a bond there – she adored her father. She was polite and well-mannered – very much so.’ Tulisa’s father and his new wife took her on day trips to the zoo and once for a weekend holiday in Wales. She won a singing competition at a Butlins holiday camp, performing Laura Branigan’s hit song ‘Gloria’ to great acclaim.

Plato wanted to gain joint custody of Tulisa, who he was convinced would be better off with him. So he encouraged Mel to marry him so his legal case for custody would be stronger. ‘He put the squeeze on me and said it would help his cause to have a stable environment for Tulisa to come to every weekend,’ Mel told the
Daily Mail
. ‘I felt I was being rushed into things, that there had been no time for the relationship to develop properly. I was only 25. But my own father had been schizophrenic and I understood the effects of mental illness on a child. I went along with it, despite huge doubts.’ She said Plato told her the day after the wedding that she would have to return to work straightaway, as she needed to bring income into the home because he ‘wasn’t built for nine-to-five.’ His bid for joint custody failed, to his devastation, said Mel.

Meanwhile, Ann’s problems continued. On one occasion, she phoned Plato and Mel to inform them that the ‘devil is climbing up the walls’. Tulisa was in the house with Ann at the time and could be heard crying in the background as her mother broke down over the phone. Ann was returned to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead but nobody knew where Tulisa was. It transpired that, in a moment of awful neglect, she had been left crying on the doorstep by the social services staff who had taken Ann to hospital. At just 10 years of age Tulisa was more alone and vulnerable than ever. She walked to the local pub where the landlord – who knew the family – took her in and called Tulisa’s aunt to come and collect her.

Tulisa had always done her best to smile through the turmoil but in the wake of that incident the brave face she tried to put on things was rarely seen. She would disappear, and then phone up asking to be collected from places as far away as Bristol. Indeed, so depressed did she become that she started to self-harm. It started when she began to cut her own arms with scissors. This became an increasingly grave problem. Before long these were not just small nicks in her arms: she was, in her own words ‘slicing up my arms’. She also used to smash her head against the wall at night with sheer frustration at her life. This was not the behaviour of a girl who was entirely happy-go-lucky. She could not have known then what joys and riches would come to her later in life. Not least because in the immediate future life was about to throw more painful trials her way. They say your schooldays are the happiest of your life. Well, don’t try telling Tulisa that. The loneliness she had felt at La Sainte Union was to be replaced by some horrific times at her next educational establishment. Indeed, after what she went through in the latter years of her schooling she would argue that schooldays can often be the very worst days of your life.

W
hen she was 12 years old, Tulisa enrolled in Haverstock School in Camden. She describes it as a place quite out of the ordinary. Indeed, her immediate memories of the place are quite shocking. ‘We used to have police outside every day,’ she told
The Sunday Times
. ‘Whoever did what they did out of that school, bloody well done to them, because when I was there, it was horrific.’ Former pupils of the school include Labour leader Ed Miliband and 1980s football star John Barnes. However, the most important pupils in Tulisa’s mind were two who were there at the time: her cousin Dino and his best friend Richard Rawson, who are now better known as Dappy and Fazer of N-Dubz. They had first met at karate lessons when they were around the age of seven. It has become an enduring friendship. The day before she started at Haverstock, it was Dappy who took her clothes shopping, so she would fit in better. Without an elder sibling to look up to in the style stakes, Tulisa had been clothed by her mother up until then.