Cheryl Cole: Her Story - the Unauthorized Biography (13 page)

Somewhere in the middle of all the fun the girls had to fit work in, too. Girls Aloud’s work commitments saw them travelling over to Dublin to join Westlife and Gareth Gates at a Childline concert. But while in Dublin, the girls found time to attend Samantha Mumba’s twenty-first birthday where they had a ball, and were later splashed across the papers leaving the party looking a little worse for wear. Although Cheryl was never happy about seeing tabloid pictures of herself falling out of clubs, the celebrity lifestyle she was now leading was the best time of her life.

The lust for fun continued when the girls got back to London, where they hit the club scene hard and made the papers almost every other day. And their wild ways did not go unnoticed. Their Polydor bosses had apparently grown concerned that the girls were living a little
too
much and with a second album to record soon, they needed to be reined in. And so they called on Louis Walsh to take them in hand and also to point out their post-Christmas weight gain. The result? The girls were ordered to shape up under the guidance of an ex-military P.E. instructor.

‘The girls … are quite out of shape,’ a band insider told the
Sun
at the time. ‘So, it was decided we would put them all on a real back-to-basics regime to get them looking great again. This is no health spa they’re at. It’s proper military-style instruction with no frills attached. By the time they finish up in the next three weeks they are going to be in the best condition of their lives.’

So for the next three weeks, the band had to endure 6 a.m. wake-up calls, and gobble down a breakfast of porridge, before embarking on a strenuous cross-country run. After that,
Cheryl and the gang would have to work up a sweat performing agonizing squat thrusts and push-ups for an hour before settling down to a healthy lunch of plain salad with a sliver of fish or meat and some fruit. In the afternoon, the girls were hard at it again doing workouts and a few laps of the pool. Then, after a light dinner, they were ordered to go to bed at 10 p.m.

The regime may have been tough, but the results were there for all to see when the girls emerged from their training camp looking lithe. Fit, healthy and focused again, they knuckled down to work on their next album. This time round, Brian Higgins and his Xenomania team were given full control of the album and they agreed that the girls were allowed more involvement in writing.

While a year ago they had been happy just to sing along to songs already written for them, Girls Aloud had quickly learned that writing would give them extra credibility and could also be financially rewarding. And if the tabloids were right, then the girls needed to make extra cash if they wanted to lead that celebrity lifestyle. One report suggested that they only earned £80 a day, while the rest of the money made from record sales was poured back into the label to cover costs for videos and photography. Sarah stated in the
Mirror
that she was still struggling financially, saying, ‘We just seem to work, work, work. I’ve worked like a dog and don’t have much to show for it.’

Luckily for the girls, Brian Higgins was only too happy to let them get stuck in. ‘We don’t let them out of the room till they’ve given every ounce of melodic instinct that they’ve got in them,’ Brian told the
Observer
, ‘then we pile some more in. And when you listen back to the completed track at the end,
they’ve contributed very well.’ But the girls knew that however much they contributed to a song, it was Brian and his Midas touch that created the magic.

Cheryl believed that the music Brian produced for the band could only have been written with them in mind. Speaking around the time of the release of their second album
What Will the Neighbours Say?
, Cheryl said in the
Independent
: ‘It would be a shame if someone like our producer Brian Higgins went unnoticed. He can’t sing a note and he definitely couldn’t front “Love Machine”. These songs would never have come to light if it hadn’t been for us. We do our best in the studio and our best to sell the song to the audience when we’re out there, but the production of the songs and how good and fresh they sound, that’s all down to the brilliant hard work of Brian and all the people at Xenomania. Without them there wouldn’t be any of us. They are the best at what they do!’

Kimberley added: ‘Brian says, “I couldn’t have this kind of success without you and the whole team of people around you.” The way we look, the way we are as people – all of that inspires Brian to write. We sing bits and pieces of the songs and he builds the music around us.’

With their new streamlined physiques causing a sensation, it came as no surprise that some of the girls made it into
FHM
’s ‘100 Sexiest Women Of The Year’ chart. And this year, Cheryl was delighted to hear that she had moved up the chart from twenty-four to twenty-two. Cheryl was flattered, especially as she was the number one Girls Aloud star on the chart, having overtaken Sarah, who was at twenty-five and Nadine, who had climbed from eighty-seven to forty-six.

At the end of April, a tabloid reported that Cheryl had been
seen partying with Liverpool players Djimi Traoré and Carl Medjani at Mosquito club in Liverpool. A reveller supposedly told the paper that: ‘Cheryl performed an X-rated lap dance on both players before leaving the club with bandmate Nicola and her boyfriend Carl.’ However, contradicting these reports, a week later Cheryl was quoted as saying that she and the single members of the band had scrapped men off their to-do list.

‘We’re not even thinking about men now – we’ve got each other and that’s enough for us,’ she told the
Mirror.
‘Everyone thinks you need to be going out with a man to have a good time, but that’s rubbish. We feel like the girls in
Sex and the City -
but without the sex. We’re strong and independent and are doing just fine without blokes.’ She added: ‘When we go out, we’re going out to dance and not to look for men. We’re probably having the best time of our lives right now.’

By the summer, the girls were putting the finishing touches to their album. They weren’t too busy to accept their invitations to the
Glamour
magazine awards, however, where they were stunned to pick up the gong for ‘Band of the Year’. Cheryl knew that winning such an accolade from a prestigious magazine was a big deal. Well-respected glossy
Glamour
only features a certain calibre of celebrity within its pages. Ultimately, Girls Aloud were a pop band that had been put together on a TV show – they would normally expect to grace the pages of teen mags and tabloids. But this award gave them the credibility so many like them craved.

At the end of June, the girls returned to their favourite haunt, G-A-Y, at the Astoria nightclub, to celebrate the release of the first single from their second album, ‘The Show’. Unsurprisingly, the girls’ wild performance went down a storm and the
new songs managed to hit the right spot with the pop-loving revellers. Before the girls dashed off for the night, club promoter Jeremy Joseph crept on stage to surprise Cheryl. In his hands, he was carrying a birthday cake in celebration of her twenty-first birthday, which was coming up in a few days’ time. Cheryl, beaming from ear to ear, accepted the cake and blushed as the 2,000-plus crowd sang ‘Happy Birthday’ in unison. Since 2004 had begun, Cheryl’s life had turned right around. And in just a few weeks’ time, things were going to get even better.

Released a couple of days before Cheryl’s birthday, Girls Aloud’s single ‘The Show’, with its kooky video in which the girls run a fifties-style beauty salon, stormed the charts and gave them their fifth consecutive top-five hit. That was swiftly followed up by ‘Love Machine’, a high-octane singalong which would later be covered by Arctic Monkeys on Radio 1. The song, sounding unlike anything the girls had done before, did the business and crashed into the charts at number two, only just unable to shift the dancefloor anthem of the summer, ‘Call On Me’ by Eric Prydz, and its overtly raunchy video.

The new song added to Girls Aloud’s credibility, and the press gave the girls the credit they deserved. The
Daily Record
went as far as to say the hot and spicy five-piece were even better than their nineties counterparts, stating: ‘Once upon a time Girls Aloud positioned themselves as the new Spice Girls, but it’s doubtful whether Geri and Co. would have the clout to carry off such a striking pop tune.’ This number-two smash was
also the track that helped the girls match the Spice Girls’ record of six top-three hits in a row. Cheryl couldn’t believe how well things were going.

Despite saying that men were off the agenda in the summer of 2004, Cheryl had discovered that perhaps her love life wasn’t as disastrous as she’d thought – and that the man who would become the love of her life had been living a few doors away all this time.

It was a blisteringly hot day in August and Cheryl and Kimberley were cruising through the housing complex, on the way to the shops. As they drove by the tennis courts, one of the tennis players called out to the girls to pull over. It was Jermaine Pennant, an Arsenal player who knew Kimberley quite well. The girls were keen to enjoy their day off and soak up a little afternoon sun, so they joined Jermaine and his friend. Although the girls recognized Jermaine’s friend as his fellow Arsenal player Ashley Cole, they waited for a formal introduction before launching into conversation.

In his autobiography, Ashley recalled that Cheryl had seen him around the complex before and had been ever so slightly put off him after he’d leaned out of a mate’s window to yell, ‘Hey, hot lips! Nice bum!’ At the time Cheryl merely rolled her eyes and thought to herself, ‘Typical footballer.’ Seeing him again now, she realized just how cute he was. But, for now at least, she played it cool, as if she didn’t know who he was. Not the tallest of men at five foot seven and a half, Ashley made up for his lack of height with his stunning dark eyes, great bone structure and a disarming nature that simply captivated her. But as Cheryl was living under a ‘no-man’ rule at that point, she didn’t give pursuing him a second thought. After all, there were so many
stories about footballers’ bad behaviour in the press, and she didn’t need to complicate her life with that.

However, unbeknownst to Cheryl, Ashley had her set in his sights. Although this was the first time he’d properly spoken to her, he knew that she was the one for him. ‘Here was someone on my wavelength, I knew it there and then,’ he recalled in his book,
My Defence.

When she returned from the shops, Cheryl found Ashley tinkering with his Aston Martin. She wound down her window and asked what was up. ‘A flat battery,’ he replied and then the pair started to chat. As the conversation continued, Ashley surprised himself by suddenly asking her for her number. Although he had no problems attracting women, the fear of a knockback is always crippling for any man. But this time he knew he had to do it: he had to see this woman again and have a proper chance to get to know her.

Reaching for his mobile, he clicked into his address book so that he could take down her number, but Cheryl had other ideas. ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry but I can’t.’ Ashley was devastated. What was wrong? He was a good catch. He was a decent guy. Perhaps she was seeing someone? Or perhaps she just didn’t like him? Either way, it looked as if his luck was out.

In actual fact, Cheryl was equally taken with Ashley but the time wasn’t right for her to launch into a relationship. However, when she drove on and got home, she found that she couldn’t shake Ashley from her mind.

Ashley was now besotted with Cheryl and he would constantly poke his head out the window to see if she was around. He may have been blown out, but he knew that he still had to try. After all, in training, Arsenal manager Arsène
Wenger drummed it into the boys to ‘Stay touch-tight and you’ll get your man’. And so he kept his eyes peeled on the complex grounds, desperate to catch sight of his crush.

Meanwhile, Cheryl was beginning to question her ‘no-man’ rule. The more she saw him in the newspapers, the more she thought about him. And when she was flicking through a copy of
Zoo
in a local shop and came across a piece on Ashley, she couldn’t help thinking that perhaps this guy was worth a shot after all.

The next time she saw Ashley, she made an extra effort with him, calling out, ‘See yourself in the magazine? Looking good!’ Ashley waved back shyly and flashed her a smile, but secretly he wondered if her comments were genuine or just her attempts to mock him.

During a brief stop-off in Newcastle a while later, Cheryl visited a psychic for a private reading. As a believer in the paranormal, Cheryl occasionally visited psychics. And on this occasion, she was stunned by what she heard. Midway through the reading, the psychic told her that there was a footballer in her circle whom she had just seen in a magazine, and to whom she would be married by the age of twenty-four. This was all too much of a coincidence. Ashley fitted the description, but with all her dilly-dallying, had she missed out on happiness with the man she was destined to marry?

Without wasting another minute, Cheryl got Kimberley to text Jermaine Pennant her number so that he could pass it on to Ashley, which he dutifully did. Like a typical man, Ashley didn’t act straight away and toyed with the number for a full week before he mustered up enough courage to send a text at around 1 a.m., thinking that she’d be tucked up in bed
and asleep, saying ‘Fancy meeting up?’ He was astonished to get a text straight back from Cheryl that said, ‘I’m still awake. So how are you?’ It turned out that Cheryl and the girls had just finished a gig in Scotland and Cheryl was finding it hard to come down with all the adrenalin coursing through her veins.

Ashley was thrilled. This was looking good. It seemed that after a slow start, he had managed to get his woman. Arsène Wenger had been right about staying touch-tight. And so the couple started seeing each other and Cheryl was pleased that they appeared to click straight away.

‘I wasn’t looking for a long-term relationship,’ she said of their early days together, ‘but pretty soon after I met him, I knew I had never felt like that before.’ And, better still, when Cheryl eventually introduced Ashley to her parents, they welcomed him into the fold with open arms, despite the fact that he played for a London club.