Cheryl Cole: Her Story - the Unauthorized Biography (14 page)

‘My mum really approves of him,’ Cheryl said to the
Sun.
‘Going out with an Arsenal player may not have been the best thing to have done but he plays for England too, so he gets away with my dad … just!’

For their first proper date, Cheryl and Ashley went to see his favourite soul singer, John Legend, in concert. However, it wasn’t the most romantic of dates – as Kimberley and her hunk boyfriend Justin Scott came along for the ride, too. When they got back to the housing complex they both lived in later that evening, Ashley walked Cheryl to her door and they chatted briefly. He really wanted to kiss Cheryl there and then, but as a shy boy, he felt a little intimidated. Then, he surprised himself by asking, ‘Can I kiss you?’ Cheryl dissolved into laughter and
teased, ‘Who says “Can I kiss you?”,’ as she revealed in her engagement interview with
OK!
magazine a year later.

From then on, the couple were inseparable, practically moving in together, and enjoying many intimate nights at home, watching TV and cooking meals. To start with, Cheryl and Ashley were keen to keep their relationship under wraps so they could take things slowly and get to know each other a little better, but soon Cheryl decided she was ready to make it serious.

‘We’d both recently come out of relationships and we wanted to start out as friends and get to know each other,’ Cheryl recalled in
OK!
, ‘but we got to the point where I thought, “I just don’t want to meet someone else.” I was kidding myself by playing it cool, so I said to him one day, “I don’t want us to see other people.”’

It was during one of their nights in front of the TV that Ashley melted Cheryl’s heart by blurting out the ‘L’ word for the first time. Cheryl was stunned. She recalled in
OK!
magazine: ‘I was making him laugh, pulling faces and doing silly voices. You know when you say something before your brain’s even thought about it! His face went green, it dropped a mile. He looked scared. I was pissing myself laughing. Howling. Then later I texted him to say I loved him too.’

It wasn’t long before word got about that Cheryl and Ashley were an item. The pair were spotted dancing at London’s Funky Buddha club, just hours after Cheryl had flashed her smile at the National TV Awards. According to partygoers the pair were very close all night and couldn’t keep their hands off each other.

While Cheryl’s bandmates were thrilled that she had
found a good man, Ashley’s teammates had a ball taking the mick out of him. In his autobiography, Ashley recalled how at training, he would saunter back into the dressing room and find sexy pictures of Cheryl stuck to his seat, while Jens Lehmann kept joking that he was waiting for the day Ashley recorded a duet with his new girlfriend, even though he was tone deaf. Dennis Bergkamp was the worst. While Ashley was being tended to in the treatment room, Bergkamp would be lying back reading a copy of
Loaded
or
FHM
and start groaning and saying, ‘Look at this woman.’ Of course the picture would be of Cheryl and Bergkamp would pretend that he hadn’t seen Ashley.

But Ashley didn’t take the banter to heart, it was all part of being in a football team, and he loved it. He particularly loved it because he knew that in spite of all the jokes hurled in his direction, he was the lucky guy going out with Cheryl. The rest of his teammates were just envious.

While the pair’s first public appearance was a paparazzo’s photo of them heading to the cinema near Bluewater in Essex in December 2004, the couple were properly outed a few days later when Cheryl attended Ashley’s twenty-fourth birthday party at Tantra club. Unsurprisingly, the minute Cheryl stepped out of the car, the paps went into overdrive, especially when some eagle-eyed shutterbug noticed the big sparkling ring on Cheryl’s engagement finger. While the tabloids would have a field day speculating about whether marriage was on the cards already, a spokesperson laughed off the suggestion. But if the world needed any more proof that Ashley and Cheryl were a hot couple, it came when a guest rolled up to the party clutching a huge painting of the pair.

So, as the year neared its end, Cheryl’s hope for a great 2004 had been realized. Not only had she met the man of her dreams, her career was accelerating beyond her wildest aspirations.

Meanwhile, back at work, following the success of their album,
Sound of the Underground
, the band had been offered a hugely flattering – and humbling – opportunity: to record the single for 2004’s Children In Need appeal. Their management hadn’t wasted any time in agreeing and the girls were happy with the song choice of ‘I’ll Stand By You’, which was a hit for The Pretenders in 1984. This would be their first proper ballad and they were excited. Not only was it a remarkably different sound for them since it didn’t feature any of the traditional Xenomania crazy sounds, they were also convinced it would show a softer side to the band and give their voices a chance to shine – as well as being for a worthy cause close to their hearts.

‘All our songs have been up-tempo and quite dancey,’ Cheryl said, ‘and we just wanted to do a really beautiful ballad that shows off our voices and just shows … that we can actually sing a slow song – and that we can actually sing.’

When the single was released on 21 November 2004, the girls were ecstatic when midweek figures showed that they were set to oust U2 from the top spot and had left Destiny’s Child lagging behind them. They couldn’t believe that they had reached number one again, with the single selling almost 60,000 copies in its first week. Surely this boded well for the upcoming album,
What Will the Neighbours Say?

When it finally hit the shops on 29 November, the girls weren’t prepared for what was to come next. The critics’ praise for the last album had been exceptional and the girls knew that they’d have to come up with a brilliant album to garner
as much, if not more, praise than before. But when they heard what the critics had to say they couldn’t believe their ears.

One critic described their songs as ‘witty, exuberant and ground-breaking’, and the
Telegraph
branded the album ‘a glorious piece of pop trash’. Caroline Sullivan, in her
Guardian
review, went as far as to compare the album to the works of Blondie, suggesting it sounded like a ‘baby punk version of
Parallel Lines
’.

And the praise was justified. Back to back, the fifteen tracks played like a greatest hits in the making. Highlights included the thunderous ‘Wake Me Up’, the gorgeous ballad ‘I Say A Prayer For You’ and the mind-bogglingly brilliant ‘Grafitti My Soul’. The latter song had a history: originally penned by Xenomania for Britney Spears after she reportedly told her label she wanted a song that sounded like ‘Sound Of The Underground’, her people eventually came back to Xenomania, telling them it didn’t have a chorus. What was Britney’s loss was Girls Aloud’s gain because the song is a fan favourite, though it was never released as a single.

Despite all the good reviews, the album only debuted at number six, no doubt because it was battling for space in the Christmas market. But the sales were brilliant, shifting just over 85,000 copies in one week. The album would eventually go on to sell over 600,000 units and be certified double platinum!

On a high, the girls gave their fans another treat: after the disappointment of 2003’s cancelled joint tour with One True Voice, the girls were proud to announce that they were to tour the country in the summer of 2005, kicking off in Nottingham. ‘We’ve been itching to do this for a long time,’ Cheryl said. ‘But we decided to wait until we had two albums’ worth of songs to
perform before we took to the stage. The time is right for us to give the fans a show they deserve. We’re so excited.’

As 2004 drew to a close, Cheryl was happy with her lot. She had her man, her career – what more could she ask for? But over the next twelve months, there were plenty of surprises in store for her.

The new year kicked off with just as much excitement as had seen out the previous one: more dates were added to their upcoming Summer 2005 tour to feed the fans’ demand for tickets, and the girls also discovered that they had been nominated for a BRIT Award. They couldn’t believe their luck, though they knew they had stiff competition as they were sharing the Best Pop Act category with pop heavyweights Westlife and McFly.

Things were going so well career-wise that it would have taken a lot to remove the smile from Cheryl’s face. Or perhaps that had something to do with the fact that she was blissfully happy with her new man …

Since Cheryl and Ashley had gone public with their relationship, the press had become more of an issue in their lives. While this was nothing new to Cheryl, having been exposed to the celebrity media via
Popstars: The Rivals
, young Ashley found it a hard transition to deal with. He knew that a footballer-pop singer combo was tabloid gold. David and Victoria Beckham
had proved that the tantalizing combination of a girl songstress hooking up with an athletic sportsman and enjoying the high life was the kind of stuff everyone wanted to read about. But he had never thought he would be part of that circus himself. Before Cheryl he had been dating his ex-girlfriend Emma Barratt for five years and had maintained a low profile. But the minute he started seeing Cheryl, it all changed; the world seemed to go mad and he found himself no longer on the back pages of the papers, but on the covers instead.

When Ashley started out as a footballer, he never imagined himself becoming a celebrity: that wasn’t the point of what he did. He wanted to play the sport he loved so much in the best way he could, and one day to represent his country internationally. And he had managed to do it, so far, without the press snooping around. But now it was a different story. Now he wasn’t just Ashley Cole, Arsenal midfielder, he was Ashley Cole of ‘Cheryl and Ashley’ fame.

‘I didn’t get followed before Cheryl,’ he said in his book
My Defence.
‘The press weren’t bothered about me. It was all about my football and my performances and that was it. But there’s no helping who you fall in love with and I wouldn’t have it any other way because Cheryl is key to it all. She’s the one person who makes sense of all this madness and she’s helped me understand it more.’

Nevertheless, he still found the intrusion very hard to deal with and was visibly uncomfortable with the constant attention from the paparazzi. He became aware that everywhere he and Cheryl went, there was a camera being pushed into their faces, while their every move was being scrutinized for cracks in their relationship. What got to him most were the lies that
were printed. Even silly stuff such as the time he supposedly went shopping with Mariah Carey in Selfridges. All made up. It also got him down when old girlfriends sold stories about their time together and cast aspersions on his good name. Just a few weeks previously, his ex, Emma Barratt, had claimed in the
Sunday People
that Ashley had cheated on her many times during their relationship.

Of course, Cheryl was used to the downsides of the celebrity lifestyle by now. She knew how to handle the paparazzi – by being cheeky to them. ‘She’s a tough cookie,’ one paparazzo said. ‘She’ll give you what you want if you treat her nicely, but if you push it too hard, she’ll lose the smile and you’ve lost her.’

At its worst, in the months following her court case with the toilet attendant, Cheryl wanted the press to go away so she could deal with what had happened away from prying eyes. It had been a tough time having snappers sitting in wait for her and trying to catch her off-guard or worse still taking a shot up her skirt. It was at times like these that she could quite easily have given the whole game up. But she loved it too much to do that.

And then, when it was good, when the girls were performing or attending an awards show, Cheryl loved the attention. It was all she had dreamed about when she was young. She had known the pitfalls from early on and she knew that there were many downsides that came with the job. So who was she to complain?

Of course, there was Ashley’s footballing life that Cheryl had to adjust herself to as well. When she attended an Arsenal-Chelsea match at Stamford Bridge, she hadn’t counted on being reduced to tears by two grown men. Lost in the snaking
corridors of the stadium, Cheryl asked two men if they could guide her back to her seat. Instead of giving her directions, the two brutes laid into her.

‘This big bald guy suddenly turned on me and started shouting, “Arsenal? ****ing Arsenal? You ****ing Arsenal slag” … I was so scared,’ she told the
Mirror.
‘I was on my own and didn’t know what to do. They were all shouting abuse at me. I just stood there in total shock… I’d never been to Stamford Bridge before and I don’t think I’ll be seeing Ashley play there again.’ As the year progressed, Cheryl teased the press by hinting at where her relationship with Ashley was going. ‘We’ve spoken about marriage,’ she told the
Sun
, sending tabloids and celeb weeklies into feverish speculation. Were the couple about to get married? Surely not – they had only been seeing each other for a few months. Wasn’t it too soon? Yet she declared how seriously she was taking this relationship in the
Sun: ‘I’ve
never been in a relationship like this where I’ve been treated like a princess.’

But whispers of weddings were forgotten when Girls Aloud attended the 2005 BRIT Awards in February with the hope of claiming a prize before the night was out. But the
CD:UK
viewers chose McFly as their winners and Girls Aloud went home – after a wild night at the aftershow party – empty-handed.

Dusting themselves off after that disappointment, the girls continued their rule over the charts and celebrated the release of ‘Wake Me Up’ at G-A-Y once again. As always, their fans came out in force to watch them strut their stuff. But this time round it appeared there wasn’t as much of Girls Aloud to go around as before. According to reports, record bosses were concerned that the girls were looking a little too thin; this, coming almost
a year after the same people had supposedly ordered the girls to burn off the pounds. Louis Walsh said he thought they were way too thin and declared in the
Daily Star
, ‘The problem is everyone’s telling them how good they look.’