Cheryl Cole: Her Story - the Unauthorized Biography (18 page)

The set list showcased their best-selling songs. But the girls had one or two surprises up their sleeves, one being a musical medley featuring the songs ‘Fame’, ‘What A Feeling’ and ‘Footloose’, and a rousing rendition of the Kaiser Chiefs’ ‘I Predict A Riot’, which brought the house down. Sadly, the Kaiser Chiefs didn’t particularly appreciate their version because Girls Aloud had changed a few lyrics – ‘condom’ to ‘phonecall’ in particular – to make them more tea-time friendly.

The critics adored the shows, as did the fans. When the band played Cheryl’s home town, the star could barely get through
the songs for tears. The reception they received was phenomenal and every time Cheryl’s face appeared on the big screens at the side of the stage the crowd would go crazy for their girl next door. During the show she paid tribute to the audience. ‘I’m so overwhelmed I can’t even talk,’ she breathlessly told the ten thousand people who were screaming themselves hoarse. ‘I told the girls that you would be the best crowd and I wasn’t wrong. This is a dream come true to perform right here in front of my friends and family.’ She later commented to the
Sun
that the tour had been amazing and that ‘it was like having a party every night’.

With the tour over, and with just a month to go before she tied the knot with her gorgeous man, Cheryl flew out to Baden- Baden, where she and Victoria Beckham would become more talked about than the football matches taking place.

During the summer of 2006, the world’s eyes were fixed on Germany, where the football World Cup was taking place. But while some were focused on the action on the pitch, the tabloids in the UK were more interested in what the players’ girlfriends were getting up to on the streets of Baden-Baden.

It was the year of the WAG and whether the rest of the country liked it or not, the press had become obsessed with what the likes of Steven Gerrard’s other half Alex Curran was wearing, or how much Frank Lampard’s then-fiancée Elen Rives had shelled out in a boutique on the finest designer wear. Who cared about which footballer was scoring goals, when the guys’ more glamorous halves, with their dazzling fashions and wild partying, were attracting more front pages and column inches than the games themselves?

While all the lesser-known WAGs tried their hardest to make an impression on the great British public by strolling around the cobbled streets in massive sunglasses and tiny dresses, the
snap-happy paparazzi were keen to get their shots of the big hitters Victoria Beckham and Coleen McLoughlin. But this time round, there was the added bonus of Cheryl Tweedy, making her big tournament debut. Before she had jetted out to Germany, she had felt a little apprehensive, nervous about having to spend so much time in such close proximity to the other WAGs, not just because she’d been critical of the idea of being a WAG in the past, but because she didn’t really know any of them and was worried she might feel a little out of place.

She soon lightened up, however, when she discovered on her journey out to Germany that the plane that had been booked for her and some of the other girls was a budget airline, and not a glamorous jet. ‘I didn’t realize we were flying with Ryanair,’ she reportedly joked in the
Independent.
‘I think it’s funny. I just hope Ashley has booked us into a nice hotel.’

And luckily for her, he had. Cheryl and the other girls were staying in the ultra-swish five-star Brenner’s Park Hotel, which offered its guests all sorts of luxuries and spas. If they so fancied, they could have massages, face and body treatments, take a dip in the plunge pool or clear their pores in the sauna. With all this and much more to choose from, the hotel was the perfect place for a bunch of girls like Victoria and Cheryl, who liked to be pampered.

While Coleen was quite happy to brave the paps and run around the town checking out all the fashion boutiques with the other girls, Cheryl and Victoria preferred to keep a lower profile and enjoy the hotel’s luxuries. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to be with the other wives and girlfriends, as the tabloids had suggested; they just wanted to keep themselves away from the paparazzi.

However, when the girls attended the matches, it was a different story, and Cheryl and Victoria got into the spirit of things. They dressed up in their patriotic colours and enjoyed catching up with the other girls. It was at the first England game against Paraguay that Cheryl got reacquainted with Coleen McLoughlin. They had met a couple of times before at previous matches and once backstage at a Girls Aloud gig in Manchester, but they weren’t yet close enough to be called friends. However, Coleen knew that she liked Cheryl. She was funny and had a great way about her so Coleen was hopeful that she’d get to know Cheryl a little better over the next few weeks.

Coleen recalled in her autobiography
Welcome to My World
how, just before the game was about to kick off, she was chatting away with Victoria and Paul Robinson’s wife Rebecca in one of the boxes, when she spotted Cheryl wandering around on her own, not really knowing where to go or what to do. Coleen knew how tough it was for a new girl to fit in and she always made sure that the newbies were well looked after. She got Victoria to call Cheryl to join them. Knowing it was Cheryl’s first trip away with the girls, Coleen made an extra effort to make her feel welcome and eventually Cheryl came out of herself and relaxed.

‘People don’t appreciate how hard it is to go to a match for the first time when everyone is in little groups and seems to know one another. It’s intimidating,’ Coleen said in
Welcome to My World.
‘Everyone made out that Cheryl didn’t mix with the rest of us and that she and Victoria hung out on their own together. But that wasn’t the way it was. She might not have come out in the evening all the time but we met up and went out for lunch – she’s a lovely girl.’

Cheryl dismissed reports of her not getting on with the other WAGs. ‘Everything was fine with me and the girls,’ she told
OK!
magazine. ‘All the girls were lovely to me. I loved Coleen, as well as Victoria. Coleen is so down to earth and she has started to make a career for herself. The thing I like about her is that she and Wayne have been together since school. You know, she didn’t quit her job and start to live off his money like some do. They grew up together. But she has ambition and goals. I admire that.’

British tabloid speculation that Cheryl was purposefully keeping her distance from the other girls was just nonsense. She is a private person and her priority on this trip was always Ashley. She was there for him, to support him, not to try to outshine him. Cheryl got to see Ashley on the days after England had played a match, when she and Ashley’s mother Sue were allowed to visit him for a short time. These were special days for Ashley, as at all other times the team were pretty much trapped in their own hotel without any contact with the outside world. To see their loved ones, even just for a few hours, was enough to make being cooped up bearable for a few days.

However, there was one night when Ashley was allowed to sneak out of his hotel and enjoy a brief time with his wife-to-be and family – to celebrate his mum’s fiftieth. Being the good, loving son he is, he decided to throw her a surprise party and secretly booked a wine cellar restaurant in town for the celebration, where he arranged for the staff to decorate the interiors with banners with the number fifty on them. He recalled in his autobiography how he assigned Cheryl the job of getting Sue to turn up without suspecting a thing, which she did brilliantly. When they arrived at the restaurant, Sue dissolved into tears
when she saw the decorations and the wives and girlfriends who had turned out for her.

But the biggest surprise of the night was yet to come. Ashley had managed to persuade Sven-Göran Eriksson to let him leave the hotel for half an hour so that he could go and give his mum a big hug. And when he arrived, his mother was over the moon. It was lovely for Cheryl that amidst all the madness of the World Cup, she and Ashley and Sue were able to enjoy an intimate family moment like this.

And of course it meant a great deal to Ashley to have his family so close to him during this stressful time. Every time he was on the pitch he could look up into the stands to find his family and they would be looking back at him with pride.

‘They all lived and breathed that tournament with me,’ he recalled in
My Defence.
‘So it was all good to share that surprise with them. I was only allowed to stay at the party for half an hour but it was a good night made even better because the press missed it.’

But those special times, such as Sue’s birthday, were few and far between, so Cheryl had to find other things to do. And, as Victoria was the person she knew best, she spent most of her time with her, mainly lounging around their suites and ordering room service.

One night during their stay, Cheryl and Victoria decided they wanted a night out and gave the paparazzi what they’d been waiting for for so long. Dressed to the nines in pencil skirts and frilly blouses, the two glamorous girls, with their long flowing tresses blowing in the evening breeze, tottered precariously in their heels along the cobbled road for something to eat at the local restaurant. It was one of the few times that the girls
made such a public outing and the paps didn’t waste a single moment. The next day the papers had a field day suggesting Cheryl looked just like a Posh-in-waiting.

However, that was far from the truth. Cheryl wasn’t trying to be like Victoria at all: she had her own style and her own mind. She merely admired Victoria for what she had achieved over the years and looked to her as a great example of someone who made things happen. Like Cheryl, the former Spice Girl turned fashion designer was ambitious, but also just a girl next door. ‘She’s not a typical footballer’s wife. She’s ambitious, so we have a lot in common,’ Cheryl said. ‘She’s just so witty and down to earth … I love Victoria.’

Her days in Baden-Baden had proven one thing in particular to Cheryl, though: she never wanted the level of celebrity that Victoria experienced. From what she saw of Victoria’s day-to-day life – beating off paparazzi and having lies written about her – Cheryl could only admire her more, and she wondered how she coped with the madness day in, day out.

‘She handles her life really well,’ Cheryl told
OK!
magazine. ‘People wonder why she never smiles when she’s out and about, but it’s because she gets criticized from her head to her toes. Literally. They’re talking about her hair, her face, how skinny she is, her bunions on her feet. F**king hell, wouldn’t you look miserable? But I think her pout is fabulous, anyway! It’s intriguing, isn’t it? People just never know what’s going on in her mind. But when she’s with you she just laughs and smiles all the time.’

According to the
Sunday Mirror
, Victoria and Cheryl talked about life in Madrid over dinner, because there were rumours that Ashley had been asked to join David Beckham out in
Spain at Real Madrid. Victoria had allegedly told Cheryl how wonderful life was in Madrid and that she and Ashley would enjoy their time out there in the sunshine, and assured Cheryl that if they were to move out she would put her in touch with the best estate agents, and show her the best places to go and so on.

Cheryl would later reveal, in an interview with Piers Morgan for
GQ
magazine, that it was around the time of the World Cup that Ashley had indeed been approached to leave Arsenal and head out to Madrid after they had married. The offer was substantial and Ashley thought long and hard about the prospect. David Beckham had gone and had proved to be very successful out there and seemed to enjoy life in Spain.

However, Cheryl wasn’t so keen on them moving overseas. Selfish as it sounded, she knew that if the pair of them left for Spain, she’d have to give up her career and she just wasn’t ready to do that yet. Girls Aloud were doing exceptionally well and were beginning to be accepted as a band and not just reality TV stars. There was simply no way she could give up on her career or give up on her bandmates.

‘I’ve worked hard to get to where I am,’ she told Piers. ‘We spoke about it at length. Either I would have had to move out there with him and commute or give up my career at a time when we had finally been accepted as a band… I almost begged Ashley to sign to Chelsea, not really knowing what that would mean. I didn’t realize the extent to which moving from Arsenal to Chelsea would cause so much hurt between the two of us. I stopped Ashley from living his dream playing out there for that team. And he wouldn’t have got half as much shit if he had gone there rather than Chelsea. And I blame myself for that!’

Sadly England’s hopes of winning the World Cup were dashed when they were knocked out of the competition by Portugal in the quarter-final, and it was back home for the footballers and their WAGs.

Not long after they returned home to the UK, the couple caused controversy when they took part in a photo shoot to promote a new National Lottery game called Dream Number. Dressed in heavenly white, they posed nextto a Rolls-Royce with their fingers crossed. The critics were out in force suggesting it was a tacky stunt, but Cheryl brushed off their comments. They were happy with their decision and that’s all there was to it.

Meanwhile, Cheryl found out that Lily Allen had written a song called ‘Cheryl Tweedy’, which she initially took as an honour. In the song, Lily sings that she wishes she looked like Cheryl Tweedy, which Cheryl understandably took as a compliment. ‘I am very flattered that Lily’s written a track about me,’ she said in the
News of the World.
‘But I don’t know why she wants to sing about wanting to be as pretty as me as she looks stunning.’

Unfortunately, Cheryl was unaware that the song was actually a little more satirical than she’d thought. Lily later said on her blog: ‘I don’t want to look like Cheryl. It’s tongue-in-cheek, it’s meant to be ironic. I don’t have anything against her but I think the portrayal of her being the right thing for kids to look up to is wrong. It was a joke that not many people got. Of course nobody wants to look like Cheryl, they just think they do.’