Susan Boyle (14 page)

Difficult as it is to remember now, in 1995, Michael Barrymore was one of the most popular entertainers in the country. That was actually the year he came out and split from his wife Cheryl, an event that precipitated the subsequent decline of his career. At the time, however, one of the hallmarks of his show was the rapport he had with his audience and the people who appeared on the show. He would clown around and tease them, which is the only explanation for the way he behaved towards Susan Boyle.

As mentioned earlier in the book, a video exists of this encounter, which took place at the Olympia Shopping Centre in East Kilbride. The short clip - only a minute and a half long - has been posted online, and the camera is mainly directed towards Barrymore, who is clowning around in the background, rather than on Susan herself. She is singing ‘I Don’t Know How To Love Him’ from
Jesus Christ Superstar
, and the clarity and purity of her voice comes across well, though Barrymore doesn’t appear to notice.

He is seen talking and gesticulating in the background, before lying down on the ground and pushing himself towards Susan in an attempt to look up her skirt. Seemingly unruffled, Susan attempts to kick him away before bending down to sing to him. Barrymore doesn’t initially engage, but as they both stand up, he leans into the microphone to sing the last few words with her, before grabbing the startled woman and embracing her. It’s a clip that, if nothing else, proves that Susan had, in fact, been kissed.

At the time, that was the end of that. Susan didn’t make it on to the show, and the incident would have been totally forgotten about had she not gone on to achieve global fame fourteen years later. The moment she became a sensation, however, the clip was posted on YouTube and Barrymore got the belated rubbishing he deserved.

‘Typical Barrymore,’ read one typical post. ‘I remember this show and I remember if anyone had any talent at all he started to mess. He hated to be upstaged and to be shown as the talentless hack he truly is. Well look who’s laughing now.’

‘What an arse!’ said another. ‘Trying to steal the show away from the real talent of Susan in such a vulgar way.’

One correspondent pointed out that after an experience like that, Susan was doubly brave to risk humiliation again: ‘How much courage did it take for her to appear on
Britain’s Got Talent
?’ read the post. ‘When you consider this experience, I think a great deal of courage, indeed.’

Susan herself was dismissive of the episode in the wake of her appearance on
Britain’s Got Talent
. ‘I did
My Kind of People
for fun,’ she said. ‘I also sang locally, but things had quietened down.’

The producers of
My Kind of People
certainly missed a trick, for in hindsight, one of the great mysteries about Susan was that it took so long for anyone to discover her. She was becoming increasingly well known in her immediate neighbourhood, and everyone who saw her sing was awestruck. In addition to singing in karaoke competitions in the pub, she sang in church, at family occasions and when any other opportunity arose. It would seem the only reason her talent remained hidden was that Susan didn’t fit the conventional view of what and who a singer should be.

 

A few years later, there was another chance for her to be discovered when a charity record on which she sang was made. Susan’s life at this stage seems to be a never-ending stream of people missing what was right under their nose, namely Susan’s amazing voice, for even when they did hear it, they didn’t realize its commercial appeal, although admittedly in this case at least someone tried to market her formidable talent. Sadly, though, it didn’t go any further at this point.

The Millennium Celebration disc was a compilation CD for charity, recorded in 1999 at Whitburn Academy where, coincidentally,
X Factor
winner Leon Jackson had been a pupil. The idea had come from Eddie Anderson, a local newspaper editor, and funds had been forthcoming from Whitburn Community Council. They then held auditions, as Eddie was looking for previously undiscovered artists to take part.

Susan duly auditioned and knocked everyone out. ‘I was amazed when she sang,’ said Eddie in the wake of her triumph on
Britain’s Got Talent
. ‘It was probably the same reaction as everyone had last Saturday. Susan was exactly the same then as she is now. She has a fabulous and unique talent.’

Susan recorded ‘Cry Me A River’ for the CD, of which only 1,000 copies were made, making it something of a collector’s item today. Amazingly, despite the number of people who now knew what an extraordinary voice she had, it was to be a full decade before she finally got her big break. There was a lot of dark muttering to the effect that the makers of
Britain’s Got Talent
knew exactly what they were doing when they put Susan on the stage, but the fact is that, with almost no encouragement, Susan had put herself forward for years before anyone paid any attention to what she could do. One endeavour after another came to nothing, with no one taking her seriously, and to make matters worse, Susan had to put up with the loutish antics of people like Michael Barrymore.

What is really unbelievable is that with so little encouragement, other than from her mother, Susan had the drive and ambition to battle on. Much has been made of her learning difficulties, but what really stands out is her determination and self-belief. Simon Cowell might have been the man to finally put her on the global map, but it was Susan herself who embarked on the journey.

But before she got there, there was to be even more pain and heartbreak.

By her late thirties, it was beginning to seem as if Susan’s big break would never happen. She appeared to have tried all the avenues of opportunity open to her, and had got nowhere. In the late 1990s, she made what must have seemed like her last big effort, using all her savings to record a demo tape, on which she sang ‘Cry Me A River’ and Roberta Flack’s hit ‘Killing Me Softly’. She distributed this CD to a handful of friends, but if it was meant to break down barriers, it didn’t do the trick. Like the Millennium Celebration CD, it is now, of course, a collector’s item, but at the time it didn’t help her make inroads into the record business.

And so began a very difficult time for Susan. In 1999 she lost her father, and 18 months later her sister Kathleen, to whom Susan had been very close, also passed away. It shook Susan badly. ‘Kathleen’s death hit Susan very hard,’ her brother Gerard told the
Sunday Mirror
. ‘Susan was very close to her and Kathleen doted on Susan. Kathleen suffered an asthma attack at home in 2000. Obviously losing Dad was hard, but at least he was older and he’d lived his life.’

It must have felt like the end of an era as Susan’s world contracted around her rather than expanded. To lose two people who had been so close to her in such a short period of time was devastating, not least because they were both her protectors. In her early years, Susan might have had her problems, but at least she had a family who protected her; now that was less and less the case. While Susan’s other siblings loved and cared about their sister, they were getting married and having families of their own - they had other concerns at the centre of their lives.

Susan lived a quiet life, caring for her mother and working as a volunteer at Our Lady of Lourdes, where she would visit older members of the congregation several times a week. ‘I wasn’t working, so we scraped by on mum’s pension and my benefits,’ she told the
Daily Record
. ‘It was a sad time, but I was happy at home. My parents always thought it was better I lived with them so they could keep me safe. That’s why I’ve never been on a date or met a man. My mum and dad didn’t want me to have boyfriends because they were worried they would try and take advantage of me. Time went on and I just accepted it was never going to happen.’

It was a frugal existence, though. Susan and her mother had always been close, but now circumstances were such that the bond between them grew stronger still. With just the two of them living in what had once been home to a family of twelve, increasingly the two had only each other for emotional comfort. It must have been extremely worrying for Bridget, who knew that no one would be there to look after Susan once she had gone. Susan had never left home, never lived on her own and never, apart from a brief six months in her teens, had a job of any description. Her siblings were around to keep an eye out for her, of course, and the local church would always be there, but Bridget must have been concerned. Consequently, she did as much as she could during the last few years of her life to ensure her daughter would be materially comfortable. She did the house up as much as possible, knowing, perhaps, that Susan would have less interest in looking after her surroundings, and prepared for what was to come.

‘Before she got very ill, she began putting money aside for me, and got nice carpets for the house and stuff like that,’ Susan later recalled. ‘I’d ask her what she was buying it for and she said, “Susan, I’m not going to be with you much longer. I’m getting old.” I still couldn’t follow her. It wasn’t until she went that it sunk in.’

Bridget died in 2007, leading to the darkest time in Susan’s life. She was forty-five and had formed an intensely strong bond with her mother, without having created a family of her own, like her siblings. After all those decades of struggling to get noticed, Susan found herself totally alone, with no husband, no career, and seemingly nothing to look forward to. The future must have looked bleak indeed.

 

It took Susan a while for the full implications of what had happened to sink in, and she recalled how it was at the very end: ‘In February 2007, [Mum] was taken into hospital suffering from dehydration,’ Susan told the
Daily Mail
. ‘Obviously she was dying. She wasn’t aware of her surroundings. She looked completely different. I couldn’t imagine that shell of a woman was my mother. She was a beautiful person, very warm and kind and very articulate.

‘It’s a very unusual experience, watching someone you love go. When people die, they just go to sleep. I held her hand and, a few minutes before she went, I don’t know what it was, but she smiled at something she saw. I don’t know whether it was Our Lady or my dad, but whoever it was, it was as if she was saying, “It’s all right.” She was in bliss, in a kind of limbo, a wee world of her own. I can talk about it now, but I couldn’t have done a year or so ago. I’d have been too emotional.’

It took Susan a long time to come to terms with the loss of her mother. The comfort of Bridget’s final moments, in which she appeared to be in a state of bliss, did not last, for now Susan was well and truly alone. Her faith helped her to find what consolation she could, and she still had her cat Pebbles, but however much you love a pet, it cannot make up for the loss of a parent, particularly one with whom you share such a strong bond. Susan was devastated. Now there was no one to come home to and no one to ward off the more unpleasant elements of the village, who used to make life difficult for Susan.

Susan recalls a very black time: ‘I was very lonely and very upset,’ she remembered afterwards, explaining that it took quite a while before she felt strong enough even to talk about it. ‘There was a kind of numbness to begin with, because you don’t know what’s happening, but then it hit me like a ton of bricks. My health went down. I had panic attacks and felt I couldn’t cope. I didn’t eat or sleep properly. I’d had everything done for me. But the rest of my family helped pull me through. I think I still struggle with my independence a bit, because I depended on my mother so much - although I have a lot more help nowadays.’

It was Susan’s dependence on her mother that made the loss so hard to deal with. Essentially, in many ways, Susan had never been allowed to grow up. Because she’d never gone through the stage that most adults do of breaking away to find a life of their own, she had never established an identity as an independent grown-up, and now she was being called upon to do so for the first time in the most painful circumstances. Her Catholicism helped, but even so the loss was keenly felt.

‘When I walk into the house now, I’m lonely,’ she said in the aftermath of the audition. ‘But this is where my faith comes in. Her physical presence is no longer here, but her spirit is. She’s still very much a part of me - she’s in my heart. To hang on to her memory is good, in a way, but in another way it’s not so good, because you don’t get on with your own life, and my mother wouldn’t have wanted that.’

In the immediate aftermath of Bridget’s death, Susan went into a state of shock, and so it took some time for the loss to sink in. It is common in the immediate aftermath of a death for it to take some time before the reality of what has happened to set in, and so it was to prove with Susan. Initially, of course, there was the funeral to organize, arrangements to be made and the house to sort out: the sheer weight of duty and protocol that must be adhered to after someone has died. In the aftermath of her loss, Susan was left on her own to brood about what had happened and where her life was going. Real feelings of isolation set in.

‘After mum died it didn’t fully register until maybe six months after, when the loneliness set in and there was nobody except my cat,’ she told the
Daily Record
. ‘When you lose someone as powerful as your mum, you feel as if a part of you is taken away and it does things to your confidence. My confidence was pretty down at that time. I told myself that, though she’s not here physically, mentally and spiritually she is. That’s what keeps you going. I have my faith, which is the backbone of who I am.’

In the immediate aftermath of Bridget’s death, on top of everything she’d had to deal with, something else catastrophic happened. For the first time in her life, Susan lost her voice. The combined results of shock and grief meant that Susan’s best way of communicating with the outside world was closed to her. Just as her neighbours would later testify that they saw very little of Susan during this dark time, because she couldn’t bear to see people, so it seems she could no longer bear to use the great gift that would one day bring her so much. Bridget had always encouraged Susan to sing, all the way back to when she was a little girl, and to engage in an activity so closely associated with her mother now that she had passed away made it even more painful. ‘For a while after my mother’s death I wasn’t able to sing,’ said Susan. ‘I was too upset. I stayed at home, did the housework, day-to-day tasks.’